10 ms·

Fedora 39 Released

164 points by xdfg13345 3y ago

habibur 3y ago
Thanks to the team. Had been waiting for it. Release was delayed several times to fix bugs related to RaspberryPi.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  In some ways, that is nice to hear. I'm glad the Pi is getting attention. Is the 5 supported?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    Doesn't appear so. https://pagure.io/arm-image-installer/blob/main/f/boards.d https://pagure.io/arm-image-installer/blob/main/f/boards.d rpi2,rpi3,rpi4 is all that I see. I'm sure they'll work on supporting it in the future. I'm not sure rpi5 was even announced when they branched f39 from rawhide.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- wheelerof4te 3y ago
  At this point, they should just focus on the x86_64.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Why do you say that? ARM usage is surging, especially on the hobby side which Fedora has seen a lot of use.
    - otherme123 3y ago
      I'm a daily user of Fedora Desktop and Fedora Server (plus a couple of VPS), I couldn't be happier. But I tried it a couple of times on a Raspberry, and for some reason it's much worse than the Raspbian, so I waste time and SD cycles in installing Fedora, fighting bugs and going back to Raspbian.
      - habibur 3y ago
        worst two that I found are - the audio jack doesn't work. Maybe it's because I installed the server installer instead of the client. - GPIO ports doesn't stay on unless you lock it and keep your program running.
tapoxi 3y ago
I've been a huge fan of Fedora, and it seems this release does 90% of what I want, but since I'm on a Framework 13 with a weird screen resolution, I once again fall into DPI scaling hell. GNOME locks fractional scaling behind an experimental option, apps like Signal are blurry and apps like Steam just seemingly ignore any attempt to scale properly. For what it's worth KDE seems to handle at least the blurry X scaling issue and supports fractional scaling by default. Maybe one day, everything will just work...
- Handprint4469 3y ago
  > Maybe one day, everything will just work... I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 2004.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    >> Maybe one day, everything will just work... > I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 2004. I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 1994. Driver support is better, and no X11 Modelines, which is nice.
    - lagniappe 3y ago
      Since '95 here... I'm just happy I don't have to visit a library to get 0.1% as far as I can today with a simple search query. We've got it good now, all things considered. I'm sure others feel differently, but I cannot complain.
      - sillywalk 3y ago
        > We've got it good now, all things considered. I'm sure others feel differently, but I cannot complain. /deadpan/ I can complain, and I do it all the time, especially on internet forums. It's not my fault other people haven't fixed my complaints, even though I've offered no assistance. That's their fault. People say "you've got it good now", or "you're not helping", or "show us the source code", or "First world problems", or "I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire". These people think I'm some sort of an entitled, self-righteous, hypocritical, bleep-hole.
dewlinedew2 3y ago
Hooray!
smetj 3y ago
Best Linux desktop/laptop distro hands down. Congrats Fedora!
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  I am ready to declare it the best OS. I've never been more productive since getting Fedora. 0 Forced reboots. With windows, forced reboots were a multi-weekly occurance. No dealing with autosaves and reopening anything. Its so fast, you click and something pops up. With windows, there seems to be like a 0.2s delay on everything. This adds up. I think I did some of those linux commands that everyone is afraid of doing. But I did that month 1, and I havent done anything since. I don't care if the rest of the world discovered The Year of Linux Desktop was 2023, but I surely figured it out. Linux Desktop is ready for the big time.
  - zamalek 3y ago
    Try out Silverblue. It's immutable Fedora. The one thing I didn't like about mutable Fedora is that update reboot was extremely slow, like 2-5min. Silverblue fixes that one gripe: the update reboot is no different to a regular boot. 90% of the work is done in CI, 10% is done prior to rebooting, and 0% happens during boot. I went back to NixOS, but Silverblue was an incredibly close second.
    - BenjiWiebe 3y ago
      I've been running Fedora for around 10 years and I'm pretty sure they don't have a different reboot for updates, except a system upgrade (F38->F39) which is opt-in and takes 30ish minutes on my PC. Normal updates overwrite the files in place, so whenever a daemon/app is re/started it will use the new files then.
      - Delk 3y ago
        If you update using the GUI software updater (Gnome Software), it pre-downloads the packages but (at least usually) the actual update action is "restart and update". That reboots the system and does the actual updating at that point. If you update using dnf on the command line, it works as you describe.
hddherman 3y ago
Did the upgrade on both server and workstation platforms, and it was painless. Great work!
doakes 3y ago
Can anyone speak to their experience with the atomic/immutable versions of Fedora (Onyx, Silverblue)? It sounds pretty interesting. [0] https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/ https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/
- spicyusername 3y ago
  IBM uses Fedora CoreOS / Red Hat CoreOS as the underlying OS for OKD / OpenShift, Red Hat's flagship product, so the bones are solid. Silverblue works well enough. The biggest drawback is that you need a different development workflow, all container-based, and you have to use Flatpaks for installing Desktop software. The biggest questions I had while using it were, "Why am I doing this?" and "Is this worth the trade-offs?". At the end of the day all the benefits I got ended up being theoretical. Is it "cool"? Yea, its really cool. But does it actually solve concrete problems I have when developing software. In the end, I decided it didn't. I think its a much different story for using Fedora CoreOS a server. There the benefits are much more straightforward: reliable atomic OS updates, cattle-only servers, infrastructure-as-code deployment by default. I still probably wouldn't use them in production because they are a niche technology stewarded by IBM, but still, the benefits are more clear.
