Fedora Workstation 31 Should Be Another Fantastic Release For Desktop Linux

[wizard69]

Interesting this discussion about why Fedora? Frankly I stuck with it in the early years because it was often the best distro for the thin hardware support in those early years. That is I could get Fedora to run and use most of the hardware.

today hardware support is much better across the distro board. That is great but Fedoras other great feature is widely supported hardware. Some things are hard to explain, the Cincinnati Begalz where my foot ball team. Don’t ask why as I don’t know!

[caligula]

Imho Fedora Workstation is massively underrated as a distro. Fedora/RH devs from my PoV do a lot of work on the Linux desktop that other distros get the praise for.

But the good thing about all this work is that it benefits all distros.

Yep. Compare this with ubuntu. Much less upstreaming, separate bug tracker from debian which mostly leads to wontfix. NIH solutions that only ubuntu uses.

[torsionbar28]

Is this fantastic release going to continue to bring up the rear in benchmark testing I wonder?

LMAO, who cares how it benchmarks. This is not a l33t gam3r disto for PRO gamers who NEED to achieve 184 fps rather than a mere 182 fps in their favourite game. Desktop distro benchmarks are kind of a joke, literally *nobody* is selecting a desktop distro based on benchmarks. People chose distros based on features, DE, personal preference, etc. IMO, Fedora is a distro for people who actually need to get sh!t done.

[Neuro-Chef]

People keep saying what a "fantastic" release Fedora 31 is / will be; what exactly can I do from day zero of this release that I can't do with Manjaro or Ubuntu or OpenSuse or even a good BSD GhostBSD?

How can we know what you can or can't do? Depends entirely on what you want to do.
Anyhow, what I can do with Fedora is:

• update packages without the system destroying itself after a few months (not so Manjaro)
• upgrade to a newer distri release without the system destroying itself (not so Ubuntu)
• use my RX560 GPU (not so *BSD)
• automatically use recent stable Linux kernels some weeks after release

Furthermore the avalable software in standard + RPM Fusion repos has almost everything I need and also in the newest existing version, while Ubuntu too often needed additional PPAs to get a recent or at least some version of whatever. The software availability in Manjaro is even worse and the existing sources for BSD ports have no chance at all in this regard. I also prefer yum/dnf over apt, because, well .. it actually works, without random weird shit like dpkg locking issues.

That being written, I'll soon give Ubuntu LTS another try as LineageOS build environment on my second workstation

[alcalde]

Doesn't Tumbleweed provide "the latest shit"? (Been a while since I looked into SUSE.)

It does, but like Fedora, OpenSUSE used to provide cutting-but-not-bleeding edge releases. Now you need to use the rolling release if you want anything recent (although the latest OpenSUSE Leap release is relatively modern, the one before had a positively ancient kernel and even Debian Stable was more current). The line I got from Brown (SUSE employee/now former OpenSUSE chairman) was that SUSE was pulling the help they used to give to OpenSUSE to get releases ready, but they were prepared to share their stable SLES kernel with OpenSUSE (which sounds more like OpenSUSE was pressured into doing this). I asked him about the Community Mission Statement that had been edited for months and finally voted on and approved that talked about SUSE being cutting but not bleeding edge. He said that the Mission Statement "wasn't binding" (!!!). He then tried to claim that there weren't enough volunteers left to put together an OpenSUSE release otherwise. I asked him where all the volunteers suddenly disappeared to and he replied "Tumbleweed". If that's correct, maybe a lot of OpenSUSE developers didn't like the new OpenSUSE "Leap" arrangement either and began working exclusively on Tumbleweed; I don't know. I moved to Tumbleweed myself since it felt more like the original OpenSUSE I left Windows for in 2010.

