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

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Yeah this is the main reason I was so adamant in using Manjaro as a distro on my company laptop where they were previously quite strict about Fedora. Even though its apparently easier to enable RPMFusion on Fedora 36, there are still a lot of packages that aren't on RPMFusion which are on ArchLinux's AUR that as a developer I rely on.

I am still of the opinion that this is mainly a side effect of how simple/easy it is to make packages in ArchLinux (following their KISS principle) where as RPM has more ceremony required for packaging (maybe that's improved as of late).

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.

[Volta]

I've tested the April 27th ISO from the Fedora gaming spin (Nubara Project) last weekend. But the out-of-the-box gaming performance didn't impress me at all, tested with the in-game-benchmark of Company of Heroes 2. Even though it was an improvement over an older Rawhide release (20 fps > 33 fps), it is still noticeably slower than other distributions at stock on my hardware (around 40 - 45 fps on Tumbleweed and Endeavour). The good news is that one can get a vastly improved experience by compiling a Xanmod Kernel (at least 85 fps - you can also get to this level quickly by using Kubuntu + Xanmod and Mesa PPA). Just for reference, with a performance optimized EndeavourOS, I get 101 fps and around 93-95 fps on Windows 10 and 11.

You can try running the game/steam by right clicking on it in the Gnome menu and choosing 'launch using integrated graphic card'. It will use dedicated one despite the name. Another thing worth to look is CPU governor.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

RPMFusion will be the least of your problems if you use rawhide.

Fedora isn't allowed to depend on any packages in RPMFusion so you shouldn't get any issues, I myself have never got into any issues with RPMFusion and I've been using Fedora for a decade now.

I agree RPMFusion should be easier to enable, but blame legal issues for that (RH/IBM is a big target)

You must not use Nvidia GPUs, because that driver from RPM Fusion breaking every once in a while is a real thing. It just happened last in February of this year. Kernel 5.16 changed the MIGRATE_PFN_LOCKED behavior and RPM Fusion didn't get the updated driver out in time (despite the issue being known about well in advance). You could boot back into the previous kernel, but RPM Fusion and the Fedora repos can definitely get out of sync.

[jsmatos]

Hello, did you try to suspend/wake up on an hp laptop, or any other laptop? Did it work well? Thanls for your time

[MadeUpName]

Fedora is the only mainstream distro to be using SELinux, and afaik that has some overhead that would affect game performance. There's Nobara for a gaming-optimized version of Fedora that disables SELinux: https://nobaraproject.org/

SELinux is the main reason I use Fedora though, and without that, I'd probably be using openSUSE TW or Ubuntu.

If you want to disable SELinux just do

setenforce 0

You can also edit the config file in /etc/selinux to permanently dissable it if you want

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

There has been a lot of changes over many releases now. This one covers some. Fedora 34 predates this change. Also Flathub is going to be enabled by default without any filters and that should bring in easier access for a variety of third party components. Pretty much every release includes some sort of change in this space.

The improvements are great and appreciated, but I think all distros can and should do better, especially the big corporate backed ones. I'm not asking them to ship proprietary stuff in the installer images. But as an example, it would be trivial for them all to...

1. Detect an Nvidia GPU at first login after install.
2. Automatically prompt the user with a choice to enable whatever quasi-official affiliated repo has the drivers they need for basic hardware to work. They can throw up whatever "closed source is evil blah blah" messaging they want as part of this prompt.
3. Automatically prompt the user with a choice to install the correct Nvidia driver based on what GPU they have.

Anything less is doing a disservice to your users. And this particular example isn't some fringe thing. Nvidia still holds the largest market share for discrete GPUs. So yes, it's awesome that Fedora now offers to enable RPM Fusion for you (but only in Workstation / Gnome AFAIK), and that you can search for Nvidia in Gnome Software after you do that and easily install the driver (you still need to know if your card needs the old 470 driver or the newer one, the descriptions don't offer any detail here) . 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.

[RahulSundaram]

The improvements are great and appreciated, but I think all distros can and should do better, especially the big corporate backed ones. I'm not asking them to ship proprietary stuff in the installer images. But as an example, it would be trivial for them all to..

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.

[MrNycticorax]

very robust
bleeding-edge yet stable and reliable
solid
excellent
great release
solid release
powerful Linux distribution that is modern and forward-looking
running solid

Well, looks like Michael is really into Fedora!

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

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.

Signing kernel modules is not hard. OpenSUSE enables Secure Boot by default too, and they create the keys and sign the driver during installation. The whole MOK enrollment thing isn't a great experience for sure, but the basics of making this not user hostile don't seem that complicated. That thread is frankly embarrassing. They've been debating potential solutions for two freaking years while their users suffered for it and are still in paralysis with no decision. Someone just needs to tell them what to do. This is Red Hat's biggest weakness in my eyes. It seems from the outside to be completely engineering driven, with little focus on the user. Do you even have product managers there? This same head in the sand and blindness to what their users need crops up all over the place, whether it is here or Toolbox or elsewhere.

[ms178]

You can try running the game/steam by right clicking on it in the Gnome menu and choosing 'launch using integrated graphic card'. It will use dedicated one despite the name. Another thing worth to look is CPU governor.

My observed numbers are definetly not an iGPU/dGPU issue, as I am on a HEDT platform with a Xeon CPU without integrated graphics and therefore games use solely the Vega 56 dGPU. To a large extent I found the Kernel configuration to be a problem for gaming as Fedora deliberatly enables some performance-costing security measures, it is not just SELinux. And while Nubara offered a better Fedora-experience for me, it was still by far the slowest of all distributions which I have tested in recent times. Your mileage may vary, I can only speak for my hardware.