Korora 22............................
Les Pounder investigates a remix of the Fedora distro that includes lots of handy applications and aims to quickly get you hacking on your next project.
The distribution that brings Fedora to the masses sees a new incarnation. It’s polished and comes with a bunch of desktops, but does it pass the Les Pounder test?
In the Linux community the two very well-known distributions are Fedora and Ubuntu. Of these, Fedora is a cutting-edge distro which is more for power users who can handle the odd bug. But what if Fedora were tamed? Korora is a remix of Fedora 22 that takes the bleeding-edge distro and tames it ready for the everyday user.
Korora comes with five different desktop environments. For this review we chose KDE and in KDE’s typical ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ approach, it gave us every application we would need, by default favouring Firefox for web browsing and VLC for media playback. Of course, these defaults can be changed by the user. The KDE Plasma 5 workspace provides a clean and bright interface that’s very fluid thanks to a hardware-accelerated graphics stack.
We tested Korora on a quad-core Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and we’re happy to say it ran exceptionally well, even using the rather heavy KDE environment. For low specification machines there are alternative desktop environments, and either Xfce and Mate are two clear choices. The Gnome version comes with version 3.16 and offers a great user interface that is not too dissimilar to KDE.
Korora comes with a number of extra repositories enabled and these provide media codecs for users to watch most types of media content. It also includes everything you’d need to start producing media, too, with some seriously powerful applications in the form of Darktable, the photo-editing suite, and Kdenlive, which is a great video editing tool. Looking in the Multimedia menu, there are additional tools to edit and record audio, record screencasts, and transcode video to and from multiple formats. This is a really nice touch, because often these applications can be a pain to install thanks to complicated dependencies. While all this does add to the size of the downloaded ISO image, in contrast to the many other distros that aim to reduce their size, it’s very welcome and enables a user to try these applications out before committing to an install.
Extra installers
If you need to install extra proprietary software, such as drivers for graphics cards, this is handled via the pharlap application, but extra applications such as Chrome can be installed using the YumExtender software installer. This is a GUI application for DNF, which replaces Yum as the package manager. Its graphical interface is very polished and easy to use but the only grumble we had is using a cog icon to initiate installation or removal of an application. This seemed counter-intuitive.
Korora’s greatest feature is its ease of use. This makes it a great choice for new users who want a user-friendly distro – it has the flexibility to grow with the user and provide a stable platform for various tasks. For dedicated coders and hackers Korora ships with GCC5 suite, enabling compilation of your projects using the latest version of the classic compiler.
Korora does an excellent job of making Fedora more accessible and offers an easy, if pragmatic, entry for those wishing to transition to Linux in a professional capacity. If you’re a FLOSS purist, this isn’t really the distro for you as it makes a lot of choices on your behalf. But if you’re a Linux novice or ‘distro-hopping’ user who wants to get up and running quickly, this is an ideal distro to investigate. It’s productive and genuinely impressive.