Fedora 22 Alpha Officially Released

[gnufreex]

Yust installed, install went well except it wouldn't accept my password, says it is weak. Worked before, maybe they now require longer passwords. I put a longer password and it installed.

But when I installed, first GRUB option makes kernel panic. It is 4.0rc1-git kernel. When I try rescue option, it boots fine.

[Ericg]

Yust installed, install went well except it wouldn't accept my password, says it is weak. Worked before, maybe they now require longer passwords. I put a longer password and it installed.

But when I installed, first GRUB option makes kernel panic. It is 4.0rc1-git kernel. When I try rescue option, it boots fine.

Downloading the ISO, we'll see if I get the same results on my system.

[Ouroboros]

Yust installed, install went well except it wouldn't accept my password, says it is weak. Worked before, maybe they now require longer passwords. I put a longer password and it installed.

IIRC, you have to click the confirmation button twice when using a weak password unless they removed that option in F22.

[gnufreex]

IIRC, you have to click the confirmation button twice when using a weak password unless they removed that option in F22.

I know that, seems they removed that.

[MartinK]

I know that, seems they removed that.

Yes, Anaconda now requires an overall stronger password to improve resistance against password guessing attacks. This change is still being discussed (improving security vs forcing users to select a more secure password) and the final Fedora 22 might or might not contain it.

[RahulSundaram]

I know that, seems they removed that.

Refer tohttps://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-March/208828.html

[Ericg]

Initial Impressions: Fedora 22 (KDE) x86_64 Alpha

Downloading the ISO, we'll see if I get the same results on my system.

Michael feel free to reference this if you so desire. No screenshots as I don't want to flood the forums. For a point of reference: AMD "Kaveri" APU and radeonsi GPU driver, 8GB of RAM, installing to an SSD..

Evening all, as promised here is an initial look at Fedora 22. First things first: In response to the above quote I am happy to say that the first boot did not result in a kernel panic. Maybe its luck or maybe the user above is hitting a corner case, don't know.


The Installation

A quick note for KDE users, not sure if this applies to Gnome as well, the "Install to System" application was not listed under Favorites and in order to find it I had to go searching through the menu. I found it under Utilities or System, don't quite remember which, under the name "Install."

This is going to be the shortest of all the sections because its the most lackluster part so far. If you have done an install of Fedora since they moved over to the new "Hub and spoke" Anaconda model then you aren't in for any big surprises. The installer is much the same as it was under Fedora 21 with no real big changes*. Its still necessary to under the "Network" spoke even if you are on a desktop system in order to set a hostname. Partitioning worked perfectly fine for me (i did BTRFS, but it defaults to LVM still).

Now the asterisk: The installer not requires that you have a "Fair" or higher password for both root and your user account. For me this was a problem as the password I use (non-public facing workstation) rated as weak and has for several releases. The password in question, since retired, was 9 letters long and that was it. Just adding a number onto the end of it wasn't enough for the system to kick it up to fair, however adding two numbers was, even if those numbers repeated. So if there is a password you really like and don't feel like learning a new one you could either 1) just add on a double number to the end, such as '22' or '11' or do what I did 2) put in a password to make it happy then once you're done with the install and rebooted into your new system just run 'passwd' and it will let you set it to be whatever you want.

On a serious note folks: Don't use weak passwords, even if you don't think it'll ever be an issue... just don't do it.

Over all I have to say I think this was one of the quicker installs that I've done for Fedora. I'm not sure if thats because Anaconda is new using the hawkey / dnf backend or if a new version of rpm came out that was generally quicker than the one F21 shipped with, but I seriously think I got through the entire install in about 20minutes compared to about 30-40 on Fedora 21.


First Run

Remember, I'm using KDE for this so I don't get the new Wayland-based GDM. That being said they've changed the sddm theme since Fedora 21 and I have to say: This one looks a lot nicer. Fedora 21's sddm theme always looked like something that was 'thrown together' not because it looked BAD per say, more that there were small things (border lines for example) that just made it look less polished than it could be. Fedora 22 however doesn't have any of that. Its not quite as polished as the Fedora 21 GDM theme was, there's still obvious borderlines at the top and I think that it could be a little more streamlined, but it is a definite improvement over Fedora 21's sddm theme.

