Fedora to Get a New Partition Manager?

It looks as though Fedora may be getting a new partition manager.  Now, you might be thinking that this new partition manager will replace the much-unliked partition manager in Fedora’s Anaconda installer, and from the looks of it, you might be right.  However, it seems that blivet-gui will be a replacement for the venerable Gparted tool that Linux users are familiar with.  The reason?  Gparted (along with some other well-known partition managers) doesn’t support a lot of the newer storage technologies available.  While I’m sure that Gparted may eventually support it (if it is still under active development), blivet-gui looks to function similarly to Gparted to provide a level of familiarity to users.

Image c/o http://blog.vojtechtrefny.cz/blivet-gui

Personally, I love Gparted and I also use CLI tools like cfdisk and parted when necessary.  Also, these tools are available in practically every distribution out there as well as the BSD flavors (AFAIK).  If blivet-gui does a good job at maintaining the intuitiveness that Gparted provides, then I believe it would be a major improvement compared to the current partitioning utility that’s used in Fedora’s installer and I welcome it with open arms.  That said, I hope that some of these improvements will also go back to the Gparted team if they haven’t already taken the task to support those storage techonologies that blivet-gui aims to support.

If you’re running Fedora 20, you can install blivet-gui and give it a test run by following the instructions on the developer’s blog.  You can also find some more screenshots there, too.