Given the proud tradition of "breaking everything on purpose" makes it an obvious candidate too.
I have found that Fedora has been letting that tradition down a bit since version 24 and even managed an upgrade without breaking anything.
But fear not - Fedora did leave some moody behaviour to honor its bleeding edge tradition.
I simply could not run Chromium on it and getting it to behave well in Virtualbox was quite impossible.
Fedora has been a Gnome 3 distro for some time and I am very underwhelmed by it. Years and years of assurances that "Gnome 3 has really become good now" have simply not been true.
It stays as bad as it has allways has been and it has been the Masturbating project no1 one if I may use a Linus Torvald analogy.
My words as a Gnome fan that has been let down since Gnome 2.
I have moved on and prefer Xfce4 these days. It has the flexibility of Gnome 2 (..and then some) so I decided to install the Fedora 27 workstation Xfce4.
I downloaded the iso and decided to install it in Virtualbox with EFI enabled.
Lots of distros protest with the EFI install so it is a bit more challenging than the default install in Virtualbox.
I had to delete everything on that existing VB "harddisk" and let Fedora 27 do the magic for me and it -more or less- did so.
A distro like Manjaro did not - even if it can be made to work. The Fedora installer seems to be ahead there.
So I installed Fedora 27 in EFI mode and it went through with some error messages but I was able to boot into the install.
There were error messages that I cannot remember but there were a thousand updates to probably fix the problems so I did a
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sudo dnf update
A reboot later things were looking up and I could brush up my Xfce4 desktop.
I have had real trouble with Chromium on Fedora before so I installed it...and it popped just fine
So time to check out that Virtualbox Client behavior then...
I need to be root
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su -i
Then I need Kernel headers and DKMS
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dnf install kernel-devel kernel-headers dkms
I want to use all the functions that Oracle have to offer so I need to download the Oracle public key
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wget https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc
and import it:
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rpm --import oracle_vbox.asc
Time to download the Virtualbox repo file and move it into /etc/yum.repos.d
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wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo
I installed Virtualbox5.2
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dnf install VirtualBox-5.2
and then I did a:
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service vboxdrv start
almost finished - but I need to add myself to the vboxusers group
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usermod -a -G vboxusers viking60
Time to reboot and check that Fedora 27 keeps up the tradition of not working well with Virtualbox....
Trying to drag my VB window to a bigger resolution...
It worked!
Copy and paste between the VM and Desktop ...
Works!
+
So let me see ..what other problems did I have with Fedora before...oh yes the sound did not work...
Checking it out now.....
......
...and there we have it;
I have no sound!
Fedora has hat this issue on several of my tests and it still does not work.
I am sure that it can be fixed with a double sommersault and lots of but that should really work out of the box..don't you think?
I did a
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pulseaudio -k
and then I ran Alsamixer and hit F6 and unmuted and activated everything.
So going back to my browser and testing that youtube video again then...
and...
It worked! - Don't ask me what exactly made it work... because I have no idea
Anyway - I do have a fully functional desktop now and it might well be one of the safest too in these times of CPU flaws.
SE-Linux is activated and hardening the distro out of the box and patches may well be present in Fedora before any other distro.
While I like distros like Solus it is always a valid question what will happen if the main developer looses interest or becomes incapable of maintaining the distro for some reason.
Fedora is not going away with its solid foundation and neither is OpenSUSE nor is Debian or Ubuntu.
The main new thing is that the GUI interface for package installation has changed.
Yumex-DNF is out and replaced by dnfdragora. Here you can search for and install packages or update your system.
I do miss a function to add and manage repos though.
Dnfdragora is based on RPMdragora which again is based on the good old RPMdrake from Mageia .
Fedora 27 is still is a very capable desktop and would still be the one to prefer over a SUSE desktop IMO. Debian holds the same important status as Fedora does and is a great server due to a very conservative policy which makes it always impossible to compare to Fedora with its bleeding edge policy. Debian does compare well with Centos and it is a matter of taste which one you should choose in the server department.
As a desktop Fedora is better than Debian IMO: Debian has lousy translations and that matters on the desktop - on the server I don't care...
Fedora27 is a nice Desktop distro well worth exploring but not for beginners. It takes some experience to even make the sound work and to get under the "skin" of SElinux.
SELinux will not get much in your way so it is no showstopper but it makes sense to explore its capabilities. If you don't want it you can simply de-activate it with
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sudo setenforce 0