How Do You Appreciate Fedora?

This week is the first annual Fedora Appreciation Week. As an extension of the How Do You Fedora? series, this article presents how past interviewees appreciate Fedora. The Fedora Project defines four common values that it encourages all contributors and community members to uphold. Those values are known as the Four Foundations. One such value, Friends, represents the vibrant community of contributors and users from across the world, all working towards the same goal: advancing free software.

Like any community, the Fedora community evolves over time. Each contributor’s story is a little different. That diversity is what makes the Fedora community so strong. Kernel contributor Justin Forbes puts it succinctly:

Fedora is the community. So much of what Fedora is now came as a direct result of community effort.

Fedora is successful today because of the many contributors, both past and present, who have put their time and effort into the project. Here are some of their stories, and how they appreciate others in the community.

You can click on any of the story headers to see our original interviews with these notable people.

Maria Leandro’s story

Fedora has been a huge part of my personal and professional life, so choosing a top moment would leave several fantastic stories behind. I do remember that first time I went to a Flock and meet personally people that I had been interacting, learning from and teaching for almost 5 years. For people like us who spend most of our time behind a screen, having that personal meeting can be life changing. That particular moment is not about the goals or the tasks that need to be done, that moment is the prize to people who work for a common well, for those who change people’s life without asking anything in return, it’s the moment when you put a face to those commits and bugs, to those wallpapers and docs; it’s the moment when we stop being a random robot name to be real… that moment when we hug each other and greet, that has to be the best moment in all Open Source History.

Maria has two favorite wallpapers from Fedora releases:

Fedora Core 7 Wallpaper

Fedora 26 Wallpaper

She sends a special thank you to appreciate Máirín Duffy, who leads the Fedora design team:

Definitely my hero, mo (mizmo). She pushed me to be the designer I am today, always had a chat to solve any doubt I had, and is the most friendly person you can meet.

Maria’s most memorable release was early on:

Probably Fedora 6, since it was the first time I did any artwork at all for the community.

Michael Larabel’s story

Without a doubt the best Fedora memory with friends would have to be celebrating the Fedora “Beefy Miracle” release back in 2012 at LinuxTag in Berlin where the Fedora booth played it so well and was serving up free hot dogs to go with the delicious beverages of the region. Lots of good catching up with open-source contributors, discussing new ideas, and more during the wonderful community-driven open-source events particularly in Europe.

Michael’s favorite Fedora desktop wallpaper will be familiar to current readers of the Magazine. It’s the brand new wallpaper for Fedora 29:

Fedora 29 Wallpaper

Michael also sent a special thank you to a very special contributor who died in 2013:

The late Seth Vidal earns much respect for his contributions to Fedora, Yum, and Red Hat communities. His technical achievements were great and he was a kind and interesting person at conferences, etc.

His favorite release was Fedora Core 3:

Fedora Core 3 certainly holds a special place in my heart as it was the first Fedora release I really became intrigued by as it was in much better shape than FC1/FC2. Since there it improved while overall from say Fedora 26 and newer, each release has felt particularly polished and keeps getting better — including Fedora 29 and my experience with it thus far on many test boxes.

Julita Inca’s story

Julita shared with us this photo from a recent Women in Fedora event, celebrating the positive impact and contributions of women in the Fedora community:


Fedora WOmen Event with Julita Inca

Her favorite Fedora wallpaper is from the Fedora 17 release:

Fedora 17 Wallpaper

Julita also took time to appreciate one of Fedora’s amazing Czech community contributors and organizers:

The person I admired since the beginning was Jiri Eischmann! He is a polite person and very active in his community. He continues to inspire me to this day! I hope to soon attend a celebration of Fedora in Europe where I am living now.

Author’s Postscript

As a fellow Fedoran I would like to thank each of the people who responded to my questions and all of the previous interviewees. Writing the How Do You Fedora? series has been immensely rewarding for me. I have learned about lots of new applications and uses of Fedora. The greatest impact of the series is that it reignites my faith in the goodness of the people who make up the Fedora community with each installment.

Fedora Project community

24 Comments

  1. Chris

    My story with Fedora? Aroud 2009 I was tired of Ubuntu and Debian, tried few other distros to hop on. I’ve downloaded Fedora 12 and was suprised how complete and polish it was. I’ve always said it was a complete, polished and user friendly Linux user experience.

    I’ve used Fedora for next 8 years. It was my distro. Sure – there was some small things, but nothing serious. Fedora never crashed to me. It was solid a distro. Ok, sometimes searching for RPM’s was tiresome – deb package are in mainstream, but Flatpak are more and more popular.

    Anyway – after a decade with Linux, I’ve switched to Mac around 1,5 year ago. But Fedora is still my favorite Linux distro.

