A Brief Look At Fedora 24

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Brief Look At Fedora 24

Another six months, another Fedora release, from the guys and gals wearing the funny looking hats. Fedora 24 Workstation comes with Gnome 3.20.2, Linux Kernel 4.5.5, Mesa 11.2.1, X Server 1.18.3, and Wayland protocol version 1.10.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=23296

[Ericg]

Hey guys, if you notice a spot where it seems a word is missing: we know. Sometime between me doing the final spellcheck on my end, sending it to Michael, or Michael posting it, a spellchecker went crazy and started deleting anything it marked as "wrong". We're trying to get it fixed up. Cheers!

[Mr. Octus]

Nice overview Eric. Regarding the Flatpak theme issue, they have an open issue here:

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/114

This is somewhat tricky, because apps and runtimes can have different toolkit versions that the host, and themes are version specific. So, the theme you have installed may not necessarily work with the app.

Also, its generally hard to use themes (of various kinds) that are system installed (i.e. are in /usr) because those are not visible in the sandbox (/usr there is from the runtime). If you installed the themes in your homedirectory, and the app had access to the homedir, and the theme works with your app then it should work.

[franglais125]

Ericg Nice write-up! Not specific to Fedora 24: I would like to know what extensions you use on Gnome-Shell!

As for Wayland... I tried it on Debian Testing (Gnome 3.20), and then forgot to go back to X. Another day, I logged in for a while and thought "hey, I could try Wayland again", to later realize I had been using it all along. So its state is pretty solid, minus a few quirks of course (e.g. can't launch synaptic).
I also found out it works pretty well on VirtualBox when using Gallium acceleration (not the fastest, but you can try it out at least)

[rabcor]

Animations being smoother is probably thanks to wayland, another nice thing about wayland is that it hugely decreases the odds of tearing. (Pretty much any graphics I use on X will tear X a new asshole unless I make some major tweaks to it, which often involves a compositor with vsync, and it never fully solves the problem)

I noticed this too when I played around with wayland, it was smoother than any display server experience I have ever had (on any operating system) kinda excited to give KDE a second chance after it's ported to wayland. I don't have the technical knowledge to explain exactly how wayland reduces tearing and how it makes animations smoother (I think it was more that X and DRI always managed to fuck them up rather than wayland actually making them smoother, but it just has to do with how wayland outputs pixels on the screen differently than X) Wayland also has an easier time displaying more frames per second than X I would imagine, (more smooth frames certainly, X seems to kinda freak out whenever things are happening too fast).

Anyhow, gnome wayland is the default on fedora now? thought it wouldn't be ready for like another half a year at least (probably full year!) what happened? Did they decide to use it in spite of a few missing features such as remote desktop and such? This is big news.

[meekteef]

Eclipse and IntelliJ are still quite buggy on Wayland. Otherwise Wayland is 90% there.

[Guest]

How's RPM Fusion with F24? Last I checked, there was some test 3rd-party repo that had some of RPM Fusion's packages rebuilt for GCC 6.

[Ericg]

How's RPM Fusion with F24? Last I checked, there was some test 3rd-party repo that had some of RPM Fusion's packages rebuilt for GCC 6.

RPMFusion for 24 isn't there yet. Hell, according to them, Fedora 23 is still tagged as "in-development". I got around it by using Negativo + selectively pulling packages from Fedora 23's repo.

[Ericg]

Anyhow, gnome wayland is the default on fedora now? thought it wouldn't be ready for like another half a year at least (probably full year!) what happened? Did they decide to use it in spite of a few missing features such as remote desktop and such? This is big news.

It's not the default, no. The plan is still for Fedora 25 (though obviously that can change). I wanted to test it out on Fedora 24 because it was supposed to be 90% of the way there. So far, every game I've tested has worked, which was my biggest "No-Go" with F23, so I'll likely run Wayland full time now.

[Ericg]

Ericg Nice write-up! Not specific to Fedora 24: I would like to know what extensions you use on Gnome-Shell!

==Appearence==

Global Dark Theme: YES
GTK+ Theme: Flat-Plat
Icons: Moka
Cursor: Adwaita
Shell Theme: Zuki-shell
Maximize Button: yes
Minimize Button: yes

==Extensions==
Application Menu
Background Logo
Dash To Dock
Impatience
Places Status Menu
Removable Drive Menu
TopIcons Plus
Transparent OSD
User Shell Themes

==Fonts==
Window Titles: Roboto Bold (11pt)
Interface: Roboto Regular (11pt)
Documents: Roboto Regular (11pt)
Monospace: Source Code Pro Regular (11pt)
Anti-aliasing: slight
Hinting: RGBA

==Other changes==

dconf changes: org.gnome.desktop.interface.show-battery-percentage = true