Fedora 36 Is A Terrific Release Especially For Linux Enthusiasts, Power Users

[Volta]

But the above would be incredibly easy for them to do without worrying about legal shenanigans of what's int the ISO, and would make the user experience far better for anyone who wants to or has to use an Nvidia GPU, and I'm amazed it hasn't been done already. Even better if these prompts happened during the install process.

Nobody from Fedora should give a shit about nvidia and their crippled proprietary blobs. Even better if Fedora displays: you're using insecure, unsupported proprietary piece of sh*t. Better buy AMD or go with Intel integrated driver instead.

[zoomblab]

@Michael

if you are looking to avoid Ubuntu 22.04 LTS due to its use of Snaps or other reasons

Just to let you know that translates to avoid sites and media due to their editors push for RedHat driven agenda and other reasons.

[mdedetrich]

Some rando has packaged almost everything in the AUR, but I'm genuinely curious what development related packages you need from there? Most companies aren't going to be super supportive of anything Arch based precisely because of the AUR. Trusting your employees who likely have sensitive corporate information on their machine to at least look at the diffs of every single update from the AUR and verify the source location is a fool's errand.

Well as a profession I am a Scala developer and there are lots of Scala related tools that I would like to be installed via the package manager rather than manually downloading tar's and installing it (after all that is the point of a package manager).

A list of such tools on the top of my head

• scalafmt https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/scalafmt-native-bin
• scala. This is an official Archlinux and Fedora package but since scala is such a fast moving language in Fedora stable its often outdated
• ammonite (scala repl on steroids) https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ammonite-scala2.13

There are other things as well, for example I was using kwinft for a while and that also has an archlinux AUR package (i.e. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/kwinft) where as on other distros it doesn't exist. The other thing that is very convenient with archlinux's AUR and specifically pamac (which is the GUI wrapper/package manager that comes with Manjaro) is that its extremely easy to update a package with a newer version if it hasn't been updated. The scalafmt package which I mentioned earlier is a really good example, as you can see the version of AUR is 3.4.3 where as the latest is 3.5.2 however pamac has a nice gui that lets you easily edit a package build definition on the fly (which often just involves bumping the version variable and supplying the new md5/b2 hashes).

This isn't really Scala specific though, a lot of newer languages move a lot faster than C/C++ do (different development model) which depending on how fast that movement is can end up hurting non-rolling release distros really hard especially if they don't have something thats as ergonomic as Arch's AUR.

[mdedetrich]

Fedora has strict packaging guidelines which RPMFusion also largely follows but a good portion of the challenges is that Fedora has to consider legal issues in a different way from many other distributions because it is sponsored by a large and profitable US business. It can be entirely automated with packit if you choose to use that or trivial to throw together packages in a copr repo but that doesn't help with licensing or patents.

Right but Archiinux also has similar issues which is why they state they do not endorse or support AUR (and they don't). IANAL but I don't see why Redhat couldn't do the same. My comments were more about the technical aspect rather than the legal, for example Archlinux package format has to also specify license and other patent things, but the actual tooling to even make a package and edit it on the fly as mentioned in my above comment is way simpler from my last recollection.

[mdedetrich]

What you describe would do a great service... to nVidia. Want to help the users? Tell them to stay as far as possible from nVidia until such time that company learns to play by Linux rules.

This also can be terrible advice for users depending on what they want or need. Users define the needs, not distros and if there is a mismatch then people just stop using the distro. Its as simple as that.

[mdedetrich]

This is far from trivial. Secure boot is enabled by default in Fedora for example and having Nvidia drivers work in this setup requires some details to be sorted out. That isn't the only outstanding issue here either.

Thats a problem with Linux kernel being monolithic so this isn't specifically an NVidia problem. For example a lot of Linux distros don't support secure boot because the Linux kernel being monolithic means that if you need to add more modules/drivers you sometimes have to rebuild the kernel and then suddenly you need a new signature for security boot.

