For more than ten eays, the Fedora Project has provided a distribution at the leading edge of the open source ecosystem. Fedora's releases have offered the latest technologies, integrating new and exciting upstream developments into a vast and diverse set of packages.
Users have build powerful desktops, reliable servers, and more recently, versatile cloud instances from the high quality packages in the Fedora repository. Fedora's strong commitment to upstream integrity gives developers a place to showcase their work, and benefit from Fedora's active testing and development volunteers.
In those ten years, much has changed. The Fedora.next initiative represents a considered strategy for maintaining the quality of the distribution and Fedora's position in introducing new technologies, while also providing a more consistent target for developers.
The result of this initiative is three distinct Fedora flagship products. Fedora Cloud for scalable infrastucture, Fedora Server for organizational infrastructure, and Fedora Workstation for the developer and desktop user.
Fedora Spins, such as live media featuring alternative desktop environments, will continue to be produced.
The Fedora Workstation product provides an easy to use, powerful environment for developers to both work and play. Desktop users can enjoy the familar GNOME Desktop Environment, with support for devices and applications used every day. Developers will appreciate how Workstation is configured for their needs, and provides useful tools like DevAssist.
Fedora Workstation developers have provided many enhancements to streamline and improve the GNOME Desktop Environment. Read more about changes to GNOME in Fedora 21 in
Section 4.1.1, “GNOME 3.14”
2.3.2. Captive Portal Detection
Fedora Workstation, by default, enables a captive portal detection that requests known content from a trusted Fedora server. If the request is redirected, a window automatically appears for you to interact with the portal's login webpage.
To disable this feature, remove /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/20-connectivity-fedora.conf
2.3.3. Developer oriented firewall
Developers often run test servers that run on high numbered ports, and interconnectivity with many modern consumer devices also requires these ports. The firewall in Fedora Workstation, firewalld, is configured to allow these things.
Ports numbered under 1024, with the exceptions of sshd and clients for samba and DHCPv6, are blocked to prevent access to system services. Ports above 1024, used for user-initiated applications, are open by default.