  - jlkuester7 3y ago
    I agree that the benefits seem way more obvious for a server. I already deploy all my server-side apps via Docker containers with basically no system-level dependencies! That being said, one of the main benefits I am hoping to get out of Silverblue on the desktop is relief from the almost-inevitable system degradation I have experienced with other Linux distros where, over time (and especially with major upgrades), more and more things slow down and/or stop working. I am not sure if I am just doing something wrong (besides daily heavy use), but historically all my desktop Linux installations have become almost unusable after a couple years. I am only a few months into using Silverblue, but I am hoping that the way the system image is rebuilt for each update makes it more stable in the long-term....
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    distrobox/toolbox definitely solves concrete problems for me as a developer. Maybe I don't need to be running on Silverblue to use toolbox, but it's a good match.
reisse 3y ago
Dynamic triple buffering for GNOME has been postponed again, fractional scaling is nowhere in sight, but they landed > a new workspace switcher and a much-improved image viewer. What a joke of a product management. Sometimes I envy guys who can rewrite workspace switchers again and again on Red Hat's money.
- dilap 3y ago
  Do you envy Sisyphus? Very similar situation, I think.
  - eVeechu7 3y ago
    Sisyphus only has one rock to worry about.
- kcb 3y ago
  And still lacking VRR support. All we have is this needlessly drama laden multi-year MR https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154
  - reisse 3y ago
    Oh, I forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder. And lacking VRR is even more insulting now, since SteamOS has a working implementation for Wayland. Given how much Valve is doing for desktop Linux, I guess one day SteamOS will be the default distribution.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  In my excitement with the beta version of Fedora 39, I installed it and had fractional scaling for a few minutes- until I installed updates and rebooted. It was gone. That was the last time I touched it. Fractional Scaling is a *must* these days, with the high res laptop screens.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  Even though Linux is open-source, it's not immune to the force of money. There are paying customers for Red Hat, and maybe they don't care about DPI scaling that much.
rcarmo 3y ago
Time to run a final upgrade on my LXC instances, snapshot them and give it a try at upgrading in place (has mostly worked since 35, wish me luck).
butz 3y ago
KDE needs more attention. Now it is tucked away as a "spin" that does not inspire much confidence, but in some cases KDE provides much better user experience. Time to add all DEs into ISO and allow selecting the one you want during install, and software too. Like in old days of Fedora Core.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Come to where the air is crisp - Debian 12 is a fantastic KDE experience these days.
  - FergusArgyll 3y ago
    I actually have Debian 12 with KDE in a VirtualBox VM and am having issues with some windows appearing semi-transparent and not showing text, it's very weird and hard to explain. It might be because of a VirtualBox setting, i'm not sure. I still prefer it to a fully functioning gnome
    - whalesalad 3y ago
      I’m running bare metal on a 13900K, RX 6600 gpu (wayland) connected to an 5K Apple studio display and I’ve had zero issues. TBH I can’t run gnome it crashes but KDE has been flawless.
      - pietro72ohboy 3y ago
        KDE on Debian Bookworm has been perfect for me too!
- vondur 3y ago
  The KDE spin from Fedora is really nice. It's pretty much vanilla KDE and is kept up to date with every new release of Fedora. I do agree that it should be one the primary download page as an option.
- scns 3y ago
  That's one reason why i chose openSUSE Tumbleweed, KDE is their primary desktop. Horses for courses.
xanthine 3y ago
The linked article doesn't seem to link to the documentation page, with all the change logs, so here you go: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/f39/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/f39/
- xanthine 3y ago
  Perhaps the change that I'm most excited about is official support for using sdboot instead of grub (something I have been manually configuring for the last 7 years): https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/cleanup_systemd_install https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/cleanup_systemd_insta...
  - aryonoco 3y ago
    Man, I can remember the day grub replaced lilo. I had just spent the past 2 years mastering lilo and thought on top of the world, and then suddenly this new fangled thing called grub came along with all its weird commands and sytanx. It's been what, 20 years now? I finally feel comfortable with grub. And now you're telling me there's a new kid on the block? sdboot? I'm too old to learn another bootloader. Maybe I should go back and dig and old copy of Debian Potato or Woody and stick to that...
aljgz 3y ago
I just had my unexpectedly smoothest OS major version upgrade. My desktop is a tricky machine, set up by myself, with all the usual troublemakers: Nvidia 4090, External Audio interface, multiple monitors, many different development, gaming and productivity tools, entire drive LUKS encryption, dual boot with Windows 11 pro, etc. I'm using KDE, BTW. I upgraded to Fedora 39 using dnf-system-upgrade, and it went flawlessly. In my 20 years of handling computers, this is the first time with a tricky computer. Even the work's MBP M1 had problems with some third-party software when upgrading. I had similarly good experiences with my Framework laptop, but that was expected. This anecdote causes me to feel much better about Linux on desktop. Kudos to the Fedora team for maintaining one of the last remaining products I can fully trust.

