Fedora 29 Is Shaping Up To Be A Very Exciting Release

[Creak]

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

Seriously?
GNOME 3 is 13 years old, you got to find another troll, this one is getting old...

[Weasel]

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.

Take news (mostly from Red Hat backed stuff) with a grain of salt, Michael tends to overhype them quite a lot.

[amehaye]

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.

Yep, his Fedora 28 review is very reminiscent of my own experience: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/...-28-gnome.html

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.

That's part of the reason why I wanted to move away from Ubuntu. But Ubuntu got better in that department - they now use systemd (I'm relatively a fan, sue me), they use Wayland etc etc. In addition they dialed down their 'spyware' features and I actually like the idea of a hardware survey.

I would still like to use Fedora someday, it feels like there is some diamond hiding inside that rough stone. I doubt it will ever come out, though, what with the continual focus on new engineering-related features rather than on 'finish'. I like these technical features, but it would be nice if some thought was given to the end-user experience as well.

[rmoog]

Seriously?
GNOME 3 is 13 years old, you got to find another troll, this one is getting old...

The truth never gets old.

[Weasel]

Yep, his Fedora 28 review is very reminiscent of my own experience: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/...-28-gnome.html

Best quotes from that review to me:

Wireless worked, all right. Samba sharing - of course not. We need the same hack as in Ubuntu, because bullshit security, the most overrated hype in the computer industry. Don't be surprised if someone decided to cancel TCP or UDP in Linux one day, because it's used to deliver viruses and whatnot. Once you change the protocol version for the client (not server, you see!), it works fine, and so does Samba printing, albeit with a somewhat slow discovery, but we can excuse that. Wireless printing also worked.

Gnome 3 is useless in its default form. It embodies a pseudo-touch minimalism idea that mistakes visual minimalism for functional minimalism. First, Linux needs to actually carve some percentage of desktop usage, and then we can talk about mobile devices. The concept is premature. And also horrible for desktop users, because they get overlarge apps with kindergarten interfaces, little to no functionality. Look at Windows 10 apps, if you need another data point. Literally every single Metro app or Modern app or whatever they are called is totally inferior to their classic desktop counterparts. Those apps work well on the mobile, really well, but not so on the desktop. And when have you last seen Gnome used on a phone? Exactly.

I wanted to restart the Gnome session to see if this helps, but of course, you cannot do this under Wayland, which happens to be another glorious modern-day technology designed to be complex and dev-friendly, much like systemd. I had to log out, chose Xorg, then logged back in, and the memory usage was now down to about 1.8 GB, and the system was actually usable. So I guess the fix still hasn't propagated from Gnome 3.30 down to this edition, or whatever. The fact this was allowed into an official release is like releasing a starved honey badger into an orphanage.

This guy's review is pure gold, and not just related to Fedora. I'd take it any day over hyping shiny new stuff just because of it being shiny new stuff. Shiny crap still stinks the same way, you know.

[riklaunim]

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

I did. Historically I used Arch when it still was short and quick to setup and configure, I used Gentoo which is still maybe an option (although it seems to lost some of it popularity?), I used Mepis for some time, shame it turned out to be a i586 liveCD with insane amount of services launched on start... MX Linux made by some ex-Mepis people seems to have some of that, although the reviews are very good (although I'm kind of afraid of compatibility problems as it doesn't use system.d). SuSE was my first Linux distro long ago. Didn't really checked it now. Rawhide rolling release could be interesting. Before installing Xubuntu 18.04 I also had mint and manjaro ISOs but when testing from Virtualbox and USB stick had some problems here and there... like every desktop distro isn't impressive with anything these days, isn't "this is awesome, I really want to use it".

[starshipeleven]

Yep, his Fedora 28 review is very reminiscent of my own experience: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/...-28-gnome.html

Wow, y'all guys need to try OpenSUSE KDE (or MATE), just saying.

It's not 100% bug free, but it's not anywhere near that level of trainwreck. I never had to touch fonts or change samba options in KDE, just enable the packman repo for the non-free stuff (codecs and the like).

[Nth_man]

Wow, y'all guys need to try OpenSUSE KDE (or MATE), just saying.

It's not 100% bug free, but it's not anywhere near that level of trainwreck. I never had to touch fonts or change samba options in KDE, just enable the packman repo for the non-free stuff (codecs and the like).

Oh, yes, by the same author:

the post-release Kubuntu Beaver is a pretty slick and tight distro.

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/kubuntu-beaver-upgrade.html

[woprandi]

I'll try KDE/Plasma next time I'll have to install Fedora. I'm quite disappointing by Fedora 28, more instability than previous version

[Aeder]

Mmm, most of the complaints about Fedora go away completely if you use the Fedora KDE Spin, so I would say they are more Gnome-specific than Fedora-specific. I generally had a worse experience with Ubuntu due to hardware support arriving way later than in Fedora or Arch.

And a few other issues are kinda global, like trying to print, especially if you don't own a HP or Brother printer.

Some other complaints are just lacking perspective, I think. For example, I agree that SELinux is annoying, but it's the equivalent of installing corporate security programs on a desktop PC. Try and see what happens if you install shit like Sophos' security software on Windows.

And some other complaints seem to be mostly personal experience? Some people comment that Linux is getting worse, but I honestly had the opposite experience. In my experience, Windows stopped being rock solid thanks to W10 and Linux is increasingly more stable.

I'll agree with some criticisms though, the installer is atrocious and remains atrocious, it's only because I got used to it that I can ignore it.

-------------

Also lol@that review that was posted. It has some gems like

I tried taking screenshots - and the desktop did make camera shutter noises, but these screenshots were not preserved.

Hint: the screenshots are in your Images folder, Gnome ships with that idiotic behaviour by default.

Resource usage, performance


This is an interesting one. First, numbers. Raw memory figure on idle, 1.7 GB, which a lot. Much more than Ubuntu, and almost 4x more than Kubuntu 18.04, for instance.

Why would you compare Fedora Gnome to Kubuntu and not to default Ubuntu? An actually fair comparison would be Kubuntu vs Fedora KDE or default Fedora Gnome vs default Ubuntu Gnome