Fedora 37 Now Available With GNOME 43 Desktop, Official Raspberry Pi 4 Support

[lateo]

Regarding the UI's evolutions from 36 to 37 :
- I really like the new nautilus' context-menu design ; e.g. for your custom scripts submenus.
- I'm glad they added a Device Security section in Confidentiality Settings : this thing is useful, specially in work environment.
- I'm definitely not a huge fan of those big (and often flashy since showing something activated) buttons in the system menu ; there's a regression there as far as i'm concerned : the old way felt more classy and professional. Is it some touch-related design ? Anyway, ugly.

I've been playing a lot with Fedora kickstart these last weeks and overall, it's been a pleasure to work with this distro.

[Volta]

Apart terrible wallpaper it's great release. It's amazing how fast one can install new release and configure it to match state of previous one. Something unachievable in Windows.

PS. wallpapers are business cards of an OS. Why the hell they're nearly always such ugly in Fedora/Gnome? It's worse than before. I know you can download what you like, but it's not the same. Good wallpapers are like trademarks of the OS. They should be beautiful and unique.

[guglovich]

The Fedora Workstation desktop has been updated to the GNOME 43 release. The configurator has a new panel with device and firmware security settings (e.g. showing information about UEFI Secure Boot activation, TPM status, Intel BootGuard and IOMMU security mechanisms). Continued the migration of applications to GTK 4 and libadwaita library, which offers ready-made widgets and objects for building applications according to the new GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines).
The ARMv7 architecture, also known as ARM32 or armhfp, is now obsolete. ARMv7 was dropped, citing the general shutdown of the 32-bit distribution, as some of Fedora's new security and performance features were only available for 64-bit architectures. ARMv7 remained the last fully supported 32-bit architecture in Fedora (i686 repositories are discontinued in 2019, only multi-lib repositories for x86_64 environments remain).
The files included in RPM packages are digitally signed, which can be used to verify integrity and protect against file spoofing using the IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) kernel subsystem. Adding signatures resulted in a 1.1% increase in RPM packet size and a 0.3% increase in installed system size.
Official support for the Raspberry Pi 4 board, including hardware graphics acceleration support for the V3D GPU.
Two new official editions are offered: Fedora CoreOS (atomically updated environment for running isolated containers) and Fedora Cloud Base (images for creating virtual machines running in public and private cloud environments).
Added a TEST-FEDORA39 policy to test the upcoming discontinuance of SHA-1 digital signature support. Optionally, the user can disable SHA-1 support by using the "update-crypto-policies --set TEST-FEDORA39" command.
Updated package versions, including Linux kernel 6.0, Python 3.11, Perl 5.36, LLVM 15, Go 1.19, Erlang 25, Haskell GHC 8.10.7, Boost 1.78, glibc 2.36, binutils 2.38, Node.js 18, RPM 4.18, BIND 9.18, Emacs 28, Stratis 3.2.0.
Packages and edition of the distribution with the LXQt desktop updated to version LXQt 1.1.
The openssl1.1 package is obsolete, replaced by the current OpenSSL 3.0 branch.
The components of additional languages and localization support are separated from the main Firefox package into a separate firefox-langpacks package, saving about 50 MB of disk space on systems that don't require support for languages other than English. Similarly, the auxiliary utilities (envsubst, gettext, gettext.sh and ngettext) are separated from gettext into the gettext-runtime package, saving 4.7 MB of the base installation size.
It is recommended that maintainers discontinue building packages for the i686 architecture if the need for such packages is questionable, or if they are costing significant time or resources. This recommendation does not apply to packages used as dependencies in other packages, or used in a "multilib" context to support running 32-bit programs in 64-bit environments. The packages java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk and java-latest-openjdk are discontinued for the i686 architecture.
A pre-build is offered to test control of the Anaconda installer via the web interface, including from a remote system.
The use of VA-API (Video Acceleration API) for hardware acceleration of H.264, H.265 and VC-1 video encoding and decoding is disabled in Mesa. The distribution prohibits supplying components that provide APIs to access proprietary algorithms, as supplying proprietary technologies requires licensing and can lead to legal problems.
Partitioning using GPT instead of MBR is enabled by default on x86 systems with a BIOS.
Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite editions have the ability to remount the /sysroot partition in read-only mode to protect against accidental changes.
Fedora Server is available for download as a virtual machine image optimized for the KVM hypervisor.

[openminded]

How does this compare to Ubuntu 22.10? Does F37 have that GNOME triple buffering patch?

As always. Fedora has more recent packages but is too spartan and needs way more time and effort to turn it into something as usable for home user as Ubuntu.
AFAIK it still lacks the patch you mentioned.

[tzui]

Some time ago I installed Fedora Kinoite on my parents' PC. It was still running Fedora 35, but it was no problem to skip Fedora 36. That's pretty cool.

[CommunityMember]

I wish they would have kept armv7 for a little longer

While I personally do, too, I understand the issue that it was becoming impossible to build a number of the entire set of Fedora packages on native armv7 (and on Fedora, all packages must be able to be build on the native platforms). This is partially due to some software projects bloat, of course, but the tooling bloat did not help, either.

[fitzie]

Google no more. h264 mesa support:


First, set up RPM Fusion repos:

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
# nonfree repository is not needed, you can skip this command
sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Then install mesa-va-drivers-freeworld and mesa-vdpau-drivers-freeworld

sudo dnf install mesa-va-drivers-freeworld mesa-vdpau-drivers-freeworld

Alternatively, if mesa-va-drivers or mesa-vdpau-drivers are already installed, use swap instead:

sudo dnf swap mesa-va-drivers mesa-va-drivers-freeworld
sudo dnf swap mesa-vdpau-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers-freeworl​

I went through this process after the last article on this issue, and I noticed that my mpv config wasn't never using hwdec to begin with. After I turned that on, I had some files that it couldn't decode properly (just displayed black). I'm sure there is some tangential benefits to hwdec, I'm not sure I will notice it. Maybe I will try again in a few months.

[fitzie]

AFAIK the previous layout had a problem where DNF and packagekit consumers such as Gnome-Software would use different layouts so there was duplication of data. Chages were made to stop this. Not sure if that is what you are referring to.

unless you set cachedir in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf, by default dnf5 uses /var/cache/libdnf5 and not /var/cache/dnf . not sure why they are doing that.

[archsway]

I upgraded a Fedora 36 KDE install using the instructions at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US...ystem-upgrade/, after a 4 GB download the actual upgrade step took 20 minutes for the 5,400 packages.

Memory usage still seems weirdly high—even simple GUI applications are using over 100 MB of RAM. It seems a lot of that is related to how LLVM is linked.

Running "perl" has an RSS of 4 MB. Running "LD_PRELOAD=/lib64/libLLVM-15.so perl" has an RSS of 40 MB.

If I compile Mesa with only softpipe (so LLVM is disabled), then konsole drops from using 130 MB RAM to 84 MB.

So:

1. ACO for radeonsi when?
2. Is this a LLVM issue, or Fedora linker settings?

Looking at some other distributions, this seems like it might be common to all distributions using glibc? Does musl do any better?

EDIT: It turns out that RSS doesn't work like I thought it did: it includes clean pages that are shared between processes, so from doing testing with the "free" command I've found that LLVM only uses about 10 MB of per-process memory, mostly for the 400,000 relocations… still a lot, but not nearly as bad.

[mirmirmir]

Do you mean dnf5? you can get the test version here: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/co...dnf5-unstable/ Not much to write home about. uses different cache layout, which I think is unnecessary and unfortunate.

Yeah, I meant that. I heard that they are way faster or something...