The Red-Hat-sponsored Fedora project recently released Fedora 27, and I couldn't wait to take a look. Fedora Linux holds a very special place in my heart. In fact, Fedora was the distro that led me to the desktop Linux world. And I'm not the only one who holds Fedora in high regard: Linux creator Linus Torvalds uses it as his primary distro. Linus once told me in an interview, "One of the reasons I like Fedora is they tend to be fairly good about new kernels." He also said he appreciated the efforts the Fedora community, especially Red Hat, put towards kernel development. "They do have lot of kernel engineers. So one of the reasons I ended up going with Fedora is just that they do a good job on the side I cared about."

Fedora Linux comes in three editions: Workstation, Server, and Cloud. This article will focus on the Workstation edition, but it is important to know that, in the case of Fedora, "workstation" does not mean "end user." Fedora's target audience is people like Linus Torvalds – developers and power users who are looking for early versions of the latest Linux updates. Or, as Fedora Project Manager Matthew Miller once explained to me, "Fedora Workstation appeals to our traditional default user base in many ways, but will have a greater focus on software developers and content creators – and, as the name implies, on people who don't want to do all of their computing from their phone." According to Miller, the Fedora project has always thought of its target user as someone who could also be a potential contributor.

I tested Fedora 27 on multiple machines – Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, Dell Precision 5720 AIO, a custom built PC with Intel i7 Core 4780k and GTX 1070 Ti, VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and Parallels Desktop. All of my systems have a minimum of 16GB and maximum of 64GB of RAM, so I have really not tested it on an underpowered system. Installation was flawless on each of the bare metal systems and virtual machines.

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