14 DAY TRIAL // Fedora used to be a major contender in the operating system war, but the number of users for this Linux distribution has declined significantly in the past few years. One of the reasons might just be the fact that Fedora is still trapped in the past, and it's in no way, shape, or form a user-friendly Linux OS.
I am sure I will get a lot of hatemail for this editorial, but please keep in mind that it's just that, a personal opinion. I just want to describe my short and ugly experience with Fedora 22, and I want to assure everyone that I will try to make it work, despite the fact that the distro is trying to prevent me from doing that.
The latest Fedora 22 Workstation has been praised for the advancements that have been made, and I thought so too after I briefly used it. I didn't try anything more than just some simple office tasks, and I liked the GNOME 3.16 vanilla implementation. It's basic, but it can be easily enhanced with extensions that work beautifully. So, when I got a little free time, I installed it at home as well. I hadn't used Fedora in many years and I wanted to give it a go. As it turns out, Fedora is not really all that friendly, and most problems I encountered until now usually have complicated solutions.
Fedora is free, but it costs time
The Fedora installer has evolved quite a lot and is now much easier to use. I had to manually set up everything because I have a few other OSes on the same system, but it wasn't all that difficult. It's still not the best experience, but I didn't waste too much time with it.
I know that many users prefer the freeware drivers, and that's their choice, but I wanted the proprietary ones. I can feel the differences in performance between the two of them, even when I'm just using the OS for office-related tasks. As you might know, there are no proprietary drivers in the official repos, and you need to get a new repo added to the system called RPM Fusion.
After I added the new repos, I installed the drivers and some other components I needed, but I also chose to upgrade the system. I didn't pay too close attention to what the terminal was saying, and I got a new X server, a new Linux kernel from the 4.0 branch, and a bunch of other stuff. The reason I didn't pay attention was because I hadn't been able to ruin my regular Ubuntu installation for quite a while, even with third-party repos. Anyway, I rebooted the system, and I couldn't log in anymore. The startup process was interrupted, and my guess was that it happened either because of the new kernel or the new drivers.
I didn't have time then to figure out what happened and after a few more reboots I abandoned it. Fast forward a few days, I walk through the door and I see my three-year-old daughter trying to enter the credentials to Fedora. Somehow, she managed to boot into it and I still don't know what she did.
Yesterday, I had some work to do, and I needed to use a VPN for that. Some of the older Fedora users will know exactly where this is going. So, I start Fedora, and since it's been a while since I last started it, I hit upgrade. A new Linux kernel update is installed; I reboot, and it no longer works. I now have two different entries in GRUB, and the latest one doesn't work. I have to use the previous entry.
I hope you don't need to use openVPN in Fedora
In any case, I set up Fedora the way I like it, I get some useful extensions, some apps, and various other packages, and I finish with openVPN. I import my settings and try to start it. Nothing happens. After a few more retries, SELinux Troubleshooting starts and tells me that I need to have the certificates in special place, in ~/home. Fine, I do that, and it still doesn't work. After some more debugging and various solutions, I find a trick for SELinux to allow me to use the folder I want and to let openVPN run. After these attempts, it tries to connect and fails.
I spent two hours trying to make it work, and I read a ton of stuff, which is actually ridiculous. Just take a look at the official wiki entry for openVPN on the Fedora website. The amount of stuff you need to do for a simple task is out of this world. And then, there are other solutions online, which also take a lot of time to test, but I have to say that nothing worked until now.
I remember reading the mailing lists for Fedora, and one of the developers was trying to gather all the reasons why users don't adopt Fedora in greater numbers. Two of those reasons were access to proprietary drivers and ease of use.
Anyway, I rebooted into something else to finish my work, and that's just sad. I really wanted to give Fedora 22 a go, and I will probably figure it out eventually, but I'm wasting time on something that should work implicitly. And my time is the most precious thing I have. It's almost like "I'm paying" to use Fedora 22.
It should not be a mystery why Fedora is not more widely used. I encountered some serious issues, and I didn't want to do anything too complicated with it, so I can only guess that other users will abandon it much sooner. Not everyone is willing to spend their time trying to make Fedora work like any other OS when you can just install a normal OS.
Note: Please understand that this is an editorial, and it should be treated as such. If you have any comments or suggestions, you can post them in the section below, but do so with respect towards other users.