16 ms·

Fedora 35

230 points by 9front 5y ago

q-base 5y ago
What are the advantages of Fedora over Ubuntu - if any? I have been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a few years now, without complaints, but as I will be getting a new laptop in the near future I might consider other distros. Back when I installed Ubuntu 18.04 I shortly tried Fedora, but for as simple reason as I did not like the "look" I switched to Ubuntu and ran with it ever since.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  I just switched to Fedora after almost a decade and a half of Ubuntu when I got a new laptop that I had to set up from scratch anyway. The switch was relatively seamless for me, as in: it's mostly similar to Ubuntu. The main reason for me was wanting to give GNOME 40 a try after having heard many good things about it, and also Ubuntu starting to feel a bit "off" from the intended GNOME experience. Everything feels more tightly integrated on Fedora, with e.g Flatpaks being a first-class citizen, the software centre working properly, and Pipewire being enabled. Which is weird, because the polished, integrated experience was what got me on Ubuntu in the first place.
  - q-base 5y ago
    Thanks a lot for your description. Could you give me a little more information as to what you find better in GNOME 40? And perhaps what felt off with Ubuntu? Pipewire may be a candidate for a something that would make me switch, only because I have some issues with Ubuntu and my bluetooth headset, where the microphone is not really working always. Also having to switch back and forth between high quality playback for music and "headset" settings is not really ideal. But I am unaware of Pipewire solving these.
    - Vinnl 5y ago
      It's not so much that I found things explicitly better, but that the descriptions piqued my interested and I just wanted to experience them for myself. Specifically, trackpad gestures combined with horizontal workspaces. (In practice, I usually have a keyboard and mouse so I don't use the trackpad much, although the horizontal workspaces feel slightly more natural.) Things feeling off are hard to describe, but a concrete one is the software centre being pretty buggy and Snaps causing there to be many duplicate entries (and also Snaps being dependent on a single, closed-source Canonical server by definition). But yes, I think Pipewire sealed the deal for me, at least in terms of giving Fedora a try once. I'm not sure why anymore, but I think it had something to do with being able to do screen sharing in Wayland? In either case, it was mostly curiosity, and the differences really aren't that big. But it worked just fine right away, with nothing much to get used to, so I just stuck with it. Curious to see how the upgrade to v35 will go though.
      - q-base 5y ago
        Thanks a lot for your thorough explanation. I was not aware of the gestures thing. Perhaps I will give it a try when I get a new laptop. Then I can always go back to Ubuntu if I do not like it.
- spicyusername 5y ago
  They are, for the most part, going to be the same experience for most people. I like Fedora because it has newer packages and I interact with more RHEL-like Linux at work, so its more comfy cozy on my personal machines than Debian-like or Arch-like Linux.
commoner 5y ago
Release notes: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-35/ https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-35/ See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29081329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29081329
- Aisen8010 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing the noteworthy changes. I'm not a fan of Fedora, I had a bad experience(many bugs) in the past. Nevertheless, it's a good distro to check out the newest Gnome.
  - mroche 5y ago
    Depending on how far in the past your experience came from, it may be worth mucking around on a spare machine if you have one from time to time. I transitioned from EL8 to F34 earlier this year (moved to F35 this past weekend) and for my use cases it's been wonderfully solid.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    What was the last version you tried? I've been using Fedora for years and years now and it has never disappointed me. Rock solid.
  - suvo 5y ago
    Fedora used to be on the bleeding edge ages ago.... For anybody who abandoned it after FC8, I'd say you can definitely give it another shot. A lot has changed in the past decade. I run it even in my production servers (yeah, I know RHEL is there but I don't want to pay for subscription) alongside Debian and it has never crashed on me.
wooque 5y ago
What's advantage of Fedora over something like Arch?
- schmorptron 5y ago
  Easy installation, tested packages, a lot of proprietary software comes as rpms but not arch packages
- kunagi7 5y ago
  First of all, I used to be a Fedora user. The experience most of the time was excellent. Updating was a breeze and via external repos most packages were readily available. Most desktops/spins are well supported like sway, i3, xfce. Nowadays I use Arch which I also think it's a great distro. The only thing I miss are delta RPMs. Also, since CentOS was shut down, Fedora is a good way to learn how Red Hat based distros internals work.
  - silverfox17 5y ago
    CentOS wasn't "shut down"... it's still out there, just as CentOS Stream now. The changes for most users are minimal to not even noticeable.
    - smarx007 5y ago
      And there is Rocky Linux for the rest.
      - ollien 5y ago
        I've heard great things about Alma
    - JohnTHaller 5y ago
      CentOS Linux is end of life at the end of this year, so in that respect, it was shut down: https://www.centos.org/cl-vs-cs/ https://www.centos.org/cl-vs-cs/ CentOS Stream isn't geared towards production environments according to the CentOS website.
bachmeier 5y ago
Has Fedora fixed its package management? I eventually deleted my Fedora partition and installed Ubuntu because package management was so painfully slow.
- smarx007 5y ago
  DNF is actually faster for me than APT on Ubuntu. 700 packages can get updated on 100Mbps link in a few minutes. Large package updates took 5+ minutes on Ubuntu.
  - severino 5y ago
    I haven't used Fedora since 2015 or so, but at the time, I always felt DNF to be very slow or heavyweight. For example, I remember installing one random small package with few or no dependency installs at all could take something between 30 seconds and more than one minute, while apt-get would usually install the thing in a breeze. I wonder if this has changed.