Fedora 39 Released

164 points by xdfg13345 3y ago

habibur 3y ago

Thanks to the team. Had been waiting for it. Release was delayed several times to fix bugs related to RaspberryPi.

_ea1k 3y ago
In some ways, that is nice to hear. I'm glad the Pi is getting attention. Is the 5 supported?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  Doesn't appear so. https://pagure.io/arm-image-installer/blob/main/f/boards.d https://pagure.io/arm-image-installer/blob/main/f/boards.d rpi2,rpi3,rpi4 is all that I see. I'm sure they'll work on supporting it in the future. I'm not sure rpi5 was even announced when they branched f39 from rawhide.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
wheelerof4te 3y ago
At this point, they should just focus on the x86_64.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Why do you say that? ARM usage is surging, especially on the hobby side which Fedora has seen a lot of use.
  - otherme123 3y ago
    I'm a daily user of Fedora Desktop and Fedora Server (plus a couple of VPS), I couldn't be happier. But I tried it a couple of times on a Raspberry, and for some reason it's much worse than the Raspbian, so I waste time and SD cycles in installing Fedora, fighting bugs and going back to Raspbian.
    - habibur 3y ago
      worst two that I found are - the audio jack doesn't work. Maybe it's because I installed the server installer instead of the client. - GPIO ports doesn't stay on unless you lock it and keep your program running.

tapoxi 3y ago

I've been a huge fan of Fedora, and it seems this release does 90% of what I want, but since I'm on a Framework 13 with a weird screen resolution, I once again fall into DPI scaling hell. GNOME locks fractional scaling behind an experimental option, apps like Signal are blurry and apps like Steam just seemingly ignore any attempt to scale properly. For what it's worth KDE seems to handle at least the blurry X scaling issue and supports fractional scaling by default. Maybe one day, everything will just work...