Using outdated 90's style architecture here is your problem. If you are able to install drivers/modules just like you can do with packages (which is how the major OS's do it) then secure boot is a non issue and in any case due to having a monolithic kernel secure boot is checking stuff that is way outside of its scope anyways. Its meant to verify that your boot record/kernel hasn't been tampered with and ironically some linux distros are using a minimal shim that just loads the kernel later to "support" secure boot (even though if you are doing this then secure boot isn't actually being helpful).

[RahulSundaram]

Right but Archiinux also has similar issues which is why they state they do not endorse or support AUR (and they don't). IANAL but I don't see why Redhat couldn't do the same

One of the earlier links already addressed this in detail but tldr: any large commercial entity in US has to be concerned more with legal liability including contributory infringement that can't just be waived away with disclaimers always. In general, obvious solutions like these are not workable, otherwise the distro would have done it already years back.

[RahulSundaram]

Thats a problem with Linux kernel being monolithic so this isn't specifically an NVidia problem

My point wasn't about any particular vendor. It's just to point out that addressing these issues are not trivial for various reasons.

[Charlie68]

They are going to use Firefox, Chrome, video codecs, and games. Sans Firefox, all of that is RPMFusion and you need stuff from there to make FF suck less to make it capable of running Netflix. Yeah, I'm kind of ignoring Flatpak in those regards, but, then again, Flats can also be considered another layer of bullshit if you're Average Joe...a pick yer poison scenario.

My point is simply that Fedora requires a person to go 3rd party for the full experience. Users don't have to do that on Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, Void, T2SDE, and other Linux operating systems. All the repos are in sync. No risk of worrying about 3rd party repo breakages.

Feel free to replace Fedora with SUSE and RPMFusion with Packman.

Anyways, I'm gonna stop replying. No reason to muck up the thread with this topic.

The speech of the codecs covered by patent is not a problem of Fedora or any other distribution, but it is only the difference between what you can do and what is not possible to do.
The distributions that have a legal entity such as Fedora and for example Opensuse cannot distribute those codecs, if they do they can incur judicial actions, distributions like Ubuntu who have a different legal entity, make him risk something.
This is the difference ... However, this cannot be a limit for anyone in my opinion, users install on their system system even from third parties without complaining to have to use a PPA or a Deb/RPM package, so installing a codec It should never be a problem, among other things, both RPMFusion and Packman are community repositories, already preset on the system, are only to be enabled and installing what they need, it may happen that they are not synchronized after an update, but it is sufficient to wait that synchronize.

[WannaBeOCer]

The speech of the codecs covered by patent is not a problem of Fedora or any other distribution, but it is only the difference between what you can do and what is not possible to do.
The distributions that have a legal entity such as Fedora and for example Opensuse cannot distribute those codecs, if they do they can incur judicial actions, distributions like Ubuntu who have a different legal entity, make him risk something.
This is the difference ... However, this cannot be a limit for anyone in my opinion, users install on their system system even from third parties without complaining to have to use a PPA or a Deb/RPM package, so installing a codec It should never be a problem, among other things, both RPMFusion and Packman are community repositories, already preset on the system, are only to be enabled and installing what they need, it may happen that they are not synchronized after an update, but it is sufficient to wait that synchronize.

That's why I prefer Solus, it's aimed at desktop users and the repository is one of the best maintained. They focus on quality of packages, unlike Ubuntu who ships unmaintained packages in their official repository. I complain about using a PPAs, especially the guides online that always inform users to add third party repositories without informing new users they're adding a third party when running "sudo add-apt-repository." Guides should also transition to showing users how to use the GUI. It's 2022, a terminal isn't needed to use a desktop Linux distro.

I never used Fedora since it always seemed aimed at Linux developers. I don't see myself enjoying the stock desktop experience on Fedora. Nobara Project seems like a good Fedora based distribution, maybe I'll give it a try but I've been using Solus for almost three years without an issue. https://nobaraproject.org/