So I came across this very positive review of Fedora Workstation on linux.com, although it was billed as a review of GNOME 3.16. Which is of course correct, in the sense that the desktop we are going to ship on Fedora Workstation 22 is GNOME 3.16. But I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight that when you look at Fedora Workstation it is a complete and integrated operating system. As I mentioned in a blog post about Fedora Workstation last April the core idea for Fedora Workstation is to stop treating the operating system as a bag of parts and instead look at it as a whole, because if we are to drain the swamp here we need to solve the major issues that people face with their desktop regardless of if that issue is in the kernel, the graphics drivers, glibc or elsewhere in your system. We can not just look at the small subset of packages that provides the chrome for your user interface in isolation.
This is why we are working on reliable firmware upgrades for your UEFI motherboard by participating in the UEFI working group and adding functionality in GNOME Software to handle doing firmware updates.
This is why we recently joined Khronos to make sure the standards for doing 3D on Linux are good and open source friendly.
This is why we been working so hard on improving coverage of Appdata metadata coverage, well beyond the confines of ‘GNOME’ software.
This is why we have Richard Hughes and Owen Taylor working on how we can improve battery life when running
Fedora or RHEL on laptops.
This is why we created dnf to replace yum, to get a fast and efficient package update system.
This is why we are working on an Adwaita theme for Qt
And this is why we are pushing hard forward with a lot of other efforts like Wayland, libinput, Fleet Commander, Boxes and more.
So when you look at the user experience you get on Fedora Workstation, remember that it is not just a question of which version of GNOME we are shipping, but it is the fact that we are working hard on putting together a tightly vertically integrated and tested system from the kernel up to core desktop applications.
Anyone who has been using Fedora for a long while knows that this change was a major change in philosophy and approach for the project, as Fedora up to the 21 release of the 3 new products was very much defined by the opposite, being all about the lego blocks, which contributed to the image of Fedora being a bleeding edge system where you should be prepared to do a lot of bleeding and where you probably wanted to keep your toolbox with you at all times in case something broke. So I have to say that I am mightily impressed by how the Fedora community has taken to this major change where we now are instead focusing our efforts on our 3 core products and are putting a lot of effort into creating stuff that is polished and reliable, and which aims to be leading edge instead of bleeding edge.
So with all this in mind I was a little disappointed when the reviewer writing the article in question ended his review by saying he was now waiting for GNOME 3.16 to appear in Ubuntu GNOME, because there is no guarantees that he would get the same overall user experience in Ubuntu GNOME that we have developed for Fedora Workstation, which is the user experience his review reflects.
Anyway, I thought this could be a good opportunity to actually ask the wider community a question, especially if you are using GNOME on another distribution than Fedora, what are we still missing at this point for you to consider making a switch to Fedora Workstation? I know that for some of you the answer might be as simple as ‘worn in shoes fits the best’, but anything you might have beyond that would be great to hear.
I can’t promise that we will be able to implement every suggestion you add to this blog post, but I do promise that we will review and consider every suggestion you provide and try to see how it can fit into development plans going forward.