Upon getting into the system the first thing I did was run dnf update. 8 Packages to install, 116 to update. I'm not surprised at the update number, Fedora spins the iso's up a day or two in advance in order to get them out to all the mirror's and in fedora prerelease packages move quickly. That being said the kernel was updated from 4.0rc1 (install kernel) to rc2, rc3 is not yet available. Highly recommend that anyone who wants to play around with the system updates it and then reboots before playing. Release-day bugfixes are a thing that can happen and you want to make sure you have all available fixes before you start bad mouthing things.

First boot went very quickly and no errors or other problems were noticed during / after boot.


Using The System

I have used Plasma 2 before, thanks to dvratil's copr, so this mini-review isn't going to focus on the changes between KDE 4.x and Plasma 2. This is mostly just focused on small things I noticed that can hopefully be fixed by release time and assumes that you have some knowledge of Plasma 2.

First thing I did was move the taskbar up to the top of the screen, as I like to keep a dock down at the bottom. In doing so I had to move the "sandwich menu" (replacement for the crouton menu) from the top left down to the bottom right. One little gripe I do have is that the crouton cannot snap to the bottom of the screen but it seems to snap fine to the top. This is likely developer oversight, assuming that the task bar will be at the bottom so why bother, but it is a small annoyance that could hopefully be easily fixed.

Even though the system is using Plasma 2 and KDE Frameworks, (kwin reports 5.2.0, "About KDE" reports 5.7.0) not all applications are using their updated versions. Dolphin, for example, is tagged as using KDE 4.13. While this wouldn't be a problem I get the impression that because they aren't using the frameworks-native version its making a few things misbehave. Dolphin, again for example, looks a little... ugly with the breeze theme. Imagine Windows 95. The interior of Dolphin has very harsh borders that are somewhat distracting given that the rest of KDE, and all KDE5 native apps, looks lovely.

The Application Menu got a nice little feature that I noticed just after installing Firefox. As soon as I installed Firefox I went up to the menu and then Applications > Internet to launch it. As soon as I hit Internet the menu (just the menu, not the whole desktop) faded slightly and a overlay came above it with a spinning circle and the text "Updating Applications." After it was done updating the apps-list it kicked me back to the main section of the menu where I could once again go through Applications and to Internet. I ran into the issue a couple times on KDE 4.x where I'd install something only to see that it wasn't in the menu yet because plasma hadn't updated its .desktop cache, so the fact that it seems much more proactive, and even informative, when it comes to the menu is a nice touch.

The new Breeze icons look much more polished than their Oxygen counterparts and I can happily say that they are a pleasure to look at in the menu.

The System Settings menu is looking more than a little bare, not only is there not a "Printers" kcm installed by default, but the new User Manager module is also not installed. A shame given that Kubuntu has been shipping the Users kcm for several releases now.

Addendum: I just launched Dolphin again and it seems like whatever issue there was with it and the Breeze theme has cleared up. Maybe it got rendered incorrectly or maybe I hit a bug, but upon second launch Dolphin looks much nicer. Keeping the line in above for completeness.


Closing Thoughts

Fedora 22 is looking to be a very nice release and it might finally be the one to make me switch to Linux full time rather than dualbooting Windows / Fedora and jumping back and forth as needed. Congratulations to the Fedora Team, the KDE Developers and the Fedora KDE SIG on an Alpha-well-done.

[reub2000]

Gnome on wayland seems to be sluggish. Like if I open more than 2 applications it feels like I'm dragging the cursor around. I'm using a core i5-3330.

Also there is no rpmfusion repo yet. Where else can I get an mp3 decoder?

[Ericg]

Gnome on wayland seems to be sluggish. Like if I open more than 2 applications it feels like I'm dragging the cursor around. I'm using a core i5-3330.

Also there is no rpmfusion repo yet. Where else can I get an mp3 decoder?

You can still add rpmfusion. You can either add 21, and hope there was no API/ABI breakage from 21->22, or add rawhide and hope that there's no API/ABI breakage in rawhide before rpmfusion adds an official 22 repo. Personally I went with the latter.

[RahulSundaram]

You can still add rpmfusion. You can either add 21, and hope there was no API/ABI breakage from 21->22, or add rawhide and hope that there's no API/ABI breakage in rawhide before rpmfusion adds an official 22 repo. Personally I went with the latter.

If there is breakage, you can always switch the repo and use yum/dnf distro-sync to match what is available in the repository