Fedora, The Platform for Developers
On an otherwise innocuous day in 1999, my 11 year old self skipped out of the local PC World emporium with a boxed copy of Redhat 5.2.
These were the days of dial-up connections, where downloading an entire distribution would take days. Buying the box, with copious documentation to read while the software installed, was not only practical, but thrilling.
Redhat didn’t support my modem at the time. But even the solitary experience of exploring the stock-installed applications without a connection excited me more than Windows 98SE blue screening ever had.
That purchase taught me the most important lesson that has affected my life and career ever-since; I am compelled to create and contribute. A passive user-experience does nothing for me whatsoever.
In Control
Many long-time users of Linux-based platforms, more than likely, have the same outlook on technology. Set and forget is great, for a backup script. But to have a pre-designed technology experience is an anti-aphrodisiac. It’s why some of us are Android, over iOS. Open, over proprietory.
Coding skills are the ultimate weapon for controlling and self-determining your (at least software) tech world. Whatever your choice of language, having the freedom to create your own software, to match your own mind, is the modern equivilent of building your own house.
Redhat introduced me to this need inside of me, but I admit I have been unfaithful throughout the years. Soon after, I bought the same type of box deal from SuSE, and once Ubuntu came upon the scene, I couldn’t resist the allure of the brown Gnome environment.
I’m even a Windows sysadmin at the moment (for your comfort, it does provide me with the hair-pulling experience you’d expect).
But my heart has always stuck with the open-source world, and more recently, Fedora has become my squeeze of the OS variety.
Ubuntu has turned the ship to a course of less tinkering. Of less self determination. Towards the general consumer that I have known for 15 years wasn’t me.
And so, one has to stand up and look around for a new base, with familiar ideals and a direction that makes sense to who I am as a technologist.
A Focus on Developers
Fedora is on a mapped-out course to be a great platform for developers. They aren’t forgetting the general Linux community, but this is a goal I can certainly get behind.
DevAssistant is a new tool in the recent Fedora 21 release that makes it seriously easy to set up your environment for the stack you prefer. Choose between GUI or scripted customisation, and DA will get your system set up for Django, Flask, LAMP, and many other stacks. You can add your own languages/stacks through YAML files.
GNOME 3.14 is minimalist and out of the way, perfect for concentrating on your code.
Project Atomic is a base OS for docker containers, like CoreOS. You can get going with Atomic on Fedora immediately, just spin up a Fedora 21 Cloud or Server instance.
GNOME also has a recently-added application called Boxes, which makes VM management incredibly simple and quick.
What are you currently using on your development machines? Does it feel designed for what you do? Fedora, for me, now does.
Open source is partly about choice, and the freedom to choose what you have and how you have it. That’s a lot easier to do when you have some development skills, and an environment that helps you build on them.
Goodbye, Amazon results in my system search. Hello productive development.
