It’s not a long time since Fedora 27 came out and I had been using it since then. Fedora comes in 3 forms i.e. workstation, server and atomic. Fedora is generally known as the distro for developers, so I thought to try it but as a normal user to find out if Fedora is suitable for all. Below you will find out all my experience with the latest release of Fedora and all screenshots (including my favorite themes and extensions).
You can also read more about the release changelog of Fedora 27 in the recent beta release on Linuxandubuntu.
Download Fedora 27
Review of Fedora 27: Workstation
I decided to stick with defaults and got GNOME 3.x out of the box which quickly received many updates. GNOME is famous for its customization and options. It is true. GNOME is just simple and does the job. I went on some type of theme streak and tried almost 15-20 themes which all work fine with GNOME. I tried many extensions but sadly not all of them were compatible.
And found many extensions were working fine with the latest GNOME like Dash to Dock, Dynamic Panel Transparency, Alternate Tab while extensions like Docker integration, Redshift indicators were broken. You can fix them in many cases as it just some settings you need to adjust but not all of them were fixed and thus all I could do was to ditch them.
In case you were a Ubuntu 17.10 user you will find a significant difference between GNOME desktops. It is simple that Ubuntu actually modified GNOME to look like unity while Fedora and many other distros still ship GNOME in its purest form. Nowadays known as Vanilla GNOME among various communities.
You can switch between Wayland, Xorg and classic modes through the lock screen. A small settings button below username is to make this switch. You won’t find any difference while using Wayland and Xorg as both works great but it becomes clear when you will do a graphic intense activity which I will describe below. However, on classic mode, which is Xorg without any additions, you will find that many more extensions will be broken and so will themes.
Theme
This is on arc default with papirus icon pack. Some customizations will make it more clear but yes, not all your default or favorite theme will work. Dynamic panel transparency started panicking when I used apps in small windows connected with the panel. I had to avoid doing that.
In short, there is a lot to customize and almost every aspect works great unless you start jumping between Wayland, xorg and classic mode. I am only saying this for customization, not all aspects.
Image viewing is hassle-free as you get your image viewers i.e. Shotwell. Music, video worked awesome in all aspects. I got no issues in playing my videos even on Full HD. Gaming was awesome except for the fact that on Wayland CS: GO failed to run on my HP. I might blame AMD for not supporting Linux but it worked fine on xorg.
There is an option to “launch using dedicated graphics card” which I have to use every time I want to run a game but it works well. Almost all steam games run fine on Wayland too.
You get LibreOffice preloaded. I wrote many documents, saved and assessed them later without any issues. In case you are a programmer and need to edit files, I suggest you get vim or your favorite editor as LibreOffice or normal notepad can create issues.
I used IntelliJ IDEA Community edition for python coding that I am learning in classes. It worked fine too. Docker also runs fine.
I used dnf to install my favorite applications like VLC, Telegram and they worked fine too. I, however, told above that some night mode apps like redshift, f.lux appears broken for now. GNOME night mode does a nice job. The weather app that ships default still lacks many city options and could not get my location. I solved it by manually putting my location in its location.xml file.
You get the calendar, clock, evolution, to do, and many other apps pre-shipped which a normal user will require. You also get bug reporting, SELinux status apps prebuilt which are useful in case you need support. The support team is nice and I received support for my Wayland issues within hours. There is a community of fedora users active everywhere and they are really helpful. In case you need support look at their telegram group fedora which is almost 24*7 active.
GNOME does its job great and didn’t let me down. However, I encountered a strange bud that flickers my screen for a moment when launching apps in full screen on both Wayland and xorg. Firefox and CS: GO are affected as per my usage.
Fedora doesn’t put its own branding on any apps and what you get is an almost vanilla experience that I consider is great. You might like to show off Fedora and there is an extension for it too. GNOME software center also works fine and does the job. However, you might want to add RPM Fusion repo to enable more applications like VLC, Telegram to install via dnf as they are not available by default. Fedora users advised me to avoid adding other repo other than RPMFusion if possible as they are seriously slower than the default ones.
Many users complained that steam is creating issues for them but I didn’t get any issues. I purchased many games, played and deleted them too. This could be a hardware specific bug for some users. The software repo is also stable and noteworthy.
Conclusion
I will conclude my review by saying that if some bugs are expected in a newly launched update. Fedora 27 workstation is an awesome release that maintains user experience as I expect from a Linux distro. You get a nice helpful community, awesome stability, and user experience as well as a stable system. I advise you to try this update. This is what a Linux distro should be like and I can say this is the best release from fedora till now. Try it and tell us what you think, we will be glad to hear about your experience.
