Fedora 27 Impressions

Fedora 27 on the ASUS Zenbook UX305CA

For people who don't know about Fedora
Fedora is a independent distribution that uses its own repositories and package management and is maintained by Red Hat. It is one of the most used Linux distributions available and uses the GNOME desktop environment by default. It also is well known for having a short release cycle and for having bleeding edge software while also having QA before it is released.

For people who have used Fedora and are on an older build
Fedora 27 introduces GNOME 3.26 which has a redesigned settings menu, improved display switching, and many other improvements over previous iterations. Firefox has been updated to the 57 build codenamed, Quantum, and many other software package updates. I would say it is a stable release, but people on servers may want to wait out so that all bugs have been ironed out.


After being on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for less than a week, I had noticed a few quirks from day-to-day usage. One of the most notable was the lack of patented codecs including H264, while it may not be the end of the world, is still a big deal if you want to play videos on this old format.

Now Fedora 27 was release recently. Great, I really enjoyed Fedora 26 already for its polish and simplicity. With 27, the exact same points have been carried and the experience seemed even smoother.

So I downloaded Fedora 27 from the official torrent links, used RUFUS to put the ISO onto my 4GB stick, and booted it on my lappy.

I quickly proceeding through the setup menus, setting my hostname, changing the timezone, followed by some partitioning. I was doing some testing on Windows 10 as well but then immediately felt the bloat that is the OS overweighs the usefulness of the touch support and mixed-DPI support.

Now back to the partition, I selected custom partitioning (of-course), deleted all of the windows created partitions and used the default LVM setting to auto-create the partitions for Fedora. I've once tried btrfs just to experiment with snapshotting but never got it to work properly (and also there were bugs with random freezing that weren't present on ext4).

After configuring the partitions, I then advanced to the install step. This was a very quick process since the ISO includes the basic packages as well as a few extras. Unlike Opensuse TW being a bloated 4GB in size and includes many other tools not useful in my case.

Once the installation completed, I rebooted my device, waiting for it to boot into Fedora, and then reached the initial setup screen. One thing I was impressed was with the background, I really like the wallpapers Fedora chooses being  focused on the nature and they all seem very calming!


So I completed the initial setup, updated all of the packages, installed VLC, Chrome, VS Code and other programs that I usually use and that didn't take long at all to do :)