Fedora 26 Is Ready To Roll & It's Looking Fantastic

While it's yet another Fedora release shipping several weeks late (in fact, more than one month later than anticipated), the release is once again worth the wait. I've been evaluating the near-final state of Fedora 26 on several of my test systems the past few days and it's working like a champ.

Fedora Workstation 26 is shipping with GNOME 3.24 as the latest desktop version. With GNOME 3.24 comes improvements to GNOME Music, various user-interface refinements, and a whole lot more (https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=24374). If GNOME isn't you thing, KDE Plasma 5.10 is available as well as Xfce 4.12, MATE 1.18, LXQt 0.11, and others.

Fedora 26 is using the Linux 4.11 kernel, Mesa 17.1.4, and GCC 7.1.1 in offering the latest components under the hood as well as a plethora of other updated packages like Go 1.8, Ruby 2.4, Python 3.6, PHP 7.1, glibc 2.25, and the DNF 2.0 package manager.

Some other Fedora 26 changes include the Fedora Modular Server being in a preview state, there is now a Fedora LXQt desktop spin, and various other improvements.

Fedora 26 has been working out well on my various test systems over the past few days. So far I've only hit one issue/complaint... The Nouveau support appears botched at least on two Kepler systems tested. In that case as well it falls back to using the LLVMpipe driver and will still log-into the GNOME Wayland session. GNOME Wayland on LLVMpipe is terribly slow, but if logging into the GNOME session under the X.Org Server it's a much smoother experience. So it's a two-fold problem, but if you are hit by a Nouveau problem or any other GPU driver problems and temporarily are relying on LLVMpipe, make sure to log into the X11-based session for a more responsive experience.

Overall, Fedora 26 is looking great and I plan to upgrade my main system to it this weekend. The official ISOs are available now from GetFedora.org.