Users, reviewers, and open source insiders have been waiting for the latest release from the Red Hat sponsored Fedora project. Big changes within Red Hat and the recent Fedora.next initiative [1] have kept the public curious about the next release. Fedora 21 has finally arrived, and we decided to try it out. Overall, the new release leaves a good impression, although the installer still needs some work. Despite all the fanfare and media commentary, Fedora 21 (Figure 1) is ultimately another Linux release, with some interesting new tools, bug fixes, and a few new technologies that are still experimental but hold promise for the future.

Figure 1: Fedora 21 ships with Gnome 3.14.2 as the default desktop.

A Little Background

The role of the free Fedora project has been difficult to define since the beginning. Red Hat launched Fedora in 2003, around the time they were phasing out the old Red Hat Linux series and phasing in the amped up and corporate-ready Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Launching Fedora allowed Red Hat to continue its legacy of support for free Linux (you gotta pay for RHEL). At the same time, Fedora gave Red Hat a test bed for trying out new technologies that would one day be part of its enterprise products. Fedora also allowed Red Hat to continue to exert influence on the community distro scene, offering an alternative to the otherwise-dominant Debian package technologies used with Ubuntu, Mint, Knoppix, and others.

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