Fedora Project Podcast

Plenty of sysadmins will tell you Fedora is a great desktop and the wrong choice for a server. Is that still true, or is it a reputation Fedora hasn't outgrown? This week it's just the two of us, and we put the question to ourselves.

We get into:

We also go thoroughly off topic for a few minutes while Noah explains why ad targeting feels like your phone is listening to you, and why it isn't. Eric calls it out on air. We left it in.

No guest this week. Just the two of us arguing in good faith and mostly landing on "it depends."

So we want your answer. Would you run Fedora on a server, and why or why not? Bonus points if you have actually done it in production. Comments, the Matrix room, or, as Noah correctly points out, RFC 1149.

Links:

• Fedora Server

Red Hat announced Hummingbird at Summit back in May. Five months later there are Hummingbird containers in the wild, a spin of Fedora Linux built on the same principles, and a full Bluefin ISO built on top of it.

Scott McCarty is a senior principal product manager at Red Hat who kicked off Podman with the team and launched Red Hat Universal Base Image. Jorge Castro runs Project Bluefin and was last on the show back when it was still rpm-ostree. Noah is out this week, so Eric flies solo.

We get into:

Scott and Jorge both close with the same ask: tell them what you would actually use this for. The Fedora discussion threads are open, and there is a thread for every episode of this show.

Special Guests: Jorge Castro and Scott McCarty.

Links:

• Fedora Hummingbird on Fedora Discussion

Framework does not have a storefront you can walk into. What they do have is a laptop you can order that arrives with Fedora already on it, and a screwdriver in the box.

Michael Tunnell is the Senior Marketing Manager for Linux Marketing at Framework, and spent years covering this ecosystem at TuxDigital before joining. Noah is back this week after missing the last episode while stuck forty feet up on a scissor lift with a dead battery.

We get into:

There is a written companion post at https://itguyeric.com/blog/fedora-ep61-framework-laptop-12/

Special Guest: Michael Tunnell.

Links:

• Framework Laptop 12

Fedora has a job whose entire purpose is the health of the community around the distribution, and this month a new person took it over. So we got both of them on at once.

Justin Wheeler has held the Fedora Community Architect seat since 2022 and is moving into a new role as AI Alignment Community Architect. Shaun McCance is stepping into the Fedora role while staying on as CentOS Community Architect. Noah is out this episode, so Eric hosts solo.

We get into:

There is a written companion post at https://itguyeric.com/blog/fedora-ep60-changing-of-the-guard/

Special Guests: Justin Wheeler and Shaun McCance.

Links:

• The announcement on Fedora Magazine

A couple of episodes ago we talked to Carl George about EPEL, and half that conversation ended up being about CentOS. The questions kept coming, so we made a whole episode out of it.

This is the biggest panel the show has ever had. Amy Marrich chairs the CentOS Board and does technical marketing for OpenStack at Red Hat. Troy Dawson leads the CentOS Stream team, sits on the board, and builds CentOS Stream for RISC-V. Shaun McCance is the CentOS Community Architect, and as of two weeks ago the Fedora Community Architect as well.

We get into:

There is a written companion post at https://itguyeric.com/blog/fedora-ep59-what-is-centos/

Special Guests: Amy Marrich, Shaun McCance, and Troy Dawson.

Fedora is a huge project with a lot of doors in. In this episode Eric and Noah walk through the different ways to find your people in Fedora, from real time chat on Matrix to long form discussion on Fedora Discourse, reading Fedora Magazine, getting a friendly hand from the Join SIG, and catching up on project wide activity through This Week in Fedora. If you have ever wondered where to start, this one is for you.

Chapters

Links from this episode

New to Fedora? Get started: https://fedoraproject.org/

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

EPEL is one of those repos a lot of us turned on without thinking twice. This episode, Noah and Eric sit down with Carl George, who leads the EPEL team at Red Hat, to explain what EPEL actually is, the golden rule that gives it its reputation, and the changes Carl is proposing for EPEL 11. If you run enterprise Linux, or you have ever typed dnf install epel-release, this one is for you.

Carl is collecting feedback on the EPEL 11 idea right now, so give it a listen and jump into the thread.

Chapters

Links from this episode

New to Fedora? Get started: https://fedoraproject.org/

Our guest: Carl George, EPEL Team Lead at Red Hat (https://fedoraproject.fireside.fm/guests/carl-george)

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Special Guest: Carl George.

The Fedora Contributor Recognition Program just wrapped its second year, and the winners were announced live at Flock. On this episode of the Fedora Podcast, we sit down with a couple of them: Ankur Sinha and Justin Forbes, to talk about the work that earned them recognition and what keeps them showing up for Fedora year after year.

We cover Ankur's long-running stewardship of the Join SIG and his work on NeuroFedora, and Justin's work keeping the Fedora kernel reliable, secure, and up to date. Two very different corners of the project, one shared thread of contribution.

If you have ever wondered what it takes to leave a lasting mark on Fedora, this episode is full of answers.

The Fedora Podcast brings you exclusive interviews and deep dives with the innovators and contributors who make the Fedora community amazing! From cutting-edge technologies to the production of the Fedora distribution itself, we chat with the minds behind it all. Whether you're a longtime user or just curious, there's always something new to discover in the world of Fedora.

🎬 New to Fedora? Get Started Here: https://fedoraproject.org/

🔗 Episode Resources

Chapters

Special Guests: Ankur Sinha and Justin Forbes.

Getting a package into Fedora takes more than just writing a spec file. There's a review queue, a sponsorship bottleneck, and a contribution process that can feel opaque to newcomers. Jakub Kadlcik has spent a decade inside that pipeline as a Copr developer and maintainer, and he's been quietly building tools to fix the parts that frustrate him most. From the Fedora Review Service that automates package review CI, to a sponsor-finder that helps new contributors navigate one of open source's less-discussed gatekeeping challenges, Jakub is reshaping how packaging works in Fedora. He'll also share what he thinks needs to change when src.fedoraproject.org moves to Forgejo, and why his live coding YouTube channel is pulling in way more viewers than he expected.

The Fedora Podcast brings you exclusive interviews and deep dives with the innovators and contributors who make the Fedora community amazing! From cutting-edge technologies to the production of the Fedora distribution itself, we chat with the minds behind it all. Whether you're a longtime user or just curious, there's always something new to discover in the world of Fedora.

🎬 New to Fedora? Get Started Here: https://fedoraproject.org/

🔗 Episode Resources

Copr: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/

🔖 Chapters

Special Guest: Jakub Kadlcik.

What does bootc look like when it's actually running in production, not just in a lab? James Harmison joins the Fedora Podcast to talk about building custom bootc images across wildly different contexts: NVIDIA drivers, AGX Orin hardware with custom kernel RPMs, replacing RHCOS images in OpenShift, and even a stripped-down SteamOS-style couch gaming rig. We also get into his contributions to the Chunkah project and the real-world UX conversations shaping where bootc goes next.

The Fedora Podcast brings you exclusive interviews and deep dives with the innovators and contributors who make the Fedora community amazing! From cutting-edge technologies to the production of the Fedora distribution itself, we chat with the minds behind it all. Whether you're a longtime user or just curious, there’s always something new to discover in the world of Fedora.

🎬 New to Fedora? Get Started Here: https://fedoraproject.org/

🔗 Episode Resources

🔖 Chapters

Special Guest: James Harmison.