Fedora 21 Alpha First Impressions: It's Great

There's plenty of updated, open-source OpenCL packages that can be exploited on Fedora 21... Too bad that not more open-source Linux desktop software is leveraging OpenCL code-paths yet for greater GPU-based acceleration.

The GNOME Wayland session wasn't installed by default, but can be easily added with a yum install gnome-session-wayland-session, which will also pull down the X.Org Server 1.16.0 XWayland support.

After installing the GNOME Wayland session package, GNOME on Wayland appeared as an option within the GNOME Display Manager (GDM). My early testing of the GNOME on Wayland support in Fedora 21 Alpha is working out well when using open-source Radeon graphics on R600g -- have yet to encounter any crashes or other show-stopping issues with my early usage. A Wayland-based environment won't become the default on Fedora Linux until at least F22 in 2015.

It's very refreshing to finally have a new, official (albeit development) release of Fedora Linux with all the latest bleeding-edge open-source software packages.

Of course, in the days ahead I'll be running plenty more Fedora 21 development tests on multiple systems within the Phoronix office. The tests will be stock and without the Fedora debug kernel.

Overall Fedora 21 Alpha has shaped up quite nicely and while the repeated delays were frustrating, at least it seems worthwhile with F21 Alpha being quite a smooth experience thus far and pleasant to be able to install Fedora on new hardware without having to do an immediate kernel upgrade, etc. With a bit of luck, delays won't plague the later development milestones and we'll see the official release of Fedora 21 in early December.