Handprint4469 3y ago
> Maybe one day, everything will just work... I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 2004.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  >> Maybe one day, everything will just work... > I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 2004. I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 1994. Driver support is better, and no X11 Modelines, which is nice.
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    Since '95 here... I'm just happy I don't have to visit a library to get 0.1% as far as I can today with a simple search query. We've got it good now, all things considered. I'm sure others feel differently, but I cannot complain.
    - sillywalk 3y ago
      > We've got it good now, all things considered. I'm sure others feel differently, but I cannot complain. /deadpan/ I can complain, and I do it all the time, especially on internet forums. It's not my fault other people haven't fixed my complaints, even though I've offered no assistance. That's their fault. People say "you've got it good now", or "you're not helping", or "show us the source code", or "First world problems", or "I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire". These people think I'm some sort of an entitled, self-righteous, hypocritical, bleep-hole.

dewlinedew2 3y ago

Hooray!

smetj 3y ago

Best Linux desktop/laptop distro hands down. Congrats Fedora!

hospitalJail 3y ago
I am ready to declare it the best OS. I've never been more productive since getting Fedora. 0 Forced reboots. With windows, forced reboots were a multi-weekly occurance. No dealing with autosaves and reopening anything. Its so fast, you click and something pops up. With windows, there seems to be like a 0.2s delay on everything. This adds up. I think I did some of those linux commands that everyone is afraid of doing. But I did that month 1, and I havent done anything since. I don't care if the rest of the world discovered The Year of Linux Desktop was 2023, but I surely figured it out. Linux Desktop is ready for the big time.
- zamalek 3y ago
  Try out Silverblue. It's immutable Fedora. The one thing I didn't like about mutable Fedora is that update reboot was extremely slow, like 2-5min. Silverblue fixes that one gripe: the update reboot is no different to a regular boot. 90% of the work is done in CI, 10% is done prior to rebooting, and 0% happens during boot. I went back to NixOS, but Silverblue was an incredibly close second.
  - BenjiWiebe 3y ago
    I've been running Fedora for around 10 years and I'm pretty sure they don't have a different reboot for updates, except a system upgrade (F38->F39) which is opt-in and takes 30ish minutes on my PC. Normal updates overwrite the files in place, so whenever a daemon/app is re/started it will use the new files then.
    - Delk 3y ago
      If you update using the GUI software updater (Gnome Software), it pre-downloads the packages but (at least usually) the actual update action is "restart and update". That reboots the system and does the actual updating at that point. If you update using dnf on the command line, it works as you describe.

hddherman 3y ago

Did the upgrade on both server and workstation platforms, and it was painless. Great work!

doakes 3y ago

Can anyone speak to their experience with the atomic/immutable versions of Fedora (Onyx, Silverblue)? It sounds pretty interesting. [0] https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/ https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/

spicyusername 3y ago
IBM uses Fedora CoreOS / Red Hat CoreOS as the underlying OS for OKD / OpenShift, Red Hat's flagship product, so the bones are solid. Silverblue works well enough. The biggest drawback is that you need a different development workflow, all container-based, and you have to use Flatpaks for installing Desktop software. The biggest questions I had while using it were, "Why am I doing this?" and "Is this worth the trade-offs?". At the end of the day all the benefits I got ended up being theoretical. Is it "cool"? Yea, its really cool. But does it actually solve concrete problems I have when developing software. In the end, I decided it didn't. I think its a much different story for using Fedora CoreOS a server. There the benefits are much more straightforward: reliable atomic OS updates, cattle-only servers, infrastructure-as-code deployment by default. I still probably wouldn't use them in production because they are a niche technology stewarded by IBM, but still, the benefits are more clear.
- jlkuester7 3y ago
  I agree that the benefits seem way more obvious for a server. I already deploy all my server-side apps via Docker containers with basically no system-level dependencies! That being said, one of the main benefits I am hoping to get out of Silverblue on the desktop is relief from the almost-inevitable system degradation I have experienced with other Linux distros where, over time (and especially with major upgrades), more and more things slow down and/or stop working. I am not sure if I am just doing something wrong (besides daily heavy use), but historically all my desktop Linux installations have become almost unusable after a couple years. I am only a few months into using Silverblue, but I am hoping that the way the system image is rebuilt for each update makes it more stable in the long-term....
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  distrobox/toolbox definitely solves concrete problems for me as a developer. Maybe I don't need to be running on Silverblue to use toolbox, but it's a good match.

