Fedora 24 released
Fedora is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions, and now version 24 has been released. You can download Fedora 24 Workstation right now for your computer.
The Fedora Magazine site has the release announcement:
Today the Fedora Project is pleased to announce the general release of Fedora 24.
The Fedora Project has embarked on a great journey… redefining what an operating system should be for users and developers. Such innovation does not come overnight, and Fedora 24 is one big step on the road to the next generation of Linux distributions. But that does not mean that Fedora 24 is some “interim” release; there are great new features for Fedora users to deploy in their production environments right now!
The Fedora 24 Workstation release features Gnome 3.20, with many usability improvements such as easier input device and printer settings, a better search interface, shortcut windows for keyboard commands, and more convenient music controls.
Flatpak (formerly xdg-app) is another building-block feature, with Software able to track installed Flatpaks and adding more features in the future as the technology develops. The Software app has also grown features to provide a full system upgrade directly from the desktop from one Fedora release to the next, and the ability to provide labeling as well as reviews of available software.
How to upgrade from Fedora 23 to Fedora 24
If you’re already running Fedora 23, you can upgrade easily to Fedora 24. The Fedora Magazine site has full instructions on how to perform your upgrade:
Fedora 24 just became available and is officially released. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system. If you’ve upgraded from past Fedora releases, you may be familiar with the dnf upgrade plugin. This method is the recommended and supported way to upgrade from Fedora 23 to Fedora 24. Using this plugin will make your upgrade to Fedora 24 simple and easy.
Note also that shortly after the release of Fedora 24, you will also be able to update to Fedora 24 Workstation using the Software app.
Update software and back up your system
Install the DNF plugin
Start the update with DNF
Reboot and upgrade
Linux redditors react to the release of Fedora 24
As you might imagine, the news about Fedora 24 spread quickly and Linux redditors shared their thoughts about the new release in a long thread:
IsolatedVampire: “I use Fedora daily for a long time and when I feel distro hopping I always go back. When other distros have a weird hardware bug or something else, Fedora works straight from the box for me. Also great community, philosophy and develop of the distro. Rock on Fedora !! :D
Only wish it had a Rolling Release like OpenSuse Tumbleweed :|”
Okungnyo: “Fedora is great, and it integrates perfectly with Gnome, if Gnome is your thing.
It’s a perfect blend of stability and the latest packages, without having to resort to the uncertainty of a rolling release distro.
And stable too! I’ve been testing the RC for a week and absolutely no problems.
IMO, Gnome 3.20 is the most consistent, beautiful, newbie-friendly DE out there.
And it’s not true that Fedora is unstable and Ubuntu is the user-friendly and stable one. I’ve had countless problems with Ubuntu 16.04. None with Fedora 24.
Edit: and with the Dash to Dock and the AppKeys extensions, you can make the Gnome Shell work exactly like Unity. I love it!”
Brick_in_wall: “Fedora is mostly stable on release but give it a update or two and you have a broken system.”
Mendingo: “I installed fedora 23 and it was by far my favourite Linux experience so far. I’ve used ubuntu, mint, lubuntu, and several more. I found it easier to use and more stable than all the other three. Its easy to navigate and get things done right away and it doesn’t crash randomly like ubuntu. So I am going to wait to update until I hear more about fedora 24.”
Sm222: “What’s best practice here? I assume I should wait a month or so before upgrading.”
Natermer: “That is a wise move. If you feel gung-ho about it then I wouldn’t wait though.
In the past I would tell people to wait at least a few weeks before upgrading. However Fedora has stabilized their releases since 20-ish or so. If you are already familiar with Fedora and do not depend on it for anything ‘critical’ (like your professional workstation) then it’s pretty safe to upgrade.
The major caveat being that patent-encumbered media codecs are going to be troublesome since rpmfusion may not have caught up yet. Along with this Mozilla has switched from using gstreamer to ffmpeg libs, so you may find that after upgrading some html5 videos may not work anymore until you get the proper libraries installed. Since they are patent encumbered you’ll have to get ffmpeg-libs from a third party.
United rpms is a option, but they don’t have any track record. So they may not be as safe as rpmfusion.
Also I expect that people will have the normal problems people tend to run into with proprietary drivers. On my Intel or AMD systems I haven’t had any issues since I am using open source drivers. I don’t know about Nvidia.”
SurfaceThought: “For all the talk about Fedora being the best Gnome distro and OPENSUSE being the best KDE distro, I have to say that my Fedora KDE experience has been flawless.”
CaptSkunk: “Can’t wait to get my PC back together, so I can upgrade to Fedora 24.”
Ssssam: “Stable means different things to different people. Fedora gets new versions of software within a release, this always carries a risk of introducing new bugs or breaking compatibility.
I use fedora on my laptop, and its great, but I have seen updates within a release that stop a machine from booting. Ubuntu somewhat is better in that respect with their fairly conservative stable-release-upgrade policy, but debian or rhel/centos is what you want if you need to have a machine that gets security updates without problems for several years.”
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