Fedora 25 Is Quite Possibly My Most Favorite Release Yet

Written by Michael Larabel in Fedora on 10 November 2016 at 12:49 PM EST. 26 Comments
FEDORA
Fedora 25 is nearly complete and this afternoon we should hear whether it will be formally released next week or will be pushed back one week due to lingering blocker bugs. Nevertheless, I've been carrying out more tests on Fedora 25 on multiple test systems in recent days and have been very pleased with this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution release.


As a long-time Fedora fan and user going back to Fedora Core, Fedora 25 is quite possibly my most favorite Fedora release yet. With the state as of this week, it feels very polished and reliable and haven't encountered any glaring bugs on any of my test systems. Thanks in large part due to the heavy lifting on ensuring GNOME 3.22 is a super-polished desktop release, Fedora 25 just feels really mature yet modern when using it.


Fedora 25 is using Wayland by default on supported systems (open-source GPU driver users) and even there all of the pieces have come together nicely where desktop/laptop users will hardly notice any difference. I haven't encountered any shortcomings through my usability testing recently and the XWayland integration is also working nicely for ensuring legacy application/game support.


The screenshots shared in this article are with the latest F25 packages as of this morning (10 November).


While not hit by bugs, about my only gripe with Fedora 25 is that it's shipping with Mesa 12.0 by default rather than Mesa 13.0. Mesa 13 was released a bit late and unfortunately didn't make the cut for F25 out-of-the-box, but will hopefully be sent down as a stable update in the very near future. Likewise, the stock graphics stack on Fedora 25 isn't shipping with any Vulkan drivers.


Unfortunately, many of the improvements can't easily be captured in screenshot form. Among the package updates are glibc 2.24, Unicode 1.9, Ruby on Rails 5.0, GHC 7.10, PHP 7.0, Node.js 6.x, Golang 1.7, and more. There is also more formal Rust support with Fedora 25 and many other improvements to make Fedora 25 Workstation one powerful desktop.


See my dozens of past Fedora 25 news articles if not familiar with all the changes.


Look forward to Fedora 25 shipping next week or the following week; will have another post later today when finding out the results of the Go/No-Go meeting.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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