reisse 3y ago

Dynamic triple buffering for GNOME has been postponed again, fractional scaling is nowhere in sight, but they landed > a new workspace switcher and a much-improved image viewer. What a joke of a product management. Sometimes I envy guys who can rewrite workspace switchers again and again on Red Hat's money.

dilap 3y ago
Do you envy Sisyphus? Very similar situation, I think.
- eVeechu7 3y ago
  Sisyphus only has one rock to worry about.
kcb 3y ago
And still lacking VRR support. All we have is this needlessly drama laden multi-year MR https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154
- reisse 3y ago
  Oh, I forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder. And lacking VRR is even more insulting now, since SteamOS has a working implementation for Wayland. Given how much Valve is doing for desktop Linux, I guess one day SteamOS will be the default distribution.
deafpolygon 3y ago
In my excitement with the beta version of Fedora 39, I installed it and had fractional scaling for a few minutes- until I installed updates and rebooted. It was gone. That was the last time I touched it. Fractional Scaling is a *must* these days, with the high res laptop screens.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Even though Linux is open-source, it's not immune to the force of money. There are paying customers for Red Hat, and maybe they don't care about DPI scaling that much.

rcarmo 3y ago

Time to run a final upgrade on my LXC instances, snapshot them and give it a try at upgrading in place (has mostly worked since 35, wish me luck).

butz 3y ago

KDE needs more attention. Now it is tucked away as a "spin" that does not inspire much confidence, but in some cases KDE provides much better user experience. Time to add all DEs into ISO and allow selecting the one you want during install, and software too. Like in old days of Fedora Core.

whalesalad 3y ago
Come to where the air is crisp - Debian 12 is a fantastic KDE experience these days.
- FergusArgyll 3y ago
  I actually have Debian 12 with KDE in a VirtualBox VM and am having issues with some windows appearing semi-transparent and not showing text, it's very weird and hard to explain. It might be because of a VirtualBox setting, i'm not sure. I still prefer it to a fully functioning gnome
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    I’m running bare metal on a 13900K, RX 6600 gpu (wayland) connected to an 5K Apple studio display and I’ve had zero issues. TBH I can’t run gnome it crashes but KDE has been flawless.
    - pietro72ohboy 3y ago
      KDE on Debian Bookworm has been perfect for me too!
vondur 3y ago
The KDE spin from Fedora is really nice. It's pretty much vanilla KDE and is kept up to date with every new release of Fedora. I do agree that it should be one the primary download page as an option.
scns 3y ago
That's one reason why i chose openSUSE Tumbleweed, KDE is their primary desktop. Horses for courses.

xanthine 3y ago

The linked article doesn't seem to link to the documentation page, with all the change logs, so here you go: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/f39/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/f39/

xanthine 3y ago
Perhaps the change that I'm most excited about is official support for using sdboot instead of grub (something I have been manually configuring for the last 7 years): https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/cleanup_systemd_install https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/cleanup_systemd_insta...
- aryonoco 3y ago
  Man, I can remember the day grub replaced lilo. I had just spent the past 2 years mastering lilo and thought on top of the world, and then suddenly this new fangled thing called grub came along with all its weird commands and sytanx. It's been what, 20 years now? I finally feel comfortable with grub. And now you're telling me there's a new kid on the block? sdboot? I'm too old to learn another bootloader. Maybe I should go back and dig and old copy of Debian Potato or Woody and stick to that...

aljgz 3y ago

I just had my unexpectedly smoothest OS major version upgrade. My desktop is a tricky machine, set up by myself, with all the usual troublemakers: Nvidia 4090, External Audio interface, multiple monitors, many different development, gaming and productivity tools, entire drive LUKS encryption, dual boot with Windows 11 pro, etc. I'm using KDE, BTW. I upgraded to Fedora 39 using dnf-system-upgrade, and it went flawlessly. In my 20 years of handling computers, this is the first time with a tricky computer. Even the work's MBP M1 had problems with some third-party software when upgrading. I had similarly good experiences with my Framework laptop, but that was expected. This anecdote causes me to feel much better about Linux on desktop. Kudos to the Fedora team for maintaining one of the last remaining products I can fully trust.