The problem with Leap is that it does little more than update software versions. The new policy states that major updates are only going to be once every three years (!!!). SUSE abandoned their online distro-building tool (which was the best available in the Linux world), stuck OpenSUSE with the old Enterprise Server kernel, and began adding support for things like transaction-based server updates and container-oriented versions and easier upgrades to SLES which no one in the community had been asking for. I won't even get into the whole renaming fiasco which saw the distro jump from 13.4 to 42 and then back to 15. The last SUSE owners did a lot of damage to the brand.

[alcalde]

openSUSE provides a Leap fix release distribution and a Tumleweed rolling release distribution, both of which are fantastic. What do you want more?

I want what we used to have - a distribution that was to SLES what Fedora is to RHEL. The community never approved nor initiated the change to Leap... or even the name "Leap" come to think of it.... I want the old independence that OpenSUSE had from SUSE to return (I hear there is work on setting up an independent foundation, so that should help). I don't want a SUSE employee appointed chairman of OpenSUSE again and spend his time sticking the SLES kernel into OpenSUSE, changing the release cycle for the worse and working on making it easy to upgrade OpenSUSE to SLES.

[alcalde]

From my experience going back quite a few years, Leap has been kind of a side project, and Tumbleweed was the primary opensuse distro which got the majority of the work. I don't think anything you've said here applies at all to Tumbleweed, other than the slide in Distrowatch popularity.

I was using OpenSUSE since 2010, when there was no Tumbleweed, only OpenSUSE. OpenSUSE Factory was what would become the next release of OpenSUSE. Eventually Factory turned into a rolling release on its own. There was a Community Mission Statement that the OpenSUSE board, chaired by a SUSE employee, essentially tore up. They stuck the SLES kernel into OpenSUSE after SUSE said it wouldn't be providing any employee help for distro releases anymore (essentially pressuring them to make this change). They changed the name to Leap and the version number to 42 (and then back to 15 for the next release, confusing the heck out of everyone). They let the SUSE Studio distro builder die of bitrot. They started putting all their effort into a version of OpenSUSE to run in containers and the cloud and adding transaction-based updates (all stuff that seemed useful for SLES but not really for desktop OpenSUSE). There was even an issue where the OpenSUSE chairman and SUSE employee didn't want to make votes public, only the results, which Bryan Lunduke publicly objected to and suggested that OpenSUSE was no longer open as a result. I'm guessing how regular board members vs. SUSE employee board members voted would have been rather revealing.

Something the now-former chairman said to me suggested that a lot of former OpenSUSE contributors began working solely on Tumbleweed; I don't know if this is accurate or not.

But anyway, once upon a time it was Tumbleweed that was a side project and regular OpenSUSE that was the core product. It was the equivalent of what Fedora is to RHEL. Now it's no longer about innovation and that's only happening on Tumbleweed, which is a shame.

[Charlie68]

I want what we used to have - a distribution that was to SLES what Fedora is to RHEL. The community never approved nor initiated the change to Leap... or even the name "Leap" come to think of it.... I want the old independence that OpenSUSE had from SUSE to return (I hear there is work on setting up an independent foundation, so that should help). I don't want a SUSE employee appointed chairman of OpenSUSE again and spend his time sticking the SLES kernel into OpenSUSE, changing the release cycle for the worse and working on making it easy to upgrade OpenSUSE to SLES.

luckily openSUSE is not Fedora ... I use both Leap and Tumbleweed and find two very good distributions, I really don't understand where the problem is. The world evolves and I'm happy that openSUSE has also evolved.

[andyprough]

LMAO, who cares how it benchmarks. This is not a l33t gam3r disto for PRO gamers who NEED to achieve 184 fps rather than a mere 182 fps in their favourite game. Desktop distro benchmarks are kind of a joke, literally *nobody* is selecting a desktop distro based on benchmarks. People chose distros based on features, DE, personal preference, etc. IMO, Fedora is a distro for people who actually need to get sh!t done.

I'll take that as a "yes it's still going to bring up the rear in benchmarks" answer.

[pal666]

Great, another Linux audio standard.

it's video. and it's not exactly new