Fedora 21 Alpha First Impressions: It's Great

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 23 September 2014 at 12:00 PM EDT. Page 1 of 2. 18 Comments.

While Fedora 21 is being dragged out agonizingly long for day-to-day Fedora users, the alpha release is out today and it's great and comes with many new features. Having not run Fedora Rawhide in several weeks now as the latest development code, Fedora 21 is turning out fairly nicely and with my early morning tests thus far the Fedora 21 Alpha release is stable and running quite nicely.

My initial impressions of Fedora 21 Alpha is that it's great and one of the better alpha releases from the project in a while. When it came to the Anaconda installer, it was quick and easy without having any problems -- unlike a few releases ago when the Red Hat installer was being overhauled. For my initial testing I've been using the Fedora Workstation 21 Alpha product, which comes in at a 1.3GB ISO image and the 64-bit build being (thankfully) promoted by default.

The near-final GNOME 3.14 packages make up Fedora 21's default desktop environment. GNOME 3.14 has lots of features and turned out quite nicely.

While interest in Chromium-based browsers tick up, Fedora is still using Mozilla Firefox by default. Shipped in the Fedora 21 Alpha is Firefox 31.0.

Key package versions to write home about are Linux 3.16.1, GNOME Shell 3.19.91, Mesa 10.3-rc1, and GCC 4.9.1. EXT4 remains the default file-system of Fedora 21.


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