Two major Linux distributions released major new versions this week. First, Ubuntu:
There’s a big user experience uplift courtesy of GNOME 44 and enhancements, and a brand new Ubuntu installer helps improves the onboarding experience.
Foundationally, Ubuntu 23.04 runs on the latest Linux kernel 6.2 release, ships Mesa 23.0 graphics drivers (with in-distro access to proprietary NVIDIA drivers for those who need them), plus updates all of the requisite tooling, toolchains, and programming packages developers need.
I’m curious to try the new installer if someone else adopts it (I have no need for Ubuntu), but other than that, this is a fairly small release that won’t rock the boat too much.
Fedora Workstation focuses on the desktop experience. As usual, Fedora Workstation features the latest GNOME release. GNOME 44 includes a lot of great improvements, including a new lock screen, a “background apps” section on the quick menu, and improvements to accessibility settings. In addition, enabling third-party repositories now enables an unfiltered view of applications on Flathub.
With this release, we’ve shortened the default timeout when services shut down. This helps your system power off faster — important when you need to grab your laptop and go.
Fedora is, in my view, the best desktop Linux distribution, and I use it myself on two of my three main PCs. So far, Fedora 38 doesn’t feel like a major new release either, but just more of what you already know.
I find Fedora’s GUI slower than every other distro, and it very much reminds you that it’s just a front end to text based tools based on this slowness.
Seriously, this is what you’ve decided to do with your Thursday evening: trolling about a random linux distro?
If you don’t like reading opinions, why are you reading comments? Also calling someone’s observations” trolling” when they have something bad to say about Linux is the real trolling. Frankly, I couldn’t have said it in less biased and neutral way without taking out a stopwatch and breaking out the objective measurements. I’m simply saying every other distro I’ve tried doesn’t remind me that a command line is behind the GUI constantly like Fedora does.
There’s no “command line” behind the GUI. What are you even going on about?
I find that you last tried Fedora a decade ago.
God, I can’t tolerate people who say general things like that while being far out of the loop.
Nope, maybe not in the last year or two, but the experience is always the same. No reason to try again if the distro, nor community even acknowledges the GUI responsiveness is much lower than other distros. You guys are nicely doing the classic “shooting the messenger” of someone bringing a valid criticism of Linux though, a main example of why the status quo is more important to Linux community than actually improving the product. Think of it like a restaurant, if you don’t listen to customer complaints, the restaurant stays empty, and in Linux’s case, it’s the market share instead of physical tables. Those tables will always stay empty because the community is more into discrediting valid criticisms than taking a look into how to actually fix them. How would you feel if you complained about the food, and then the chef came out and told you that you’re wrong? Because that’s pretty much what the community does 24/7.
No reproducible testcase.
No bug report.
No data.
I’ve been using Linux for over 25 years now. I don’t go spreading FUD about lags and latency in Linux. I’m now typing this from Fedora 38 and there’s ZERO to report.
It’s honestly a rite of passage when it comes to a new release of a tech product being discussed on the internet.
Some people still think that “complaining” about some arbitrary qualitative non issue is a flex. When in reality they have zero clue about the product being discussed.
This has been a thing since the ancient usenet groups. In fact it is literally the same type of post, almost verbatim, from back in the day of linux 1.x or Windows 9x. It’s hilarious. Literally people who parrot stuff they heard elsewhere.
Why should I waste hours of my day downloading, installing, and gathering said data for a community that will just dismiss the claims anyway? Especially when there is already plenty of objective evidence out there that it is terrible. iirc the main problem with Fedora is it simply doesn’t tell you what it’s doing in the background so you’re left with an unresponsive GUI that doesn’t appear to be doing anything. Hard to compare to ones that do tell you what’s going on in the background. Also you are the one with the objectively bad product. You can either take criticism like a professional, or dismiss it like bad chef running their restaurant into the ground. The Linux community always chooses the latter. Interestingly there was a Reddit thread this week on /r/programminghumor where we see the average IT person still hates Linux with a passion (forgive some of the language, but for purposes of this argument we’re only looking at comments, and the top thread is just dripping sarcasm. Outside of the pro-Linux echo chamber, it’s clearly still seen as awful, ESPECIALLY by IT pros): https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/12tuo7p/something_something_my_language_is_better_than/
If Desktop Linux were commercial, it would have died from a lack of funding by now and being a terrible product.
This is all off topic anyway, the point is you are too biased to even accept the most mild of criticisms, and need to practically shout them out like this as heresy towards Linux. At the end of they day, you just don’t want to look at the evidence so why should I bother collecting it for you knowing full well you’ll either just dismiss it, or try to educate on what Linux is doing and why that’s the superior way of doing it?
dark2,
I believe the majority of service and embedded developers are choosing linux when they have the choice. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some problems and personally I am comfortable talking about them (and I do), but you need to be honest with yourself and accept that many of us do actually feel it’s better than windows. That doesn’t mean it applies to you and the good news is you don’t have to use it. This is really all very subjective and everyone here should try to remember it. There’s a tendency to take everything personally and reply aggressively, which is unfortunate as it devolves into flame wars as we’ve got going on here. The truth is it takes two sides to achieve this, and I do see the others here have also stoked the flames instead of staying cool,
This may be futile, but for the sake of friendly & civil discussion, is it too much to ask everyone to take a step back and accept that differences of opinion aren’t a big deal? By diffusing rather than provoking, we could keep the tone on osnews more professional and friendly.
