Fedora 25 Officially Released & I Highly Recommend It

[cl333r]

My experience is, that KDE integration in Fedora is not the best. I tried it on Fedora 24 and I had to struggle with KDE Wallet which always wanted the master password when I launched Chrome. It was really annoying and when I filed a bug report on the KDE bug tracker, they said, I could install a plugin which inserts automatically my credentials for KDE Wallet. When I said that this is not a user friendly default behaviour, they said, that the distributor is responsible how they handle security.
I've never used a desktop where some service ask me for a password when I start a browser (per session)! I've used Windows, Mac, Gnome, Unity etc. and all of them hadn't such a shitty default behaviour. After filing some KDE bugs, I switched back to Gnome...

It's typical Linux experience. When you say something needs to be fixed it gets ridiculed, if Linus Torvalds says it, the Linux community suddenly accepts it as self evident. Case in point - password protected printers, they said it's for "security reasons", when Linus blamed them they took the passwords away:

"Whoever moron thought that it's "good security" to require the root password for everyday things like this is mentally diseased." [1]

But if you said something like that, you get ridiculed.

[1]

https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/1vyfmNCYpi5

[Danny3]

After hearing Michael that is being so impressed I decided to make a test drive with it.
I remember testing Fedora a few years back and quickly gave up on it, I don't remember what I didn't like then.
My impression this time as a first time Fedora user based on installation on Virtualbox:
I expected the integration with Virtualbox to be ok after all these years and Virtualbox being open source, but only the mouse integration works by default, not also the VM window resize, even in full screen mode, even after installing Guest additions., so it's wors than Windows in Virtualbox )
The installer seems to have pretty dumb decisions.
I had problems finding the "Next" button because is placed at the top, never seen that in any OS, very counter-intuitive
I think ever normal person first reads the info text, questions and then press a buton, but not go to the beggining of text to press the buton.
Maybe Fedora devs read from bottom to top.
Privacy:
Location services default is ON
I expected to see this only on Windows or Google OSes, but not here, looks like it's trying to trick people with the defaults.
Asking me to connect to online accouns?
WTF do I need that at the OS level,
I could barely find the "Skip" button
Same bullshit as Windows 10 with making the skip as small and dull as possible.
The privacy settings are a joke.
I can't see the most important ones like Camera and mike access control
Maybe Virtualbox doesn't passthrough these ones.

And.... I remember what I didn't like a few years ago.
Right click on desktop is useless, entirely. Only change background an settings
I can't create no folder, no file and no program shortcut.
So I understand that the only purpose of the Desktop in Fedora is to stare at the background?
Some programs are missing the minimize button, I don't know why...
Time displayed in the middle of the taskbar? whatever...
The only thing that I like is the weather program, but even that one, displays the temperature only in Fahrenheit and I have no idea what those values mean.
No hints on the buttons, you have to press it to see what it does.
I pressed a button in the power menu (don't know how is called, the top-right one) that looked like a "pause" button which turned of the OS.

Awful experience for a first time Fedora user
Maybe it's only Gnome's fault.
I really can't undestand how anyone can use something like that.
I don't plan to test it again for a long time.

[r1348]

Are you sure you actually changed the *trackpad* setting? There are separate settings for mouse and trackpad, and if you just look through dconf-editor or something, you'll see the mouse one before the trackpad one (because alphabet). I made this exact same mistake with a fresh F25 install this week, took me five minutes to realize I was desperately poking the mouse setting not the trackpad one.

Sorry, I meant touchpad, and I changed it from the gnome system settings, I'll have a look at dconf later.

[r1348]

It should be fixed in next mutter release. It's already fixed in git.

Alright thanks, looking forward to it.

[r1348]

So, after my first day of use, and apart from the touchpad issue I described before, I have to say my main gripe with Fedora 25 is Wayland itself. It doesn't seem to support any hardware video decoding acceleration. I installed mesa-vdpau-drivers, but neither vdpauinfo or vainfo seem to detect available acceleration if I run from a Wayland session. If I switch to Gnome Xorg, all works fine.
Another problem I have, is noticeable latency and stuttering problems when playing anything on Xwayland. I was playing The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth on my AMD Kaveri laptop, and the stuttering made it unplayable. Again, if I switch to Xorg no problems at all.
I understand Wayland is in its infancy, and someone has to be the one to set it as default if we want it to mature, but right now it has too many problems t be my daily driver. I'll try to re-enable it later on when further updates find their way to Fedora.

[r1348]

Are you sure you actually changed the *trackpad* setting? There are separate settings for mouse and trackpad, and if you just look through dconf-editor or something, you'll see the mouse one before the trackpad one (because alphabet). I made this exact same mistake with a fresh F25 install this week, took me five minutes to realize I was desperately poking the mouse setting not the trackpad one.

Thanks, disabling natural scroll from dconf seems to work, it's just that the setting is not changed when using the Gnome system settings tool.

[zxy_thf]

Several problems I noticed:

glew and glfw are still outdated and don't support Wayland.

Firefox doesn't receive click event sometimes. I can't reproduce for now but I'm guessing multiple Xwaland instances may be the reason (I opened Thunderbird and Calibre when I hit the bug).