  2. Using Fedora since 2005 on my servers, despite of a lot of time to fix the risky upgrades until 2012 today it’s very positive to see how stable and easy it is to modify, update and upgrade Fedora. The active community is a very important point to solve issues quickly, especially when new important system component version are somehow breaking things. I always used Fedora from scratch, installed just what my servers need, keep legacy components working even much better than before, Long Life to Fedora and thanks for all.

  3. tom

    After a few concerns i started favouring Gnome3 over Gnome2+Do and Ubuntus new DE which shot my beloved Gnome2 Compiz Fusion Cube down. Then i switched to Ubuntu-Gnome and after time i noticed that Gnome always had a new version one month after the ubuntu releases. So i took the step to Fedora to get it on the edge. I also played around with Chapeau and Korora. That helped me understand fedora a lot.

    When i discovered Gedit3 i started loving the titlebar concept and lots of the things gnome3 gets done well. I think development on gedit stucks a bit, but its ok.

    one may find a lot userscripts on github: https://github.com/search?q=gedit

    Now i prefer Fedora because it seems to me that the software i use on regular basis is way better supported then it was 3 years back and problem solutions are fast and solid to solve for me as a desktop user.

    Since a few weeks now i use git much more often then before and there may be enhancements to Gedit/Nautilus/Desktop integration possible. Maybe with parts of Gnome-Builder which i like to test but it takes too long to start it, so i mostly abort it. I imagine a kind of “GnomeOnlineAccounts” to a git-server like gitTea, Gitbucket or Gitlab.

    If i just had more time left, i would love to create gnome-themes on css basis.

  4. I’ve been using Fedora for about 4 years now. When I started I was doing a lot of high performance computing in the Physics department at my university and was shocked to find that Fedora had up to date versions of MPICH and OpenMPI that I could install side by side. It also shipped with all the libraries I needed for my research. This kind of support for scientific computing was flawless. I had basically the same set up on my laptop as the cluster I was submitting to.

    In the time since, I’ve moved on to work in Data Science and web services and Fedora has always had exactly what I needed to get my work done. It has inspired me to always keep learning and playing with my operating system. Thank you so much for everyone that works to put together such a wonderful platform.

  5. M J Orchard

    I have the irq .55 bug playing me up with fedora 29 on a quad core phenom board, the damn thing just locks up on me. Any bug fixes for this?

    • Steve

      M J Orchard,

      This is a magazine article about Fedora appreciation, and reporting bugs is not done here, but over there https://bugzilla.redhat.com/. If you have a bug, you should report it since it will make the distro better and may get you some assistance in resolving the issue. I happen to coincidentally have the AMD Phenom II Processor in use too (6 Core), and experience the message about there not being a handler for the IRQ 55 on 5 of the 6 processors. This “bug” is actually a problem with how AMD deviates from the standard for reporting the Processor Resource mappings to the OS via a couple of tables that reside in BIOS, and not a Fedora related issue. This seems to have an effect on both SMB and EFI versioned BIOS’s since mine is SMB based, and I have the issue. I do not experience lock up’s due to it, I merely would be advised not to overclock my CPU for instance since the metrics the OS gets back wouldn’t be reliable.

  6. Fedora is great!
    But why is so difficult to sahe folders in a home network?
    Why not use nautilus-share as Ubuntu uses and make everything easy?

  7. Fernando

    I started with Fedora 20 after several years with Debian, and other distros previously. At the beginning I had some issues with SELinux but, as of lately, it’s the most polished distro out there, I believe. An install and forget solution for any computer. Anything one can expect is there, and even more. Most of my family has left Ubuntu for Fedora during these years. Thanks!!!

  8. Roberto

    Hey guys, some know which fedora have the wallpaper with air ballons?

  9. svsv sarma

    Fedora changed my computer habits for good. Every upgrade is a new experience! Thank you for its openness and free.

  10. Toni TamiBar

    I started with Red Hat 9 since those days I’m with Linux and then Fedora Core 1 and since I’m with Fedora. The Israeli community is very fond of what you do. Keep up the good work and love you very much

  11. Ramdas

    I have been using Fedora from FC1 and it is my favourite distribution, like it very much and I never missed upgrading to any of its releases.

    Great Job, Fedora Team!!

  12. Jatin

    Fedora and the red hat family is the best. I have been using fedora since 23 and RHEL (Developer license) and CENTOS 7. Software support enterprise class like Autodesk maya, Davinci Resolve are only available for these 3 distros and it helps in all of my development 🙂 OpenShift is also a great tool ! I love the whole family of red hat from CoreOS to fedora 🙂

  13. Gian Paolo

    I have used every single release of Fedora since Yarrow up to 29.

    The ones that stand out in my mind are Yarrow itself, as it was the first release of Fedora and I genuinely wondered how the whole idea of a community driven, corporate sponsored project would pan out.

    Next would have to be Fedora Core 4 Stetz as it was with it that I made the jump to 64-bit in a time where multilib was a head ache for everybody else, and it gracefully worked with Fedora.

