Miller: Very direct! Every few years-now officially three-Red Hat takes a release of the Fedora OS and branches it into an alpha version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Those are our upstreams, and we collect and integrate them into the flow that is the Fedora distribution.Īrs: How direct is the downstream-if that's an accurate description-to CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Likewise, most of the software that goes in the Fedora distribution isn’t written by the Fedora Project, but rather in thousands of other projects like the Linux kernel, systemd, the Wayland graphics stack, Firefox, the GCC compiler, and so on. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and keep stretching-the spring at the start of a river doesn’t create water that water comes from rains and snow melt and so on. Miller: Fedora is one of those few distributions which is at the head of a river, to stretch the upstream/downstream analogy. For most users, you’ll see the equivalent of better gas mileage and smoother performance, but it won’t be something you actually directly care about-and that’s a good thing.Īrs: I'd love to hear you talk about how Fedora sits in the Red Hat and overall Linux ecosystem-do you have a direct upstream? You definitely see enthusiasts for whom this is a big deal, but that’s like car enthusiasts talking about a new engine design. But really, the improvements are all under the hood. AdvertisementĪll this means Wayland is definitely the way forward, and we made Wayland the default four years ago in Fedora 25. It’s not that these couldn’t theoretically be done in X11 (with more effort), it’s just that no one is doing that work. This makes it safer to run sandboxed applications that might be from a less-trusted source or at least to contain a compromise from spreading to another application.Īdditionally, since Wayland is where the development energy is, new features like hardware acceleration for Firefox and improvements to high DPI rendering are only available there. And, it allows applications to run on the same display but be isolated from each other-the X11 design actually makes it so any running application can snoop on key-presses intended for another application. It can also better take advantage of modern graphics cards, allowing for flicker-free animation and tear-free video. more lightweight design that connects applications more directly with the hardware. Nothing flashy or new or amazing at all-just better performance and a smoother experience. But first let me give the perhaps-surprising answer for most people: when Wayland is working as it should, you won’t even notice it. Miller: OK, so, I’m going to have to get a little geeky on this one. What should I look for to see it to my best advantage? I've been hearing it's the super amazing next generation of window manager for years, but I've never actually used it. (The interview has been lightly edited for length and readability.)Īrs: I'm particularly interested in-and clueless about!-Wayland. Matthew Miller was gracious enough to respond at some length. A chat with Fedora project leader Matthew Millerīefore getting started with Fedora, I put out some feelers on Twitter to see if I could get a project leader to answer some questions about the distro. Although the screenshots taken throughout this review are of virtual machines, my first installation of Fedora Workstation (ever!) was bare metal, on the HP Dragonfly Elite G1. That's not what I personally want in an operating system-I fix broken things professionally I'd prefer not to fix them personally any more than I have to.īut as one of the few distros using the next-generation Wayland display server by default, Fedora made me very curious indeed. I never felt particularly drawn to Fedora myself, because it's a bleeding-edge distro-one targeted to the very newest software, possibly at the expense of stability. (Remember physically attending events? Ars remembers.) Fedora is one of the heavyweight desktop distros of the Linux world, with a vibrant community and a strong presence at every open source convention I've ever attended. Today's Linux distro review is one I've been wanting to do for quite some time-Fedora Workstation.
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