Minimal install
Thanks for the review, glad you enjoyed F21 overall!
"Given the base system shared by these new flavors, I hoped there might be a plain, base flavor - something akin to Debian's Minimal install, which would let you build a more customized desktop. But so far that's not something Fedora is doing. In fact, the Fedora project emphasizes that the base set of packages is "not intended for use on its own"."
Where did that "not intended for use on its own" quote come from? It might need tweaking. You certainly can do a minimal install of Fedora, and it's fairly common. It won't be a Product, but it's a perfectly valid Fedora install. To do it, use the Server network install image, go to the Software Selection screen and pick the 'Minimal Install' option, it's all the way down the bottom of the left-hand column. (Note for the haters: Minimal still uses systemd, NetworkManager and firewalld. Sorry, haters.)
"With Fedora's installer it isn't immediately clear what you need to do – or even that you need to do something"
Well, er, there *is* a rather bright orange bar at the bottom with a little attention icon, that says "Please complete items marked with this icon before continuing to the next step." And the spokes you have to complete - only Installation Destination is required, usually - are marked with that attention icon. Was this not visible enough?
"GNOME on Wayland is still very rough around the edges and there are a number of apps that won't work with Wayland (some of which might never be ported to use the Wayland protocol)"
Note that most of those should still run in a Wayland *session*, via XWayland. In fact I think it's still the case that most apps run via XWayland in Fedora's Wayland GNOME session by default - GTK+ 3 does *have* native Wayland support now, but it was still so crashy the devs decided not to use it by default yet.
"Other Fedora 21 highlights include some SystemD updates"
Nitpick: it's systemd, all lower case. The 'SystemD' spelling tends to be associated with the comment thread monster raving loony faction, so the devs get sensitive about it.
Thanks for all the kind words!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
