Fedora 29 Is Shaping Up To Be A Very Exciting Release

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 29 Is Shaping Up To Be A Very Exciting Release

While Fedora 28 has been a fantastic release, Fedora 29 that is currently under development for releasing in October is going to be what feels like a massive amount of changes...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...eatures-So-Far

[amehaye]

When Fedora 28 came out, after hearing all the praises I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Let's say that I was… underwhelmed. Here is a partial list of issues that I found. I sometimes compare that with Ubuntu which is the distro that I currently use.

The installer (Anaconda) is buggy. Took me a while to cajole it into doing what I want on my peculiar setup (dual boot with hackintosh).

Fonts are ugly. Subpixel rendering is disabled by default, because reasons. I had to enable third-party repos, replace the font rendering engine and carry out some tweaks, and finally I ended up with something which was better than the default… but still didn't look as good as the default Ubuntu install.

Even after applying the fixes stated above, I have to change font scaling in the Gnome tweak tool each time after changing the subpixel rendering options, otherwise the changes are not taken into effect. This is just another bug.

One more thing about the fonts. RGB subpixel font smoothing effectively gives you 3 times the horizontal resolution of the screen. So if you are using a 'Full HD' (1080p) monitor like most people do, you get 1920 * 3 = 5760 subpixels. However if you have a '4K' screen, the horizontal resolution is 3840. That means that you get *more* resolution on 1080p with subpixel smoothing enabled than on 4K screen without. But the Fedora powers that be decided that you get the lower resolution, and you oblige.

There are no video thumbnails in 'Gnome Files' (Nautilus) by default, you have to install gstreamer1-libav.

Installing non-free media codecs is a bit more involved compared to Ubuntu.

Firefox and Chromium are not the at the latest versions – from my short time of using Fedora it seems that they take more time to get the latest versions.

Boot and login are slower than Ubuntu even on SSD. This was actually surprising for me.

Application startup is slower than on Ubuntu, even on SSD. Also surprising.

Scrolling using the mouse scroll wheel or by using the 2-fingers gesture my first generation Apple 'Magic' trackpad stops working sporadically, especially in chromium. This might be an xwayland issue, however it doesn't happen on Ubuntu.

I have to restart the session after adding an input source to the keyboard, but there is no indication that I have to do that. In fact immediately after adding an input source I can make the 'switch input source' gui appear by using the keyboard shortcut but as I said nothing happens until the session is restarted.

Printing doesn't work - wireless printers are no longer recognized, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1525937 This is ridiculous for a 'desktop' distribution.

No top left hot corner disable in the 'Tweaks' tool. In Ubuntu there is an option it in the tweaks tool, in Fedora I have to install a Gnome Shell extension.

Systemd-nspawn with 'veth' didn't work for me while in Ubuntu it worked for exactly the same rootfs. No idea why and no time to dive into the logs. I guess that it had something to do with SELinux as the rootfs was on another disk volume.

By default, you can't mount other disk volumes on your system, using Gnome Files, without issuing a superuser password each time. There is a way to enable that, of course, but it involves editing configuration files etc.

Final thoughts
There were more issues, but at that point I went back to Ubuntu. Unfortunately I don't have the amounts of free time I used to have i the past, and can't spend too much time on setting up my work environment.

The 'vanilla' gnome session on Ubuntu (apt install vanilla-gnome-desktop) is actually more polished than the default Fedora session. Fedora is in dire need of the '100-papercuts' project from Ubuntu. But this might not be enough. They have to change something in the way they make decisions - for example, the fonts issue, video thumbnails etc. The way things are right now, I don't have high hopes for Fedora 29 from a usability perspective.

[pracedru]

Last time i tried Fedora i also had problems..
Mostly with pulse audio though. I kept getting distorted output randomly. I don't get that in other distros.
Installing Nvidia drivers was also more work, but it ended up working.
But i'll try F29 for sure.

[riklaunim]

Dedoimedo has quite spot-on Fedora and other distro reviews. As developers play with backend features, code and stuff the end user experience is neglected. Many 2018 distro releases didn't really bring anything new in terms of quality and user experience. A user of F29 will see newer GNOME or newer XFCE and that's it.

I use Linux daily for anything except gamin and astrophotography and I'm starting to ask myself should I really continue to use Linux on a desktop. With docker I can easily code on Windows. After installing Xubuntu 18.04 I got pretty much the same bugs since last 2-3 previous Xubuntu releases plus weird UX/UI decisions. Zero improvements.

[matematic]

I use Linux daily for anything except gamin and astrophotography and I'm starting to ask myself should I really continue to use Linux on a desktop. With docker I can easily code on Windows. After installing Xubuntu 18.04 I got pretty much the same bugs since last 2-3 previous Xubuntu releases plus weird UX/UI decisions. Zero improvements.

I keep asking myself the same. I'm a long time Linux fan and use Linux exclusively for server and desktop but last two years I see mostly regressions and almost zero improvement. We are still fighting problems decades old. Shame...

[Jabberwocky]

When Fedora 28 came out, after hearing all the praises I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Let's say that I was… underwhelmed. Here is a partial list of issues that I found. I sometimes compare that with Ubuntu which is the distro that I currently use.

The installer (Anaconda) is buggy. Took me a while to cajole it into doing what I want on my peculiar setup (dual boot with hackintosh).

I agree with this one, the custom/advanced partitioning manager in Anaconda is very tricky. Not in terms of understanding it, but getting it to do what you want. I would typically just set efi/root/swap and configure fstab afterwards. Anaconda works better with LVM or LUKS configurations though.

There are no video thumbnails in 'Gnome Files' (Nautilus) by default, you have to install gstreamer1-libav.

Installing non-free media codecs is a bit more involved compared to Ubuntu.

Fedora is well known for not supporting non-free software, I did not know about this problem. It's another reason not to use Nautilus in my books.

Firefox and Chromium are not the at the latest versions – from my short time of using Fedora it seems that they take more time to get the latest versions.

The latest version of Firefox supports wayland, the package name is firefox-wayland. I don't think it's stable yet, you can opt-in if you want the latest though. Ubuntu is afraid of wayland so it makes sense why they are shipping the latest version without spending time on improving things. With regards to chromium you are correct Ubuntu has higher frequency in chromium releases, on average chromium has 4 releases per day.

Boot and login are slower than Ubuntu even on SSD. This was actually surprising for me.

Application startup is slower than on Ubuntu, even on SSD. Also surprising.

I'm surprised too. It's probably worth a look to find out why, you can use the following to investigate.

systemd-analyze blame

Final thoughts
There were more issues, but at that point I went back to Ubuntu. Unfortunately I don't have the amounts of free time I used to have i the past, and can't spend too much time on setting up my work environment.

The 'vanilla' gnome session on Ubuntu (apt install vanilla-gnome-desktop) is actually more polished than the default Fedora session. Fedora is in dire need of the '100-papercuts' project from Ubuntu. But this might not be enough. They have to change something in the way they make decisions - for example, the fonts issue, video thumbnails etc. The way things are right now, I don't have high hopes for Fedora 29 from a usability perspective.

I honestly find your results interesting. In terms of usability I feel the same as you, but in favour of Fedora. I don't use gnome and many things that bother does not phase me, so I can understand the difference in terms of user experience. At the core of the OS Ubuntu has a history of stunts pulled from unstable kernels, pulseaudio and more recently netplan (which you had to change kernel boot parameters to disable) to spyware in Unity menu. In terms of track record they are not that great, it's still very popular though and I'm sure more people are happy with Ubuntu. Fedora is not perfect by a long shot, but they are shipping newer software (generally speaking) and the OS breaks less in my experience. I'm still using Ubuntu though, in some cases you just can't get away from good old PPAs! I just don't use new leases of Ubuntu and I also won't use it on new hardware.

Sorry if I sound like a fanboi, I did not have a lot of time play devil's advocate.

[starshipeleven]

Dedoimedo has quite spot-on Fedora and other distro reviews. As developers play with backend features, code and stuff the end user experience is neglected. Many 2018 distro releases didn't really bring anything new in terms of quality and user experience. A user of F29 will see newer GNOME or newer XFCE and that's it.

I use Linux daily for anything except gamin and astrophotography and I'm starting to ask myself should I really continue to use Linux on a desktop. With docker I can easily code on Windows. After installing Xubuntu 18.04 I got pretty much the same bugs since last 2-3 previous Xubuntu releases plus weird UX/UI decisions. Zero improvements.

Could be worth it to check out other distros first. Like OpenSUSE or Manjaro. Ubuntu is just ONE of the Linux distros available.

[Candy]

Yes soooooo exciting!

This time they put the number 29 on the box.

[Creak]

Very interesting comment amehaye. I'm a Fedora user from Fedora 24 and since Ubuntu is back to GNOME, I'm very interested in going back there.

I like Fedora, I especially like that it's pure GNOME, and I like to see the amount of work the RedHat devs are doing. But to put it simply, I must admit that Fedora Workstation isn't as user-friendly as a desktop distrib should be, imo.

[rmoog]

GNOME 3.30 on its own right should be an exceptional release.

There's nothing exceptional about GNOME 3 unless you consider being:
- an exceptional waste of man-hours
- an exceptional way to troll the entire user base of GNOME 2
- an exceptional SNAFU