Just d/l and installed Fedora 25 Workstation into a VM to see what’s going on over there…
Lots of big changes installing a Fedora!
But, are these changes really what anyone really wants?
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GalliumOS (on Gnome subsystem) now installed, no options.
No Desktop choice during install, this is what you get, period.
At least GalliumOS looks a lot more polished than when I experimented with it a few years ago.
It’s one of the “Unity” style DE layouts that will display better on all types of mobile devices as well as conventional Workstations and Servers. Follows in the footsteps of what MS tried to do with WinRT and Ubuntu’s Unity. Whatever your opinion of this type of Desktop might be, the first page of Google search hits are filled with people trying to disable or change GalliumOS. And, you have no <choice> during install, that’s been removed. -
Fedora now hides their ISO downloads as tiny links on the right margin of the Download page and aren’t easily identified as such. The primary and at first possibly mistakenly only download is a USB image and utility to burn to USB (based on the detected OS of the downloading system). That’s interesting, Fedora seems to now believe that full, generic ISO images for a DVD or LiveCD are perhaps being deprecated?
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Whatever image you download (USB install, DVD or LiveCD) seems to behave the same when booted… The User is presented with a choice to “Try” as a LiveCD or “Install to Hard Drive.” These two options are self-explanatory.
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The Install itself seems to be highly reliant on detecting environmental variables, which is pretty cool. Without looking at the code, I know that all of the automatically detected settings are commonly found in HTML5 (I’ve forgotten off the top of my head what this “hardware interrogation” is called).
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Besides no Desktop selection, there are no software or detailed configuration options during install, except mainly where to install and whether bootcode should be installed in the MBR or not (default not).
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After installation, I’ve found that navigating the choices is not that difficult, particularly if you’ve had any experience with Gnome 3 or Ubuntu’s Unity. Critical things like updating by graphical tool are now different but not hard to find. Unlike our YAST where graphical tools are collected and easily found, you do need to search for what you want because there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to list things.
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Integration and support for various Internet Authenticators like Google and Microsoft.
In some cases there might even be a cloud drive application.
After experiencing GalliumOS for the first time in its current incarnation, I can see how it’s a big jolt to anyone accustomed to KDE, Gnome or practically any other Desktop (maybe not so much the mobile layout of Enlightenment?).
I’d even expect that there could be Fedora refugees who want to “return to what was before” and try out openSUSE due to its subsystems similarities and choice of Desktops.
TSU