    - smarx007 5y ago
      Ah, but 'dnf install' does also what 'apt-get update' does when necessary. So, dnf is faster for me than 'apt-get update && apt-get install'. I think there is a flag you can alias to force disable updating repos. Though the delay is rare for me.
      - mroche 5y ago
        The flag you're thinking of is '-C | --cacheonly'. It is very useful for doing stuff like 'dnf [search|rq|list|etc...]', but it is not allowed with upgrade/install type runs. dnf will do a check when running subcommands like 'install' to see if it _needs_ to update the cache data (as you noted), it won't always do it. There are a few factors that play in, but you can also adjust the cache expiry time in dnf.conf.
    - vondur 5y ago
      I believe some of the default settings for DNF are to blame. Editing the dnf.conf file to allow for more simultaneous downloads and selecting the closest mirrors can really speed it up.
rwmj 5y ago
This defaults to Pipewire (instead of PulseAudio) and some are reporting problems with audio, especially in browser-based conferencing applications like Google Meet. I have Fedora 35 and don't use GMeet, but can report that playing videos (vlc) is fine. Edit: See reply about the Pipewire default. However people reporting problems with audio in browser conferencing systems is new in F35.
- ollien 5y ago
  Wasn't Pipewire the default as of 34?
  - paol 5y ago
    Yes it was. It broke passthrough audio because Pipewire doesn't have that feature yet, so I had to downgrade all the way to ALSA to fix my media center which I have Fedora on.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  I've been using Pipewire with Arch and not had any issues with browser-based conferencing in Meet and Teams. It's been pretty rock-solid tbh.
blinkingled 5y ago
As a GNOME/Wayland based desktop Fedora 35 is a definite improvement - it looks decent, Firefox looks and performs great with proper Wayland/EGL integration out of the box. I found the height of the Gnome Top Bar or window title bar are way too big for a laptop screen and I could not find a way to change those (used to be done with CSS but that's gone looks like) - best I could do was to switch to different themes and autohide top bar with an extension. Hacky but at least makes it usable.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  I don't know if it's still maintained, but the Minwaita theme (found on the usual theme websites) is just a fork of the default Adwaita theme that has less padding, especially in the top bar and the title bars.
  - blinkingled 5y ago
    Yeah Minwaita still seems to work - not eye candy but does the job. The Flat remix set of themes have borderless variants that don't give you any vertical space back but at least make it visually less bothersome to look at the title bars.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Yeah, that's one of the few minor GNOME gripes that I have. That top bar is thicc
hackerbrother 5y ago
Just switched to Fedora because Microsoft declared my CPU incompatible with Windows 11. Works great! Cinnamon is a wonderful desktop manager too.
- criddell 5y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what did Windows 10 not support that Fedora and Windows 11 does?
  - kronk 5y ago
    Most likely his processor. That’s what’s holding me back on a 2 year old i7.
    - criddell 5y ago
      So both Windows 11 and Fedora are significantly better than Windows 10 in CPU utilization for you?
      - razze 5y ago
        Not sure you read the initial post the correct way :)
        criddell 5y ago
        Then clue me in. A Windows 10 user wants or needs some functionality in Windows 11 but their machine isn't compatible. Instead, they switch to Fedora. Doesn't that imply Windows 11 and Fedora have some required feature that Windows 10 lacks?
        samus 5y ago
        Windows 11 has the anti-feature of not supporting the old processor anymore. Who knows why. Could be anything from simplifying QA and maintenance effort to not being able to (or not willing to) implement a feature on the older platform. Compared to that, I don't know of a platform Fedora has recently deprecated. Linux usually takes a really long time to deprecate and remove support for old hardware.
marcodiego 5y ago
Debian 11, Fedora 35... These two distros are very influential. Both were recently released and both come by default with pipewire and wayland. We'll have an Ubuntu LTS next year and it will probably be influenced by these releases. A few new problems because of these changes... a lot of fixes because of these changes.
- smarx007 5y ago
  Waiting until screen sharing works under wayland in FF, Chrome etc. Quite a smooth ride otherwise.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    This has been working for months (but behind flag in Chrome); what's your problem with that?
    - smarx007 5y ago
      Not knowing about the flag :)
      - razze 5y ago
        Just use Firefox then :)
      - vetinari 5y ago
        Found the Chrome user :) chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer
    - dtx1 5y ago
      Please share the flags and necessary services!
      - vetinari 5y ago
        In Fedora and with standard desktop spins, it should work out of the box by default, in Firefox. For Chrome, you need to enable chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer For more details, what packages need to be installed and what setup done (for sway, for example) see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_sharing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar... (yes, arch wiki, the principles are same for all distros).
jcastro 5y ago
Fedora Silverblue in particular has changed my workflow, but I came from Ubuntu and I felt like I was lost in an entirely new world so some friends of mine helped me cobble together a set of scripts. So if you come from Ubuntu and want to give Fedora a shot but you need Ubuntu images, versions, etc then this might help you! https://github.com/castrojo/ublue https://github.com/castrojo/ublue
- jtdev 5y ago
  Serious question: why move to Fedora if you need all of this from Ubuntu? Why not just stay with Ubuntu?
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    because your employer signed a security agreement that specifies RedHat?
  - jcastro 5y ago
