Fedora had an amazing 2018. The distribution saw many improvements with the introduction of Fedora 28 and Fedora 29. Fedora 28 included third party repositories, making it easy to get software like the Steam client, Google Chrome and Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Fedora 29 brought support for automatic updates for Flatpack.

One of the four foundations of Fedora is Friends. Here at the Magazine we’re looking back at 2018, and ahead to 2019, from the perspective of several members of the Fedora community. This article focuses on what each of them did last year, and what they’re looking forward to this year.

Fedora in 2018

Radka Janekova attended five events in 2018. She went to FOSDEM as a Fedora Ambassador, gave two presentations at devconf.cz and three presentation on dotnet in Fedora. Janekova starting using DaVinci Resolve in 2018: “DaVinci Resolve which is very Linux friendly video editor.” She did note one drawback, saying, “It may not be entirely open source though!”

Julita Inca has been to many places in the world in 2018. “I took part of the Fedora 29 Release Party in Poland where I shared my experiences of being an Ambassador of Fedora these years in Peru.” She is currently located in the University of Edinburgh. “I am focusing in getting a Master in High Performance Computing in the University of Edinburgh using ARCHER that has CentOS as Operating System.” As part of her masters degree she is using a lot of new software. “I am learning new software for parallel programming I learned openMP and MPI.” To profile code in C and Fortran she is using Intel’s Vtune

Jose Bonilla went to a DevOps event hosted by a company called Rancher. Rancher is an open source company that provides a container orchestration framework which can be hosted in a variety of ways, including in the cloud or self-hosted. “I went to this event because I wished to gain more insight into how I can use Fedora containerization in my organization and to teach students how to manage applications and services.” This event showed that the power of open source is less focus on competition and more on completion. “There were several open source projects at this event working completely in tandem without ever having this as a goal. The companies at this event were Google, Rancher, Gitlab and Aqua.” Jose used a variety of open source applications in 2018. “I used Cockpit, Portainer and Rancher OS. Portainer and Rancher are both services that manage dockers containers. Which only proves the utility of containers. I believe this to be the future of compute environments.” He is also working on tools for data analytics. “I am improving on my knowledge of Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack — Kibana, which is an extraordinarily powerful open source set of tools for data analytics.”

Carlos Enrique Castro León has not been to a Fedora event in Peru, but listens to Red Hat Command Line Hero. “I really like to listen to him since I can meet people related to free code.” Last year he started using Kdenlive and Inkscape. “I like them because there is a large community in Spanish that can help me.”

Akinsola Akinwale started using VSCode, Calligra and Qt5 Designer in 2018. He uses VScode for Python development. For editing documents and spreadsheets he uses Calligra. “I love Vscode for its embedded VIM , terminal & easy of use.” He started using Calligra just for a change of pace. He likes the flexibility of Qt5 designed for creating graphical user interfaces instead of coding it all in Vscode.

Kevin Fenzi went to several Fedora events in 2018. He enjoyed all of them, but liked Flock in Dresden the best of them all. “At Flock in Dresden I got a chance to talk face to face with many other Fedora contributors that I only talk to via IRC or email the rest of the time. The organizers did an awesome job, the venue was great and it was all around just a great time. There were some talks that made me think, and others that made me excited to see what would happen with them in the coming year. Also, the chance to have high bandwith talks really helped move some ideas along to reality.” There were two applications Kevin started using in 2018. “First, after many years of use, I realized it was time to move on from using rdiff-backups for my backups. It’s a great tool, but it’s in python2 and very inactive upstream. After looking around I settled on borg backup and have been happily using that since. It has a few rough edges (it needs lots of cache files to do really fast backups, etc) but it has a very active community and seems to work pretty nicely.” The other application that Kevin started using in OpenShift. “Secondly, 2018 was the year I really dug into OpenShift. I understand now much more about how it works and how things are connected and how to manage and upgrade it. In 2019 we hope to move a bunch of things over to our OpenShift cluster. The OpenShift team is really doing a great job of making something that deploys and upgrades easily and are adding great features all the time (most recently the admin console, which is great to watch what your cluster is doing!).”

Fedora in 2019

Radka plans to do similar presentations in 2019. “At FOSDEM this time I’ll be presenting a story of an open source project eating servers with C#.” Janekova targets pre-university students in an effort to encourage young women to get involved in technology. “I really want to help dotnet and C# grow in the open source world, and I also want to educate the next generation a little bit better in terms of what women can or can not do.”

Julita plans on holding two events in 2019. “I can promote the use of Fedora and GNOME in Edinburgh University.” When she returns to Peru she plans on holding a conference on writing parallel code on Fedora and Gnome.

Jose plans on continuing to push open source initiatives such as cloud and container infrastructures. He will also continue teaching advanced Unix systems administration. “I am now helping a new generation of Red Hat Certified Professionals seek their place in the world of open source. It is indeed a joy when a student mentions they have obtained their certification because of what they were exposed to in my class.” He also plans on spending some more time with his art again.

Carlos would like to write for Fedora Magazine and help bring the magazine to the Latin American community. “I would like to contribute to Fedora Magazine. If possible I would like to help with the magazine in Spanish.”

Akinsola wants to hold a Fedora a release part in 2019. “I want make many people aware of Fedora, make them aware they can be part of the release and it is easy to do.” He would also like to ensure that new Fedora users have an easy time of adapting to their new OS.

Kevin is planning is excited about 2019 being a time of great change for Fedora. “In 2019 I am looking forward to seeing what and how we retool things to allow for lifecycle changes and more self service deliverables. I think it’s going to be a ton of work, but I am hopeful we will come out of it with a much better structure to carry us forward to the next period of Fedora success.” Kevin also had some words of appreciation for everyone in the Fedora community. “I’d like to thank everyone in the Fedora community for all their hard work on Fedora, it wouldn’t exist without the vibrant community we have.”

Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash.