Fedora 23 Beta is here, Linux fans

If you are thinking of making the switch to Linux from Windows, there are many good beginner-friendly distributions from which to choose. I highlight two such operating systems here. But what if you are a bit more advanced in the ways of Linux?

Fedora is the top choice of many Linux experts, including the father of the kernel, Linus Torvalds. Today, version 23 of the operating system reaches beta status. Will you try it?

"As with other Fedora releases under the Fedora.next initiative, all of the Fedora 23 Beta editions are built from a base set of packages that include the Linux kernel, RPM, systemd and Anaconda, as well as the updated package manager 'DNF'. While many updates and enhancements have been made to these base packages, one of the most significant updates is the use of compiler flags to help improve security by 'hardening' Fedora 23 Beta binaries against memory corruption vulnerabilities, buffer overflows and other similar issues. While not overt changes, these, and many other under the hood tweaks, will help to provide additional system security", says The Fedora Project Team.

The team further shares, "desktop users of Fedora 23 Workstation Beta will be pleased to see many new enhancements coming their way, with the biggest of these being a preview of GNOME 3.18. Changes are also included to the Software application, allowing it to update system firmware, and desktop users will also now have access to LibreOffice 5, the latest edition of the powerful, open source office suite. Additionally, improvements are included for Wayland with an aim towards making it the default graphical server in future releases".

While under-the-hood improvements to security and stability are most important, I'd be lying if I didn't say I was most excited about GNOME 3.18. Unlike on Ubuntu, where the GNOME environment can be updated fairly easily, Fedora users, for the most part, must wait for full OS upgrades to get an update. While it is not universally loved, I find the UI to be the best -- better than any other Linux DE, Windows or OS X.

Office 2016 was released today, and that has me so very excited. With that said, Fedora 23 will ship with the latest major version of the MS Office alternative, LibreOffice 5. The open source office suite is actually very good, albeit not as polished as Microsoft's offering, which is the gold standard.

The Fedora Project Team has not yet shared specific details such as kernel and package versions, but that will be released soon. You can download Fedora 23 Beta from here now.

Are you excited for Fedora 23 Beta? Tell me in the comments.

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