    I want the advantages of using an image based OS, if you go look in the Ubuntu 21.10 thread here on HN from that day there's a bunch of complaints about PPAs breaking updates, etc. and Silverblue fixes all this. EDIT: I did a stream last night trying to explain this to a coworker if you feel like listen to me ramble, sorry about the audio we just decided to do it on the spot: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1193532435?t=00h22m23s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1193532435?t=00h22m23s Hopefully someone else can explain better than me!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - heresie-dabord 5y ago
    https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/ "Fedora Silverblue is an immutable desktop operating system. It aims to be extremely stable and reliable. It also aims to be an excellent platform for developers and for those using container-focused workflows."
- 5y ago
ajusa 5y ago
I've been using Linux on a secondary machine since 2011, and as my daily driver since 2018. I've distrohopped quite a bit - Ubuntu (2011), Puppy Linux (2012), Manjaro (2013), LXLE (2014), Solus (2016), and then back to Manjaro (2018). I liked Manjaro because I could get newer packages in the repositories (when compared with Ubuntu) and because of access to the AUR. I made the switch to Fedora 34 a few months ago from Manjaro. It has newer packages than Ubuntu, has more software than Solus, is more modern than LXLE/Puppy Linux, and is more stable than Manjaro in my experience. I got tired of running `pacman -Syu`, rebooting, and having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change, or something else. I never had a smooth update with Manjaro, which led to me delaying updates for months until I would have time to debug and fix my laptop after the update. Bit of a security issue, especially with how often browsers update. Fedora has been rock solid, and I haven't had any issues with my machine crashing or not booting into a desktop environment after an update. Congratulations to the team, looking forward to (smoothly) updating my laptop today!
- xfalcox 5y ago
  > having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change Let me guess, Nvidia?
  - ajusa 5y ago
    Nope, Ryzen 3500u with integrated graphics :) There were quite a few issues with amdgpu that would get fixed in certain kernel/video driver updates, and broken in other ones.
    - dagw 5y ago
      Can second. Ryzen 3XXX integrated graphics has caused me no amounts of headache, to the extent I'm wondering if Nvidia isn't a better bet after all.
- adar 5y ago
  100% in agreement with you. I liked the idea of Manjaro but the way they deployed Nvidia driver updates made it feel like absolute luck of the draw whether you'd have a login screen waiting for you after rebooting post-update. I've had more Nvidia driver issues on Manjaro in a year than I've had in the past decade+ on Ubuntu or any other distro. Switched to Fedora a week ago which I like a lot so far, but I still very much miss the AUR.
nickhalfasleep 5y ago
I have this on a Microsoft Surface Laptop Go, and all the hardware "just works" right after install. Video, external video, touchscreen, sound, networking.
throwaway20371 5y ago
Is Apple still the only company you can pay for both hardware and software support? Because all I want is to drop down a couple grand and never have to think about "computer maintenance" again. I maintain my car myself because it's so infrequent (pretty much just oil changes) but it feels like my computer maintenance is constant. One of the reasons for that constant maintenance seems to be The Web. Remember when you didn't need 4 gigs of ram to browse the web? When you didn't need a high-power 3D graphics card to look at Google Maps? (bad example but WebGL is mandatory for some simple sites, and if your graphics sucks/doesn't do hardware acceleration...) I don't remember ever having to upgrade my car every few years just to visit a new local business. At some point we need to admit that this constant tech churn isn't improving our lives, but it is enriching some billionaires.
- andyp-kw 5y ago
  What kind of maintenance are you doing on your machine? I restart my work and home machines once per month for updates and that's it.
  - throwaway20371 5y ago
    Why do your machines need monthly updates? Do you constantly update any other machine that you own? Lawnmower, car, oven, microwave, bicycle, watch, reciprocating saw, vaccum, garage door, TV?
    - Daegalus 5y ago
      Because software is buggy, even Apples. It's not like you are updating hardware (like your other examples) you are doing a software update so that the software interfaces with the hardware better or fixes bugs. nowadays your TV if it's a smart tv also gets monthly or quarterly updates too. they just tend to happen in off-peak hours. and car software updates are when you take them in for service. you aren't doing a fair comparison asking why your X hardware doesn't need updates when comparing mostly hardware with simple software and full operating systems.
_benj 5y ago
Fedora is my goto distro when I need to get stuff done. I've used it professionally and it has worked just fine with all the proprietary software I needed (jetbrains, zoom, slack, spotify, etc...) Although Arch has a special place in my heart and I play from time to time with FreeBSD, Fedora pretty much just works out of the box, is very stable (in my experience), has decently newish software (even if it is from flathub...) and it's not to hard to find rpms around for more obscure software. The only issue that I've come across is with older software... Fedora doesn't seems to care that much about backwards compatibility so if I need to run a software with old ncurses version, tough luck.
ufo 5y ago
Fedora Magazine has more info on what are the new features in this release: https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-35-workstation/ https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-35-workstation/ And also about the differend spins that are available for download. https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-35/ https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-35/
ancode 5y ago
It is so hard to tell people about using Linux, how great it is, it's free, etc, and then you get to the name part and it's called 'fedora'.
- phkahler 5y ago
  Tell them you use Fedora-Linux.
- butz 5y ago
  As a non native English speaker I still cannot understand what is wrong with name "Fedora"?
  - handrous 5y ago