What I’m really curious about is Fedora Silverblue. Immutable base OS + pure Flatpak base on top. Seems the most consistent/logical, and like the future of Linux.
https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/about
One day I’ll get around to properly playing with it.
I agree. Next laptop is going to get a Silverblue install, and I’m going to work out my workflow friction.
I use quite a few CLI tools, and switching to a container to get my tools is kind of annoying when I’m editing text or something like that.
I also need to get better with containers. Having to setup my environment every time I create a new toolbox is annoying. Plus, switching my Fedora servers to Fedora IoT would be a good idea.
I used to enjoy such release but then GNOME 3 happened. So neither of the two works for me anymore. I need to customize my desktop experience by opting in for a different DE. I am grateful GNU/Linux allows for me to do that. Apple, Microsoft an Google just show down your throat whatever they want. And people defend them for doing it. Imagine if all GNU/Linux users would be forced to use GNOME 3. Yikes!
Fedora has a bunch of Spins with different default desktops.
https://spins.fedoraproject.org/
They have…
– KDE
– XFCE
– LXQT
– MATE-Compiz
– Cinnamon
– LXDE
– SOAS
– i3
– Budgie
– Sway
I never did quite “get” the Red Hat family of distros. Still don’t, really. Their admin tools… well, I guess they work for large corporations in the same way that Windows’ tools do, or maybe I just prefer the Debian way. Back in the GNOME 2 days it at least had that going for it, but I can’t bring myself to use GNOME whatever-it-is-these-days and they dropped KDE.
The last several versions of Fedora I tried to boot in a VM but was always unsuccessful, due to a crash, failure to load an applet or the desktop, and/or problems with hardware acceleration. I was finally able to get Fedora 38 running in a VM though, which is a first… but it’s still GNOME. But at least it works!
What is it that I’m missing? A lot of people seem to like Fedora but I just don’t get it. And yeah, you could say just use some other desktop spin, but with Red Hat’s devotion, dedication and incredible resources put into GNOME I feel like at that point you might as well just use another distro. Modern GNOME pretty much seems like the old GNOME 3 everyone hated way back then, but less buggy and more stable. But there must be *something* for it to get Red Hat’s corporate backing.
KDE has never been dropped, it’s fully usable. What’s more, Fedora includes a development snapshot of SDDM which can run in pure Wayland mode as opposed to other distros where SDDM is a pure X11 application.
It’s not about Fedora, it’s about your VM software.
Yeah, I don’t get anything either. You just don’t say what you’re missing despite typing three full paragraphs.
There are no spins, there’s a base system + some preinstalled packages under a certain name for your convenience. You can trivially switch any spin to any other spin by typing dnf group install What_you_need.
I don’t understand people’s obsession with Gnome. I use Fedora with XFCE and it’s just fucking perfect.
> There are no spins
Try to be less wrong in future. https://spins.fedoraproject.org/
I don’t use Fedora.
Try to learn to speak, I mean read and understand English in the future:
“There are no spins, there’s a base system + some preinstalled packages under a certain name for your convenience.”
Artem S. Tashkinov,
Hmm, I also read and understand english and I also don’t understand why you said there were no spins. I wouldn’t have bothered to bring it up myself, but the statement does seems to warrant further explanation. Perhaps you may be using a different definition for it, fedora themselves call them spins.
Updated my Kinoite yesterday, still loving it. Hoping the UEFI boot bug is fixed so I can also install it on my Surface Pro 3.
The idea of an immutable OS took me a while to warm to, but once I realized I could use toolbox or distrobox for an Arch Linux container I was hooked.
I think it’s overall better, and I need to get comfortable with it.
I do need to figure out how to build my own images though. There are things I would like to add or remove from the base image. Like, remove Firefox, add Epiphany, add Emacs, add neovim, add git, add Tilix, add Distrobox, add ripgrep, add fd-find, add FreeIPA client for business workstations, and others.
Flatpak takes care of most of my desktop applications, but there are some CLI applications which I use regularly enough that switching to a container introduces friction.
I upgraded my main desktop to F38 on Tuesday, and everything went really smoothly.
As usual, some Gnome Extensions are lagging in support, but there hasn’t been any breakage in my normal workflow.
Same here, it went pretty smoothly. Basically I’m using the same box that started with F34 and each upgrade has gone without any major issues. As you pointed out, the main complains are in regards to gnome extensions lagging the latest release.
The only issue is regarding CUDA, so we keep most of our boxes on Centos and/or Ubuntu LTS.
The in place upgrades have been fantastic.
My desktop got rebuilt at the end of last year because I messed up Python and needed to encrypt the disks. Otherwise, it would have been upgraded starting with whatever version was current in May 2018.
Out-of-tree stuff is better with a stable kernel.
I have a Fedora box lagging because of ZFS. I should use CentOS or Rocky, but since it’s a personal server, YOLO. 🙂