SUSE Contributions, Fedora & Korora 24 Reviews, Security Distros
Today in Linux news, Fedora 24 was said to be one of the best releases this year, yet the reviewer hesitated to recommend it. Jesse Smith reviewed Fedora-based Korora 24 saying it is a solid desktop choice and Jack Germain thought Peppermint 7 was also "solid." Bruce Byfield ran down the five best distros for security and Christopher Tozzi interviewed SUSE folk to identify its contribution to Linux success.
Scott Gilbertson reviewed Fedora 24 for ArsTechnica.com today saying it's a solid release, but questions their eight month release cycle. He said if Fedora 24 had been delayed a couple more weeks, that whole Skylake chip fiasco could have been avoided. He's looking forward to more testing of Flakpaks and Wayland graphical server, but Gilbertson thinks the release cycle puts too much pressure on developers and stress on users. He'd like to see more long term supported release or even a rolling branch because as it is now, Fedora "ends up with an often awkward update process happening all too frequently." Within a few weeks of release most major bugs in Fedora 24 were sorted, which is why Gilbertson thinks users should wait a bit after release. He concluded, "Even with a couple of issues, it's leaps and bounds beyond anything else I've tested this year, including Ubuntu 16.04 and Mint 18."
Jesse Smith reviewed Fedora offshoot Korora 24 today saying he was happy with his experience. Korora attempts to provide some of the missing puzzle pieces to Fedora like multimedia support and extra software repositories configured out-of-the-box. He found the installer adequate except for the "awkward" partitioning step. The application selection was adequate and performance decent (mostly). Smith said Korora also provides a lot of extra configuration tools he appreciates. The update tool failed, but DNF completed the large amount of initial updates. In the end, Smith said, " I think the distribution is a fairly solid desktop operating system. I did run into a few glitches while using Korora, but nothing that consistently gave me trouble, so all-in-all, I was happy with my experiences this week."
Security seems to be on everybody's mind these days with daily reports of intrusions, hacking, and vulnerabilities. So, today Bruce Byfield offered his top five distro choices for upping the security for average users. He began with Qubes OS explaining its approach, "The difference in Qubes OS is that the compartments are formalized, and accessible from the desktop." No security distro list would be complete with Tails. He also included Trusted End Node Security which is similar to Tails in that it's a live system with no persistent data. See his other choices as well, but Tails and Qubes are probably the best bets.
In other news:
* SUSE's Role in the History of Linux and Open Source