    > I still cannot understand what is wrong with name "Fedora"? Nothing whatsoever to 95+% of people, but perhaps 5%, most of whom one might describe as "very online", have decided to strongly associate it with a certain type of annoying guy prone to wearing them (they're more often trilbies, but whatever, the fedora is what's been "meme'd"), to the point that they would choose to be bothered or turned off by an OS named after the hat style.
- nix23 5y ago
  Tell them about Debian (made by Ian and Debora) ;)
  - hackthefender 5y ago
    Honestly, the worst part about Debian is the name. Everything is deb-this and deb-that. Packages are .deb. Which is his ex-wife. Can you imagine getting a divorce and then for the rest of your life have this massive thing associated with your ex and will never go away be named after you? Yick.
encryptluks2 5y ago
I'm a huge fan of Arch. Not only can you quickly search for packages, but the packages are actually maintained and kept up-to-date. With Arch, not only is the software usually up-to-date... even if it isn't, it is easy to modify a PKGBUILD file—but they actually provide a package search on their website. Even Ubuntu and Debian allows you to search packages on their website, but not Fedora. With Arch, when you search for a package, you can immediately see how the package is built as well. Yes, Arch is not a distro for people that just want to run Linux with a bunch of out of date software. It is for people that want to take some building blocks and create the perfect distro for them. Unfortunately, the choices can be confusing at times, but it has been well worth the effort on my part to find out what software works for me. Once you do that, just keep a list of the packages you install. If you need to reinstall, it is easy enough providing that package list to pacstrap.
- razze 5y ago
  Fedora is usually up to date. In my experience more then manjaro (but that's not arch), still usually fast enough.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  You can search for a package on Fedora's website. Very similar to Debian. Just do a Google/DDG/etc search for "Fedora packages" and click the link. (src.fedoraprojecr.org)
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I hadn't seen that before. Unfortunately, just a quick search of some Kubernetes tools that are included are at least 6 months old on Fedora, whereas Arch they are current.
geewee 5y ago
And here I am still on Fedora 33 because all of the GNOME addons I use still don't work with anything newer than that.
- xook 5y ago
  If I may ask, why not switch to another distro? Are those particular add-ons useful, or is it inertia?
  - geewee 5y ago
    Not switching to another distro is probably just inertia - I like a lot of stuff about Fedora and I'm used to it. Honestly most of the addons are just cosmetic and minor UI stuff, but I don't really want to "downgrade" when the release version I have is "good enough"
ruined 5y ago
installer still doesn't support root on zfs, i guess. there's a "guide" on openzfs wiki but it only provides a suggested partition schema ubuntu at least had a gui tool available in their last LTS, though it only worked for the gnome frontend. nvme fronting a raid is really nice but btrfs and lvm/mdadm options just fall short with write holes and other unacceptable failure modes. kind of a shame because dnf is so much better than apt, and i'd like to play with silverblue.
- intsunny 5y ago
  Given the licensing of ZFS, and the friendly nature of Oracle, I suspect Fedora/Redhat/IBM et al will never ship with native ZFS support. This strict adherence to licensing matters certainly saved IBM's ass in SCO v. IBM in regards to IBM's work on JFS for Linux.
- ubercow13 5y ago
  Well yeah, Fedora doesn’t support zfs at all.
underscore_ku 5y ago
meh, Ubuntu is better
awwwwaawa 5y ago
Archlinux doesn't even support Secure Boot. Fedora does, and so does Ubuntu, it is much more pleasant this way when dual-booting with Win10 or Win11. Fedora does have a VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED Vulkan problem with Nvidia though that Arch does not. F34 or F35 can't launch Wolftestein Youngblood from Steam on X11 session and errors out with VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED. Same system works on Archlinux and can even launch Youngblood in Wayland session. Under Fedora I notice the following things: - in wayland session vulkaninfo fails to run unless WAYLAND_DISPLAY is unset like so: WAYLAND_DISPLAY= vulkaninfo - on Fedora with X11 session vulkaninfo randomly toggles between Mesa's software lavapipe vulkan and nvidia's vulkan implementation - steam fails to launch a Proton game (Wolfenstein Youngblood) on X11/Wayland with "Startup failure: VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED" message - I hear you need to set Vulkan variable: export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json before running 'steam', I tried and it fixes running 'vulkaninfo' so lavapipe doesn't randomly activate but it had no effect on steam, still getting VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED Vulkan on Fedora is absolute shit show.
- nix23 5y ago
  >Archlinux doesn't even support Secure Boot BS, learn to read: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface/Secure_Boot#Implementing_Secure_Boot https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...
elric 5y ago
I'm somewhat confused by the "Power Modes" feature ... it's being introduced as a Gnome feature, but why would that be tied to Gnome? Isn't it usable from other window managers/desktop environments?
- marcthe12 5y ago
  Its not gnome specific but the daemon used is new and gnome and kde have only got integration recently.
mickotron 5y ago
If Fedora was rolling release, it would be a candidate for my daily driver.
harel 5y ago
I've been using Ubuntu since 2005. Most of this time on Thinkpads. My last laptop is the 9th gen X1, and the microphone does not work on the latest Ubuntu (not LTS, but still a very basic function). On a whim I tried a live Fedora On Fedora it just worked. This makes me wonder if it's time to change distro after so many years. I always kept to Ubuntu as a switch would slow me down while I learn where everything is but it seems like that barrier is lower these days....
harel 5y ago
Is there a "translation" guide for distro hoppers? Something that I can tell which distro I'm coming from and it would tell me to do X in distro Y, do Z?
- nix23 5y ago
  Don't hop take a old warhorse distro and your good: Arch OpenSUSE Debian Fedora
- tosihakkeri 5y ago
  Honestly I don't think one really needs such. Nowadays Linux distros are very similar, only thing I could imagine would be a translator for package managers.

