I Switched (Back) Over To Fedora As My Main OS & It's Going Great!

After having used Ubuntu Linux on my main production system for about the past six years or so, I'm back to using Fedora as my main OS. So far the Fedora 21 experience has been going excellent.

Before this long stint with Ubuntu on my main system, I was using Fedora (Core) and before that was openSUSE, Mandrake, and others. I stopped using Fedora (Core) due to some of the releases being less reliable than others with at the time less of a focus on shipping quality releases and at times just feeling like a dirty testing ground for RHEL. With being very pleased with Fedora 20 and Fedora 21 on the many test systems around the office, I decided to give Fedora another go on my main system. I've also been very interested in Fedora.Next and how Fedora 22 is shaping up. Fedora these days seems to be back on a solid footing for end-users with a bright future ahead; Fedora 22 might even ship on time for a change while not sacrificing quality! Fedora 21 brings back a lot of good memories for me of the early Fedora days.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu has been less appealing to me in recent months with most of Canonical's investment into the platform being right now focused on Unity/Mir and their mobile ambitions that ultimately will be pushed over to the desktop. With having bought the new Broadwell powered ThinkPad X1 Carbon, I switched over to an encrypted Fedora 21 installation to use as my main production OS now that most of the testing is done (I still have more X1 Carbon / Broadwell results already done to share in the coming days plus some other Fedora tests I'll do over time).

A Tour Of The New Phoronix Office.

The Fedora 21 experience with this Intel Broadwell ultrabook has been going smooth. After not being too happy with GNOME3 in its early days, GNOME 3.14 seems to be really great and there's even more exciting improvements coming down the pipe for GNOME 3.16.

A Walkthrough Of The New 32 System Open-Source Linux Benchmarking Test Farm.

On my main system, most of the work just comes down to doing emails, writing articles, web browsing, and Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org / Phoromatic development. My most used Linux applications are the GNOME Terminal, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Gedit, gFTP, GIMP, and Pidgin.

Stay tuned for more of my thoughts on Fedora 21 after using it as my main system (rather than just a lot of test systems) over the weeks ahead along with more opinions on the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon. This change is just about my main system I use and not about the dozens of Phoronix test systems, which will continue using a variety of Linux/BSD distributions, predominantly Ubuntu -- given that it's the most widely-used desktop Linux distribution thus of most relevance to the maximum number of readers during the Linux hardware testing/reviews, etc.