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Fedora 29 Is Shaping Up To Be A Very Exciting Release

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  • #21
    I like Fedora. On my two primary machines, one is running Xubuntu 16.04, and the other Fedora 28 with default GNOME. I'll upgrade the Ubuntu machine once ROCm 1.9 is out (??) and you can directly upgrade 16.04 -> 18.04 (tomorrow?).

    Before Fedora 28 I had Arch with LXDE. I really liked that. The computer was incompatibly old, so to upgrade it I replaced the entire thing.
    I still had the USB with Arch, so started installing it. But then I accidentally mounted a partition I set as UEFI boot as an ntfs, so I'd have to start over.
    Figured screw it, I want to get started with the new machine, let me just use Manjaro.
    Froze as soon as it booted into the live environment, which you have to do to use the graphical installer.
    Okay, Manjaro architect.
    Ran into a bunch of errors. Googling, I saw loads of hits for similar flavors of errors. Many since were fixed, but they were all subtly different. Didn't feel like wading through an avalanche, but I wanted a computer with up to date software, preferably rolling release.

    While not rolling (Rawhide is too unstable for me) Fedora was close enough.
    Got through the graphical installation, rebooted, logged in, and it froze. Sorta saw that coming, given Manjaro. So, rebooted again, ctrl+alt+f2, login to console, dnf update (getting the latest linux kernel), reboot, login and everything is fine. No problems since then.

    I'm not nit picky. I'd never have noticed most of the complaints most people have. Still don't.
    I don't mean that judgmentally, we need you guys to create truly polished products.

    That said, my experience with Fedora 28 has been great so far.
    Works well, easily gives me the latest gcc ( which generates much better code for some problems, eg nearly 6/10 [or 7/11 for avx512] instructions are vfmadd for a basic matmul vs like 1/8 for earlier versions ), so it took little setup beyond installing the software I have to install under any distro (Julia, Atom/VSCode, etc).
    GNOME is nice. Makes it easy to switch windows with a flick of a trackball if I happen to have a hand off the keyboard.
    Last edited by celrod; 25 July 2018, 11:17 AM.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by Aeder View Post
      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.
      Windows 10 is a disaster, but not even W10 uses 1.7GB of RAM, probably half of it. So while W10 is trash, let that sink in what it truly means.

      Thankfully, this is Linux, not GNOME, so we have a choice right? We aren't forced to use GNOME. But GNOME is worse than Windows and most of his criticisms were either there or other idiocies. Best thing about Linux is that we aren't at the mercy of one entity (usually...). I personally don't find Red Hat that much better than Microsoft tbh.

      And make no mistake: just because Windows makes the same mistakes does not exempt Linux from criticism. Somehow, people are missing all the massive criticism at Windows 10 or what? If they apply to GNOME, they're equally valid here.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by Jabberwocky View Post
        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.
        A better term would be "US patented software" since the software in question really is free software that happens to be patented in the US and therefore illegal to distribute freely in that country. RedHat is a US corporation which menas they are forced to exclude software that's free to use in most of the world. It seems like few Americans are unaware that there is no software patents in most of the world, it's a US specific thing.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by Weasel View Post
          Windows 10 is a disaster, but not even W10 uses 1.7GB of RAM, probably half of it. So while W10 is trash, let that sink in what it truly means.
          We take note about how hard you try to not sound like a Windows shill by pretending you can't just open Task manager on the PC you are using to post this. /sarcasm

          Since I'm not burdened by your role I can tell that, most Win10 systems use between 1.2 and 1.5 GB of RAM just after startup as long as there are 3 or more GB of RAM (if you have less it will of course limit itself). Shown by Task Manager anyway.

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          • #25
            The only thing I can give Fedora credit for is something that a lot of people aren't talking about. Beats me why. It has a repo with an OSX cross-compiler.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by xiando View Post
              A better term would be "US patented software" since the software in question really is free software that happens to be patented in the US and therefore illegal to distribute freely in that country. RedHat is a US corporation which menas they are forced to exclude software that's free to use in most of the world. It seems like few Americans are unaware that there is no software patents in most of the world, it's a US specific thing.
              Well no, patents related to software has been granted in many parts of the world. It is most definitely not a U.S specific thing although more patents are granted in U.S in general. Ex: EU - http://bastianbest.com/software-patent-europe/

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              • #27
                Originally posted by rmoog View Post
                The only thing I can give Fedora credit for is something that a lot of people aren't talking about. Beats me why. It has a repo with an OSX cross-compiler.
                Oh? Where do I find it? URL?

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                • #28
                  Some interesting comment but some simply not supported by facts.

                  Originally posted by amehaye View Post
                  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 can actually agre on this one, the installer could use lots of work. It is great if the installee has no intention of modifying the setup but beyond that it is a pain.
                  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.
                  Thi sisn't true at all on my HP ENVY. Other thanthe fonts being smaler that I'd like the fonts are rather crisp.
                  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.
                  Your modification of the system isn't something you can blame on Fedora.
                  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.
                  I would have to suggest that you don't understand sub pixel rendering.
                  There are no video thumbnails in 'Gnome Files' (Nautilus) by default, you have to install gstreamer1-libav.
                  Teh whole idea of Fedora is to implement a base GNOME experience.
                  Installing non-free media codecs is a bit more involved compared to Ubuntu.
                  Which has been Fedoras policy for just about forever.
                  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.
                  This does no seem to be consistent with my experience nor the generals public.
                  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.
                  There actually may be a bug here that Fedora may have cleaned up with the latest kernel releases and updates. I didn't whip my disk and install Fedora 28 until it firmed up instead running it from a thumb drive. That being said it seemed like the 5th kernel update was required ot get the reliability i wanted. Note that this is not unusual for any distro, If you have been aorudn Linux long enough you will have had to deal with new releaes that where not 100%
                  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.
                  Again strange as I have not seen this.

                  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.
                  The whole point of Fedora is to gvie users a GNOME base install not a flavor of the month install. I actually think you mis the point of Fedora.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by amehaye View Post

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



                    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'm not really a fan of Ubuntu nor do I really hate it. I did try out several distros before installing Fedora because it had the right mix of GNOME and minimalism that I preferred. I really don't like distros that go out of their way to install features they think I need.
                    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.
                    The other way to look at this is that somebody has to engineer these core features and in that regard there are few distros beyond Fedora that do as much.

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                    • #30
                      Fedora KDE is just a bunch of packages thrown together. Worst spin of all of them, no care for details.

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