230 points by 9front 5y ago

What are the advantages of Fedora over Ubuntu - if any? I have been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a few years now, without complaints, but as I will be getting a new laptop in the near future I might consider other distros. Back when I installed Ubuntu 18.04 I shortly tried Fedora, but for as simple reason as I did not like the "look" I switched to Ubuntu and ran with it ever since.

Vinnl 5y ago
I just switched to Fedora after almost a decade and a half of Ubuntu when I got a new laptop that I had to set up from scratch anyway. The switch was relatively seamless for me, as in: it's mostly similar to Ubuntu. The main reason for me was wanting to give GNOME 40 a try after having heard many good things about it, and also Ubuntu starting to feel a bit "off" from the intended GNOME experience. Everything feels more tightly integrated on Fedora, with e.g Flatpaks being a first-class citizen, the software centre working properly, and Pipewire being enabled. Which is weird, because the polished, integrated experience was what got me on Ubuntu in the first place.
- q-base 5y ago
  Thanks a lot for your description. Could you give me a little more information as to what you find better in GNOME 40? And perhaps what felt off with Ubuntu? Pipewire may be a candidate for a something that would make me switch, only because I have some issues with Ubuntu and my bluetooth headset, where the microphone is not really working always. Also having to switch back and forth between high quality playback for music and "headset" settings is not really ideal. But I am unaware of Pipewire solving these.
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    It's not so much that I found things explicitly better, but that the descriptions piqued my interested and I just wanted to experience them for myself. Specifically, trackpad gestures combined with horizontal workspaces. (In practice, I usually have a keyboard and mouse so I don't use the trackpad much, although the horizontal workspaces feel slightly more natural.) Things feeling off are hard to describe, but a concrete one is the software centre being pretty buggy and Snaps causing there to be many duplicate entries (and also Snaps being dependent on a single, closed-source Canonical server by definition). But yes, I think Pipewire sealed the deal for me, at least in terms of giving Fedora a try once. I'm not sure why anymore, but I think it had something to do with being able to do screen sharing in Wayland? In either case, it was mostly curiosity, and the differences really aren't that big. But it worked just fine right away, with nothing much to get used to, so I just stuck with it. Curious to see how the upgrade to v35 will go though.
    - q-base 5y ago
      Thanks a lot for your thorough explanation. I was not aware of the gestures thing. Perhaps I will give it a try when I get a new laptop. Then I can always go back to Ubuntu if I do not like it.
spicyusername 5y ago
They are, for the most part, going to be the same experience for most people. I like Fedora because it has newer packages and I interact with more RHEL-like Linux at work, so its more comfy cozy on my personal machines than Debian-like or Arch-like Linux.

commoner 5y ago

Release notes: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-35/ https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-35/ See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29081329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29081329

Aisen8010 5y ago
Thanks for sharing the noteworthy changes. I'm not a fan of Fedora, I had a bad experience(many bugs) in the past. Nevertheless, it's a good distro to check out the newest Gnome.
- mroche 5y ago
  Depending on how far in the past your experience came from, it may be worth mucking around on a spare machine if you have one from time to time. I transitioned from EL8 to F34 earlier this year (moved to F35 this past weekend) and for my use cases it's been wonderfully solid.
- esarbe 5y ago
  What was the last version you tried? I've been using Fedora for years and years now and it has never disappointed me. Rock solid.
- suvo 5y ago
  Fedora used to be on the bleeding edge ages ago.... For anybody who abandoned it after FC8, I'd say you can definitely give it another shot. A lot has changed in the past decade. I run it even in my production servers (yeah, I know RHEL is there but I don't want to pay for subscription) alongside Debian and it has never crashed on me.

wooque 5y ago

What's advantage of Fedora over something like Arch?

schmorptron 5y ago
Easy installation, tested packages, a lot of proprietary software comes as rpms but not arch packages
kunagi7 5y ago
First of all, I used to be a Fedora user. The experience most of the time was excellent. Updating was a breeze and via external repos most packages were readily available. Most desktops/spins are well supported like sway, i3, xfce. Nowadays I use Arch which I also think it's a great distro. The only thing I miss are delta RPMs. Also, since CentOS was shut down, Fedora is a good way to learn how Red Hat based distros internals work.
- silverfox17 5y ago
  CentOS wasn't "shut down"... it's still out there, just as CentOS Stream now. The changes for most users are minimal to not even noticeable.
  - smarx007 5y ago
    And there is Rocky Linux for the rest.
    - ollien 5y ago
      I've heard great things about Alma
  - JohnTHaller 5y ago
    CentOS Linux is end of life at the end of this year, so in that respect, it was shut down: https://www.centos.org/cl-vs-cs/ https://www.centos.org/cl-vs-cs/ CentOS Stream isn't geared towards production environments according to the CentOS website.

bachmeier 5y ago

Has Fedora fixed its package management? I eventually deleted my Fedora partition and installed Ubuntu because package management was so painfully slow.