[AdamW]

After hearing Michael that is being so impressed I decided to make a test drive with it.
I remember testing Fedora a few years back and quickly gave up on it, I don't remember what I didn't like then.
My impression this time as a first time Fedora user based on installation on Virtualbox:
I expected the integration with Virtualbox to be ok after all these years and Virtualbox being open source, but only the mouse integration works by default, not also the VM window resize, even in full screen mode, even after installing Guest additions., so it's wors than Windows in Virtualbox )
The installer seems to have pretty dumb decisions.
I had problems finding the "Next" button because is placed at the top, never seen that in any OS, very counter-intuitive
I think ever normal person first reads the info text, questions and then press a buton, but not go to the beggining of text to press the buton.
Maybe Fedora devs read from bottom to top.
Privacy:
Location services default is ON
I expected to see this only on Windows or Google OSes, but not here, looks like it's trying to trick people with the defaults.
Asking me to connect to online accouns?
WTF do I need that at the OS level,
I could barely find the "Skip" button
Same bullshit as Windows 10 with making the skip as small and dull as possible.
The privacy settings are a joke.
I can't see the most important ones like Camera and mike access control
Maybe Virtualbox doesn't passthrough these ones.

And.... I remember what I didn't like a few years ago.
Right click on desktop is useless, entirely. Only change background an settings
I can't create no folder, no file and no program shortcut.
So I understand that the only purpose of the Desktop in Fedora is to stare at the background?
Some programs are missing the minimize button, I don't know why...
Time displayed in the middle of the taskbar? whatever...
The only thing that I like is the weather program, but even that one, displays the temperature only in Fahrenheit and I have no idea what those values mean.
No hints on the buttons, you have to press it to see what it does.
I pressed a button in the power menu (don't know how is called, the top-right one) that looked like a "pause" button which turned of the OS.

Awful experience for a first time Fedora user
Maybe it's only Gnome's fault.
I really can't undestand how anyone can use something like that.
I don't plan to test it again for a long time.

Sorry for the unexpected experiences. As a general note here: most of what you say (in fact pretty much all of it) isn't particularly specific to Fedora. A lot of it is specific to GNOME, and some of it is kinda general to all traditional Linux distributions.

I don't do any testing with VB myself (I use KVM), but I suspect the window resize issue is related to wayland; virt-manager has a similar issue. That's the kind of stuff that we're kinda expecting to see in the early days of Wayland.

The button at the top-left is not in fact a 'Next' button, it's a 'Done' button. The installer design is that you start at a 'hub', go out to various 'spokes', and return from them to the hub; when you complete a spoke you're not stepping through a linear wizard, it's more like the Super Mario World overmap or something. =) The button placement is something that comes up quite often, I think there was some talk about moving it but I'm not sure where it stands right now.

I don't think it's really fair to suggest that the default location services setting is trying to 'trick' anyone, when it's unavoidably presented to you in a very prominent fashion. It's also worth understanding that this stuff is quite embryonic on the Linux desktop at this point. I'd have to double check the code to be sure, but I think the GNOME 'location services' thing only provides IP-based geolocation and GPS location if the system has a supported GPS device (which most things you're going to run GNOME on won't). I don't think there's any wifi-based location stuff going on. Given how Linux distros currently work, any app could do IP geolocation on its own quite trivially anyway; there's no mechanism (in Fedora or any other) to actually *prevent* apps doing this. So the control only really has limited significance in the first place, especially if your system doesn't do GPS.

The same kinda applies to webcam access: traditional Linux distros just aren't built like a cellphone OS where app access to hardware is heavily mediated by the system layer. Pretty much any app can access the webcam, and the way things are right now, GNOME can't really intermediate itself as an authority deciding whether or not apps can do that.

And again with microphone access; you *could* build an input mute switch and present it as a privacy control, but I think at present again pretty much any app could actually just access the mixer and change the setting back again.

Basically what I'm saying is that, AIUI at least, there would have to be a lot of work done at levels below the UI in order to provide location, webcam and mic 'privacy' controls that are truly meaningful, which hasn't been done yet for Fedora or any other distro I'm aware of. (Well, I'm not sure about explicitly privacy-focused ones like Tails, I haven't looked into those much.) I can't make a meaningful comparison with Windows or macOS here either as I don't know whether they can really prevent regular applications from adjusting the mic input level or doing IP geolocation.

The GNOME 'Online Accounts' feature is actually really awesome. It's done at the desktop level because it allows many apps to do useful stuff with the accounts. For instance, if you set up a Google account, Evolution will get your Google mail, contacts, calendar and tasks, Photos will get photos from your Google account (I think, anyhow) and documents from your Google Drive account will show up in Documents. That's the kind of integration it's aimed at providing. When I used ownCloud it was really neat to enter my ownCloud account settings and get my contacts and calendar showing up in Evolution and my files in Nautilus right away.

Yes, in the standard GNOME 3 design, there really isn't a 'desktop'. It's just not made to work that way. When running under X it's possible to enable some basic desktop interaction - this was added into a release somewhere in the middle of the GNOME 3 series in response to requests - but this is not possible under Wayland because of technical details of the way it's implemented not being compatible with Wayland. It's just kinda not how you're meant to interact with GNOME 3. The primary way to interact with GNOME 3 is intended to be the Overview (the thing you get when you hit the Start key or click Activities).

