I needed to do a bare-metal install of Fedora 21 today, and I used the beta image for the live Xfce Spin.
I didn’t do anything special. The whole disk was devoted to Fedora. I encrypted everything.
It was probably the quickest Linux install I’ve ever done — even quicker than OpenBSD’s excellent text-based installer, where if you go with the defaults you have a working system within minutes.
Sure Ananconda isn’t “linear” like other installers, but once you get used to its “hub and spoke” logic, you can bring up a Fedora system very, very quickly.
As much as I love Debian, whenever I try to do anything complicated with disk partitioning, I run into trouble. Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer is pretty good, too. But considering the bad press that Fedora/RHEL’s Anaconda installer has gotten over the past few years, once you get to know it, you can do installs very quickly and efficiently.
You can download the RC5 release as that is the build that was given the green-light during Fedora’s Go-No-Go meeting today.
https://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/21_RC5/
I was just about to do a fedup upgrade today on my running system. RPM Fusion has its F21 repos active, so that’s enough to give me the go ahead, but I think I’m going to wait a while.