smarx007 5y ago
DNF is actually faster for me than APT on Ubuntu. 700 packages can get updated on 100Mbps link in a few minutes. Large package updates took 5+ minutes on Ubuntu.
- severino 5y ago
  I haven't used Fedora since 2015 or so, but at the time, I always felt DNF to be very slow or heavyweight. For example, I remember installing one random small package with few or no dependency installs at all could take something between 30 seconds and more than one minute, while apt-get would usually install the thing in a breeze. I wonder if this has changed.
  - smarx007 5y ago
    Ah, but 'dnf install' does also what 'apt-get update' does when necessary. So, dnf is faster for me than 'apt-get update && apt-get install'. I think there is a flag you can alias to force disable updating repos. Though the delay is rare for me.
    - mroche 5y ago
      The flag you're thinking of is '-C | --cacheonly'. It is very useful for doing stuff like 'dnf [search|rq|list|etc...]', but it is not allowed with upgrade/install type runs. dnf will do a check when running subcommands like 'install' to see if it _needs_ to update the cache data (as you noted), it won't always do it. There are a few factors that play in, but you can also adjust the cache expiry time in dnf.conf.
  - vondur 5y ago
    I believe some of the default settings for DNF are to blame. Editing the dnf.conf file to allow for more simultaneous downloads and selecting the closest mirrors can really speed it up.

rwmj 5y ago

This defaults to Pipewire (instead of PulseAudio) and some are reporting problems with audio, especially in browser-based conferencing applications like Google Meet. I have Fedora 35 and don't use GMeet, but can report that playing videos (vlc) is fine. Edit: See reply about the Pipewire default. However people reporting problems with audio in browser conferencing systems is new in F35.

ollien 5y ago
Wasn't Pipewire the default as of 34?
- paol 5y ago
  Yes it was. It broke passthrough audio because Pipewire doesn't have that feature yet, so I had to downgrade all the way to ALSA to fix my media center which I have Fedora on.
approxim8ion 5y ago
I've been using Pipewire with Arch and not had any issues with browser-based conferencing in Meet and Teams. It's been pretty rock-solid tbh.

blinkingled 5y ago

As a GNOME/Wayland based desktop Fedora 35 is a definite improvement - it looks decent, Firefox looks and performs great with proper Wayland/EGL integration out of the box. I found the height of the Gnome Top Bar or window title bar are way too big for a laptop screen and I could not find a way to change those (used to be done with CSS but that's gone looks like) - best I could do was to switch to different themes and autohide top bar with an extension. Hacky but at least makes it usable.

NoGravitas 5y ago
I don't know if it's still maintained, but the Minwaita theme (found on the usual theme websites) is just a fork of the default Adwaita theme that has less padding, especially in the top bar and the title bars.
- blinkingled 5y ago
  Yeah Minwaita still seems to work - not eye candy but does the job. The Flat remix set of themes have borderless variants that don't give you any vertical space back but at least make it visually less bothersome to look at the title bars.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Yeah, that's one of the few minor GNOME gripes that I have. That top bar is thicc

hackerbrother 5y ago

Just switched to Fedora because Microsoft declared my CPU incompatible with Windows 11. Works great! Cinnamon is a wonderful desktop manager too.

criddell 5y ago
Just out of curiosity, what did Windows 10 not support that Fedora and Windows 11 does?
- kronk 5y ago
  Most likely his processor. That’s what’s holding me back on a 2 year old i7.
  - criddell 5y ago
    So both Windows 11 and Fedora are significantly better than Windows 10 in CPU utilization for you?
    - razze 5y ago
      Not sure you read the initial post the correct way :)
      - criddell 5y ago
        Then clue me in. A Windows 10 user wants or needs some functionality in Windows 11 but their machine isn't compatible. Instead, they switch to Fedora. Doesn't that imply Windows 11 and Fedora have some required feature that Windows 10 lacks?
        samus 5y ago
        Windows 11 has the anti-feature of not supporting the old processor anymore. Who knows why. Could be anything from simplifying QA and maintenance effort to not being able to (or not willing to) implement a feature on the older platform. Compared to that, I don't know of a platform Fedora has recently deprecated. Linux usually takes a really long time to deprecate and remove support for old hardware.

marcodiego 5y ago

Debian 11, Fedora 35... These two distros are very influential. Both were recently released and both come by default with pipewire and wayland. We'll have an Ubuntu LTS next year and it will probably be influenced by these releases. A few new problems because of these changes... a lot of fixes because of these changes.

smarx007 5y ago
Waiting until screen sharing works under wayland in FF, Chrome etc. Quite a smooth ride otherwise.
- vetinari 5y ago
  This has been working for months (but behind flag in Chrome); what's your problem with that?
  - smarx007 5y ago
    Not knowing about the flag :)
    - razze 5y ago
      Just use Firefox then :)
    - vetinari 5y ago
      Found the Chrome user :) chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer
  - dtx1 5y ago
    Please share the flags and necessary services!
    - vetinari 5y ago
      In Fedora and with standard desktop spins, it should work out of the box by default, in Firefox. For Chrome, you need to enable chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer For more details, what packages need to be installed and what setup done (for sway, for example) see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_sharing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar... (yes, arch wiki, the principles are same for all distros).

