Fedora 25 has been out for 2 months and it seems like a very solid release, maybe the best in the history of the distro. And feedback from the press and users has also been very positive. I took the time and put together a digest of the latest reviews:
Phoronix: Fedora 25 Is Quite Possibly My Most Favorite Release Yet
As a long-time Fedora fan and user going back to Fedora Core, Fedora 25 is quite possibly my most favorite Fedora release yet. With the state as of this week, it feels very polished and reliable and haven’t encountered any glaring bugs on any of my test systems. Thanks in large part due to the heavy lifting on ensuring GNOME 3.22 is a super-polished desktop release, Fedora 25 just feels really mature yet modern when using it.
Phoronix: Fedora 25 Turned Out Great, Definitely My Most Favorite Fedora Release
That’s the first time I’ve been so ambitious with a Fedora release, but in testing it over the past few weeks (and months) on a multitude of test systems, the quality has been excellent and by far is most favorite release going back to the Fedora Core days — and there’s Wayland by default too, as just the icing on the cake.
Distrowatch: Fedora 25 Review
Even when dealing with the various Wayland oddities and issues, Fedora 25 is a great distribution. Everything is reasonably polished and the default software provides a functional desktop for those looking for a basic web browsing, e-mail, and word processing environment. The additional packages available can easily turn Fedora into an excellent development workstation customized for a developer’s specific needs. If you are programming in most of the current major programming languages, Fedora provides you the tools to easily do so. Overall, I am very pleased using Fedora 25, but I am even more excited for future releases of Fedora as the various minor Wayland issues get cleaned up.
ZDNet: Fedora 25 Linux arrives with Wayland display support
Today, Fedora is once more the leading edge Linux distribution.
ArsTechnica: Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (or more handsome)
Fedora 24 was very close to my favorite distro of the year, but with Fedora 25 I think it’s safe to say that the Fedora Project has finally nailed it. I still run a very minimal Arch install (with Openbox) on my main machine, but everywhere else—family and friends who want to upgrade, clients looking for a stable system and so on—I’ve been recommending Fedora 25.
…I have no qualms recommending both Fedora and Wayland. The best Linux distro of 2016 simply arrived at the last moment.
Hectic Geek: Fedora 25 Review: A Stable Release, But Slightly Slow to Boot (on rotational disks)
If you have a rotational disk, then Fedora 25 will be a little slow to boot and there is nothing you or I can do to fix it. But if you have an SSD, then you shall have no issues here. Other than that, I’m quite pleased with this release actually. Sure the responsiveness sucked the first time on, but as mentioned, it can be fixed, permanently. And the stability is also excellent.
Dedoimedo: And the best distro of 2016 is…
The author prefers Fedora 24 to 25, but Fedora is still the distro of the year for him:
Never once had I believed that Fedora would rise so highly, but rise it did. Not only is the 24th release a child of a long succession of slowly, gradually improving editions, it also washed away my hatred for Gnome 3, and I actually started using it, almost daily, with some fairly good results. Fedora 24 was so good that it broke Fedora. The latest release is not quite as good, but it is a perfectly sane compromise if you want to use the hottest loaf of modern technology fresh from the Linux oven.
OCS-Mag: Best GNOME distro of 2016
The same author, and again not surprisingly prefers 24 which is the best GNOME distro in his opinions:
Fedora 24 is a well-rounded and polished operating system, and with the right amount of proverbial pimping, its Gnome desktop offers a stylish yet usable formula to the common user, with looks and functionality balanced to a fair degree. But, let us not forget the extensions that make all this possible. Good performance, good battery life and everyday stuff aplenty should keep you happy and entertained. Among the Gnome bunch, it’s Funky Fedora that offers the best results overall. And thus we crown it the winner of the garden ornament competition of 2016.
The Register: Fedora 25: You’ve got that Wayland feelin’, oh, that Wayland feelin’
Fedora 25 WorkStation is hands down the best desktop Linux distro I tested in 2016. With Wayland, GNOME 3.22 and the excellent DNF package manager, I’m hard-pressed to think of anything missing. The only downside? Fedora lacks an LTS release, but now that updating is less harrowing, that’s less of a concern.
Bit Cannon: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X
Wesley Moore was looking for an alternative to Mac OS X and his three picks were: Fedora, Arch Linux, and elementaryOS.
Fedora provided an excellent experience. I installed Fedora 25 just after its release. It’s built on the latest tech like Wayland and GNOME 3.22.
The Huffington Post: How To Break Free From Your Computer Operating System — If You Dare
Fedora is a gorgeous operating system, with a sleek and intuitive interface, a clean aesthetic, and it’s wicked fast.
ArsTechnica: Dell’s latest XPS 13 DE still delivers Linux in a svelte package
Not really a review of Fedora, but the author tried to install Fedora 25 on the new XPS13 and this is what he had to say:
As a final note, I did install and test both Fedora 25 and Arch on the new hardware and had no problems in either case. For Fedora, I went with the default GNOME 3.22 desktop, which, frankly, is what I think Dell should ship out of the box. It’s got far better HiDPI support than Ubuntu, and the developer tools available through Fedora are considerably more robust than most of what you’ll find in Ubuntu’s repos.
Looks like we’re on the right track and I’m sure Fedora 26 will be an even better release. We’ve got very interesting things in the works.