    Zod (FC6) had a personality of its own, I absolutely loved the genetic theme.

    Werewolf (8)IIRC has been the longest lived release and a very solid release too.

    Cambridge (10) and its absolutely lovely plymouth boot theme was so awsome!

    Lovelock (15) goes down in my memory as the release that shipped Gnome 3 as default. Previous releases had shipped it in a preview state, but seems like not many users were actually ginving the shell a go, and 15 was when it debuted full-time… I am glad to say that GnomeShell has come a LOOONG way from those days.

    My favorite wallpapers have to be: Zod, Cambridge, Leonidas, Laughlin, Verne, 26, 28 and 29, but I have all of them installed and cycled through out the day.

  14. I started using Fedora in earlier this year (2018) with Fedora 27 KDE. I started using Linux in 2017 with Ubnutu 17.04 Gnome, so I was still pretty new .

    I had decided to learn web development which is what prompted me to wipe Windows and exclusively use an OS that had the amazing Bash terminal.

    Whiles using Linux was amazing, I don’t have a real reason as to why I first made the switch to Fedora. I kept reading comments about how nice it was for developers and Linus Torvalds using it was also a factor.

    Since then, I used a macbook for work but I eventually bought a personal laptop and distro-hopped for about a month. I went from Arch, to Fedora 28, to Manjaro, to Mint then finally back to Fedora which I’ve stuck with.

    I personally feel like these distros are all the same with a few crucial exceptions. The community is a big deal and each distro definitely has its own community.

    There’s also an intangible feeling associated with each distro.

    Finally, there’s a manifesto or a way of thinking that is strongly associated with each distro. I think the packages available to each distro is indicative of that way of thinking.

    Maybe I’m just imagining all of the above but in the end, I love using Fedora. I love the experience out of the box. I think Gnome is a great de and I also like Adwaita. I think DNF is great as a package manager. As a web developer who mainly using Node (I use Node Version Manager so the repo packages don’t affect me) and React, I’ve had a great dev experience.

    I hope to come to a better understanding of Linux, under the hood, and maybe then I’ll have more reasons as to why I love Fedora but for now all I can basically say is that it’s perfect for me and I’ll use it on every computer I own.

    I’ve even installed it on my work computer, a macbook pro. Thanks Fedora! You all have done a great job.

  15. I started using Fedora permanently on the PC since Fedora 19(2013) and about 10 releases after it is still my Linux distro of choice, I joined Fedora QA 2016 and got featured on Fedora Magazine series How Do you fedora, and I am yet to start. Thanks to Linux Professional Institute(LPI) I would never have known Linux without you guys ,Thanks Fedorans, Fedora Project(I would never have Enjoyed Linux without you), Thanks Charles.

  16. My very first experience with Linux came in ’98 with Mandrake, then Red Hat 7 in 2000, but just doing some testing. It was in 2003 when I first start using Fedora as desktop OS for everything including soft. dev., without knowing it would be a happy long journey. I’ve been witnessing the evolving cycle of this good distribution, which I hope to continue providing bleeding-edge technologies to the open source community.

    Good job!

  17. gent31m4n

    I am full stack web developer and I am in love with Fedora. Currently v28 ’cause docker’s stupid packages build policy but plan update to 29 soon.

  18. I started Redhat with Redhat 3 (still have RedHat 6.2 install media), stayed with Redhat Legacy (community supported Redhat 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, 9.x) for a while, then switched to Fedora with fc4 – I still have a VM with my FC4 system.

    I really started to appreciate Fedora when I signed up to be a packager and started contributing (I had done many private RPM packages for home and work). I am a big advocate of Classical education vs the “Prussian model” popular for the last 100 years. The Fedora Project has many aspects of classical education – with more advanced students/discipuli/talmudim instructing less advanced, and a few masters/magistri/rabbis guiding the project.

    There is a place for certificates (and a conventional “education” is essentially a certificate), but to really learn, you need to actually do it, with others on the same journey to help you along. Fedora is a well organized way to do exactly that.

  19. Dan Smith

    Fedora made using a computer and working in the tech field interesting again! I have been using microsoft products since DOS with Linux off and on over the years. Fedora has inspired me so much in 2018 that my 2019 New Years Resolution is to leave MSFT forever! For good! Its one of the most liberating experiences in my life. You may think I am being dramatic but the doors that are about to open up because of Fedora make my career exciting again! I finally will teach myself Python and master the terminal. Here’s to 2019, may you and the entire Fedora team prosper like never before! Thank you very much Fedora and all its contributers.

  20. Yoki

    I created and posted a video how to install Fedora in a convertible PC or a windows tablet: https://youtu.be/sIB4oGBfDVM

  21. Jamie

    I went from ubuntu 5 to 10 then to debian and jumped to fedora 19 . I dumped windows completely at fedora 23, have now moved all the kids pc’s over to fedora via multiseat. They love it as much as me!

    Thank you for a rock solid OS.

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