jcastro 5y ago

Fedora Silverblue in particular has changed my workflow, but I came from Ubuntu and I felt like I was lost in an entirely new world so some friends of mine helped me cobble together a set of scripts. So if you come from Ubuntu and want to give Fedora a shot but you need Ubuntu images, versions, etc then this might help you! https://github.com/castrojo/ublue https://github.com/castrojo/ublue

jtdev 5y ago
Serious question: why move to Fedora if you need all of this from Ubuntu? Why not just stay with Ubuntu?
- mistrial9 5y ago
  because your employer signed a security agreement that specifies RedHat?
- jcastro 5y ago
  I want the advantages of using an image based OS, if you go look in the Ubuntu 21.10 thread here on HN from that day there's a bunch of complaints about PPAs breaking updates, etc. and Silverblue fixes all this. EDIT: I did a stream last night trying to explain this to a coworker if you feel like listen to me ramble, sorry about the audio we just decided to do it on the spot: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1193532435?t=00h22m23s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1193532435?t=00h22m23s Hopefully someone else can explain better than me!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- heresie-dabord 5y ago
  https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/ "Fedora Silverblue is an immutable desktop operating system. It aims to be extremely stable and reliable. It also aims to be an excellent platform for developers and for those using container-focused workflows."
5y ago

ajusa 5y ago

I've been using Linux on a secondary machine since 2011, and as my daily driver since 2018. I've distrohopped quite a bit - Ubuntu (2011), Puppy Linux (2012), Manjaro (2013), LXLE (2014), Solus (2016), and then back to Manjaro (2018). I liked Manjaro because I could get newer packages in the repositories (when compared with Ubuntu) and because of access to the AUR. I made the switch to Fedora 34 a few months ago from Manjaro. It has newer packages than Ubuntu, has more software than Solus, is more modern than LXLE/Puppy Linux, and is more stable than Manjaro in my experience. I got tired of running `pacman -Syu`, rebooting, and having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change, or something else. I never had a smooth update with Manjaro, which led to me delaying updates for months until I would have time to debug and fix my laptop after the update. Bit of a security issue, especially with how often browsers update. Fedora has been rock solid, and I haven't had any issues with my machine crashing or not booting into a desktop environment after an update. Congratulations to the team, looking forward to (smoothly) updating my laptop today!

xfalcox 5y ago
> having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change Let me guess, Nvidia?
- ajusa 5y ago
  Nope, Ryzen 3500u with integrated graphics :) There were quite a few issues with amdgpu that would get fixed in certain kernel/video driver updates, and broken in other ones.
  - dagw 5y ago
    Can second. Ryzen 3XXX integrated graphics has caused me no amounts of headache, to the extent I'm wondering if Nvidia isn't a better bet after all.
adar 5y ago
100% in agreement with you. I liked the idea of Manjaro but the way they deployed Nvidia driver updates made it feel like absolute luck of the draw whether you'd have a login screen waiting for you after rebooting post-update. I've had more Nvidia driver issues on Manjaro in a year than I've had in the past decade+ on Ubuntu or any other distro. Switched to Fedora a week ago which I like a lot so far, but I still very much miss the AUR.

nickhalfasleep 5y ago

I have this on a Microsoft Surface Laptop Go, and all the hardware "just works" right after install. Video, external video, touchscreen, sound, networking.

throwaway20371 5y ago

Is Apple still the only company you can pay for both hardware and software support? Because all I want is to drop down a couple grand and never have to think about "computer maintenance" again. I maintain my car myself because it's so infrequent (pretty much just oil changes) but it feels like my computer maintenance is constant. One of the reasons for that constant maintenance seems to be The Web. Remember when you didn't need 4 gigs of ram to browse the web? When you didn't need a high-power 3D graphics card to look at Google Maps? (bad example but WebGL is mandatory for some simple sites, and if your graphics sucks/doesn't do hardware acceleration...) I don't remember ever having to upgrade my car every few years just to visit a new local business. At some point we need to admit that this constant tech churn isn't improving our lives, but it is enriching some billionaires.

andyp-kw 5y ago
What kind of maintenance are you doing on your machine? I restart my work and home machines once per month for updates and that's it.
- throwaway20371 5y ago
  Why do your machines need monthly updates? Do you constantly update any other machine that you own? Lawnmower, car, oven, microwave, bicycle, watch, reciprocating saw, vaccum, garage door, TV?
  - Daegalus 5y ago
    Because software is buggy, even Apples. It's not like you are updating hardware (like your other examples) you are doing a software update so that the software interfaces with the hardware better or fixes bugs. nowadays your TV if it's a smart tv also gets monthly or quarterly updates too. they just tend to happen in off-peak hours. and car software updates are when you take them in for service. you aren't doing a fair comparison asking why your X hardware doesn't need updates when comparing mostly hardware with simple software and full operating systems.

_benj 5y ago

Fedora is my goto distro when I need to get stuff done. I've used it professionally and it has worked just fine with all the proprietary software I needed (jetbrains, zoom, slack, spotify, etc...) Although Arch has a special place in my heart and I play from time to time with FreeBSD, Fedora pretty much just works out of the box, is very stable (in my experience), has decently newish software (even if it is from flathub...) and it's not to hard to find rpms around for more obscure software. The only issue that I've come across is with older software... Fedora doesn't seems to care that much about backwards compatibility so if I need to run a software with old ncurses version, tough luck.

ufo 5y ago

Fedora Magazine has more info on what are the new features in this release: https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-35-workstation/ https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-35-workstation/ And also about the differend spins that are available for download. https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-35/ https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-35/

ancode 5y ago

It is so hard to tell people about using Linux, how great it is, it's free, etc, and then you get to the name part and it's called 'fedora'.

phkahler 5y ago
Tell them you use Fedora-Linux.
butz 5y ago
As a non native English speaker I still cannot understand what is wrong with name "Fedora"?
- handrous 5y ago
  > I still cannot understand what is wrong with name "Fedora"? Nothing whatsoever to 95+% of people, but perhaps 5%, most of whom one might describe as "very online", have decided to strongly associate it with a certain type of annoying guy prone to wearing them (they're more often trilbies, but whatever, the fedora is what's been "meme'd"), to the point that they would choose to be bothered or turned off by an OS named after the hat style.
nix23 5y ago
Tell them about Debian (made by Ian and Debora) ;)
- hackthefender 5y ago
  Honestly, the worst part about Debian is the name. Everything is deb-this and deb-that. Packages are .deb. Which is his ex-wife. Can you imagine getting a divorce and then for the rest of your life have this massive thing associated with your ex and will never go away be named after you? Yick.