The minimize button is, again, a GNOME 3 thing; in stock GNOME 3 there is no minimize button on standard windows. The cited reason for this is that minimization is really not fundamentally necessary to efficient use: you can switch between windows via the overview or alt-tab. There is a commonly-used extension which adds minimize buttons, if you still want them. It sounds in general like you're one of the folks who'd be happier with several widely-used GNOME extensions enabled; if you Google around a bit, there are quite a lot of blogs etc. where people discuss their preferred extensions. You can browse and install extensions at https://extensions.gnome.org/ .

You can change the units for the weather app from its menu. If you look in the top panel right next to Activities you'll see a menu for the currently-active app; when Weather is selected you'll see 'Weather' there. Click it, and you get a menu. Click 'Temperature unit' and change it to Celsius. Most GNOME apps put their settings in this menu.

The buttons in the 'power menu' use icons that I thought are pretty universal...the one in question shows the 'power' icon by default - when clicked, it will display a 'Cancel / Restart / Poweroff' dialog and power off if you do nothing for 60 seconds - and if you hold down Alt, it turns into (yes) a 'Pause' icon, which means 'suspend' (not power off). This again is standard GNOME 3 stuff.

To sum up - if you were to install the GNOME version of any other distribution, say openSUSE for example, you'd see pretty much all the same stuff you saw with Fedora. Sorry you had some troubles, though! You might be interested to try a different Fedora spin, e.g. the KDE spin: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/kde - I suspect it might be a bit more up your alley (though the privacy stuff would still be valid there, I believe). Thanks for the feedback!

[AdamW]

As a quick note on the privacy stuff - this is just a personal opinion, but I suspect one reason it's still a work in progress on desktop Linux is that the apps most people use on Linux desktops just don't tend to *do* shady crap with your location or mic or webcam. (The other main reason, of course, is just sheer lack of people to work on it). There are some moves in the wider Linux world - with GNOME involved for sure - towards a possible future where there's an Android or iOS-style system of making it easy for third parties to publish apps (this is what Flatpak and Snaps are kinda all about), and if that goes very far, I suspect we might suddenly be placing a rather higher value on those kinds of privacy controls. (The Flatpak/Snappy designs *do* potentially allow for much better control over apps' access to privacy-sensitive systems, on the up side).

But that's still kinda in its infancy; in the main, what people mostly run on Linux systems are F/OSS apps they get from distribution repositories. And those apps just aren't really in the business of trying to profile you to show you ads and stuff. It's pretty hard to get something like that into a distribution, and if you did manage to get it in, it'd probably get found out and kicked out again quite quickly.

There's nothing inevitable about this, and it *could* become a problem in future. But right now it really mostly isn't.

[zoomblab]

Yes, in the standard GNOME 3 design, there really isn't a 'desktop'. It's just not made to work that way. When running under X it's possible to enable some basic desktop interaction - this was added into a release somewhere in the middle of the GNOME 3 series in response to requests - but this is not possible under Wayland because of technical details of the way it's implemented not being compatible with Wayland. It's just kinda not how you're meant to interact with GNOME 3. The primary way to interact with GNOME 3 is intended to be the Overview (the thing you get when you hit the Start key or click Activities).

Among all the horrible design decisions that developers took with GNOME 3, this is the worst. "Activities" is the analogous of the Windows 8 full screen start menu and the VIM editing modes combined. At best it is super annoying. At worst it completely destroys your workflow. At least Microsoft turned to be less stubborn than GNOME people. Once they realized the experiment went wrong, they swallowed their pride and reverted the mistake.

The minimize button is, again, a GNOME 3 thing; in stock GNOME 3 there is no minimize button on standard windows. The cited reason for this is that minimization is really not fundamentally necessary to efficient use: you can switch between windows via the overview or alt-tab. There is a commonly-used extension which adds minimize buttons, if you still want them. It sounds in general like you're one of the folks who'd be happier with several widely-used GNOME extensions enabled; if you Google around a bit, there are quite a lot of blogs etc. where people discuss their preferred extensions. You can browse and install extensions at https://extensions.gnome.org/.

The buttons in the 'power menu' use icons that I thought are pretty universal...the one in question shows the 'power' icon by default - when clicked, it will display a 'Cancel / Restart / Poweroff' dialog and power off if you do nothing for 60 seconds - and if you hold down Alt, it turns into (yes) a 'Pause' icon, which means 'suspend' (not power off). This again is standard GNOME 3 stuff.

And this is another example of why I left GNOME and I don't see myself ever going back. The people behind GNOME (and coincidentally other projects that are supported by Red Hat like systemd, flatpak, etc.) saw themselves as an authority that can dictate the needs of the users and used their position, as the upstream, to enforce their sick ideas. I won't support this kind of attitude.

PS. At least I see that now the shutdown button is the default option instead of suspend. This is amazing progress! Maybe in the next decade we can have a task bar back in the desktop by default as well.