encryptluks2 5y ago

I'm a huge fan of Arch. Not only can you quickly search for packages, but the packages are actually maintained and kept up-to-date. With Arch, not only is the software usually up-to-date... even if it isn't, it is easy to modify a PKGBUILD file—but they actually provide a package search on their website. Even Ubuntu and Debian allows you to search packages on their website, but not Fedora. With Arch, when you search for a package, you can immediately see how the package is built as well. Yes, Arch is not a distro for people that just want to run Linux with a bunch of out of date software. It is for people that want to take some building blocks and create the perfect distro for them. Unfortunately, the choices can be confusing at times, but it has been well worth the effort on my part to find out what software works for me. Once you do that, just keep a list of the packages you install. If you need to reinstall, it is easy enough providing that package list to pacstrap.

razze 5y ago
Fedora is usually up to date. In my experience more then manjaro (but that's not arch), still usually fast enough.
BenjiWiebe 5y ago
You can search for a package on Fedora's website. Very similar to Debian. Just do a Google/DDG/etc search for "Fedora packages" and click the link. (src.fedoraprojecr.org)
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I hadn't seen that before. Unfortunately, just a quick search of some Kubernetes tools that are included are at least 6 months old on Fedora, whereas Arch they are current.

geewee 5y ago

And here I am still on Fedora 33 because all of the GNOME addons I use still don't work with anything newer than that.

xook 5y ago
If I may ask, why not switch to another distro? Are those particular add-ons useful, or is it inertia?
- geewee 5y ago
  Not switching to another distro is probably just inertia - I like a lot of stuff about Fedora and I'm used to it. Honestly most of the addons are just cosmetic and minor UI stuff, but I don't really want to "downgrade" when the release version I have is "good enough"

ruined 5y ago

installer still doesn't support root on zfs, i guess. there's a "guide" on openzfs wiki but it only provides a suggested partition schema ubuntu at least had a gui tool available in their last LTS, though it only worked for the gnome frontend. nvme fronting a raid is really nice but btrfs and lvm/mdadm options just fall short with write holes and other unacceptable failure modes. kind of a shame because dnf is so much better than apt, and i'd like to play with silverblue.

intsunny 5y ago
Given the licensing of ZFS, and the friendly nature of Oracle, I suspect Fedora/Redhat/IBM et al will never ship with native ZFS support. This strict adherence to licensing matters certainly saved IBM's ass in SCO v. IBM in regards to IBM's work on JFS for Linux.
ubercow13 5y ago
Well yeah, Fedora doesn’t support zfs at all.

underscore_ku 5y ago

meh, Ubuntu is better

awwwwaawa 5y ago

Archlinux doesn't even support Secure Boot. Fedora does, and so does Ubuntu, it is much more pleasant this way when dual-booting with Win10 or Win11. Fedora does have a VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED Vulkan problem with Nvidia though that Arch does not. F34 or F35 can't launch Wolftestein Youngblood from Steam on X11 session and errors out with VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED. Same system works on Archlinux and can even launch Youngblood in Wayland session. Under Fedora I notice the following things: - in wayland session vulkaninfo fails to run unless WAYLAND_DISPLAY is unset like so: WAYLAND_DISPLAY= vulkaninfo - on Fedora with X11 session vulkaninfo randomly toggles between Mesa's software lavapipe vulkan and nvidia's vulkan implementation - steam fails to launch a Proton game (Wolfenstein Youngblood) on X11/Wayland with "Startup failure: VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED" message - I hear you need to set Vulkan variable: export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json before running 'steam', I tried and it fixes running 'vulkaninfo' so lavapipe doesn't randomly activate but it had no effect on steam, still getting VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED Vulkan on Fedora is absolute shit show.

nix23 5y ago
>Archlinux doesn't even support Secure Boot BS, learn to read: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface/Secure_Boot#Implementing_Secure_Boot https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...

elric 5y ago

I'm somewhat confused by the "Power Modes" feature ... it's being introduced as a Gnome feature, but why would that be tied to Gnome? Isn't it usable from other window managers/desktop environments?

marcthe12 5y ago
Its not gnome specific but the daemon used is new and gnome and kde have only got integration recently.

mickotron 5y ago

If Fedora was rolling release, it would be a candidate for my daily driver.

harel 5y ago

I've been using Ubuntu since 2005. Most of this time on Thinkpads. My last laptop is the 9th gen X1, and the microphone does not work on the latest Ubuntu (not LTS, but still a very basic function). On a whim I tried a live Fedora On Fedora it just worked. This makes me wonder if it's time to change distro after so many years. I always kept to Ubuntu as a switch would slow me down while I learn where everything is but it seems like that barrier is lower these days....

harel 5y ago

Is there a "translation" guide for distro hoppers? Something that I can tell which distro I'm coming from and it would tell me to do X in distro Y, do Z?

nix23 5y ago
Don't hop take a old warhorse distro and your good: Arch OpenSUSE Debian Fedora
tosihakkeri 5y ago
Honestly I don't think one really needs such. Nowadays Linux distros are very similar, only thing I could imagine would be a translator for package managers.