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

[birdie]

Upgraded from Fedora 35 -> 36 this afternoon. This is in a VM located on a KUbuntu 22.04 host. All went well. This VM has been upgraded each iteration from F33. We've come a long way as I remember the upgrading try was just a precursor to wiping and installing the new revision! My DE is KDE.

Fedora 33-36? I've had the same system since Fedora 1 without a single full reinstall. I'm not completely fair, I stopped using it for a couple of years due to systemd when it was first deployed and returned to it around Fedora 28.

[ms178]

You got some data regarding distro performance? With distros are scoring higher on your list? I'm a HEDT platform user and I also game if I have free time.

The sad truth (at least from my limited testing on my hardware) is that the out-of-the-box experience of all tested Linux distributions (Fedora, Kubuntu, Tumbleweed, EndeavourOS, Manjaro) leaves a lot to be desired - by the way, I've also tried Clear Linux but their installer didn't even recognize my disks properly. The main difference is the time to get each of them into an acceptable state. It also depends on how much time you want to invest and how tolerant to breakage you are. I aim for maximum performance and currently have the time and energy to compile a lot from sources with a high tolerance for some breakage. That doesn't suit everyone's needs. I currently favor EndeavourOS as it provides an easy way to get maximum performance due to the access of the AUR and their dependency management. It is by far not perfect as you still need to edit some PKGBUILDS from time to time to get them to work or to enable/disable some features, but you also get a x86-64-v3 repository on Arch which provides already some benefits very fast. With a custom-compiled Xanmod-Kernel (with some configuration tweaks) and Mesa you should get most of the benefits relatively fast on any of these distributions. But there is more to be had, but that involves compiling your own toolchain and compiling some more packages from source with somewhat aggressive compiler flags (e.g. dbus-broker, systemd, KwinFT, Xorg-Server and its dependencies). I found that to be a pain on non-Arch distributions. I keep an eye on the not-released SerpentOS though. They promise to deliver a better optimized out-of-the-box experience and to make compiling from sources even more automated and more accessible than Arch currently does.

[jacob]

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.

Most users' need would be "have a well supported GPU", not "have NVIDIA". If they decide they want it need to run Fedora, they should get hardware that is well supported by Fedora, not buy hardware based on cheerleading and unwarranted brand loyalty, and then blame Fedora when it doesn't work on it. No-one reasonable would expect a self-assessmbled PC to seamlessly run OSX, but when it comes to Linux distros it's somehow always assumed.

[mdedetrich]

Most users' need would be "have a well supported GPU", not "have NVIDIA". If they decide they want it need to run Fedora, they should get hardware that is well supported by Fedora, not buy hardware based on cheerleading and unwarranted brand loyalty, and then blame Fedora when it doesn't work on it. No-one reasonable would expect a self-assessmbled PC to seamlessly run OSX, but when it comes to Linux distros it's somehow always assumed.

You are making incorrect assumptions about users needs, and there are plenty of cases where NVidia GPU's fits users needs better on Linux. A very obvious one is the fact that NVidia's driver due to its design supports many linux versions even for the latest GPU, so if for example as a user you buy a brand new NVidia graphics card you can get full driver support for it even on older kernels because NVidia's driver supports many kernel versions.

With other vendors you are forced to use the latest kernel because its only in the latest version of the Linux kernel where vendors add support for newer hardware. Where I work btw we had to deal with this very problem, which is that as a company you typically buy the newest laptops and even with Fedora supported vendors (i.e. lenovo thinkpad's) we still had issues mainly because drivers for the newest wifi/integrated GPU where substantially better in the newest kernel version.

[openminded]

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.

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.

Let me show you what a user will do in such a case:
Screenshot_20220512_144127.png

[Charlie68]

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/

Just to specify that RPM Fusion and Packman are not third -party repositories, but community repositories.
For the rest I use tumbleweed that being a rolling release everything is updated and I have never had problems.

[Mez']

Terrific for unpowered users who like to get the desktop in the way of what they do, have their theme out of the 90´s and use an outdated paradigm.

[jacob]

The new "Console" app is great. You do "sudo", the header bar turns red. You do "ssh", it turns purple. A seemingly trivial feature but it prevents so many stupid mistakes!

[Guest]

I used Fedora 36 for a bit. Gedit was crash-happy when closing it. I reinstalled openSUSE TW earlier, and the experience is better. I don't know what Fedora does, but for as long as I can remember, boot times were always 5-8+ seconds longer than any other distro (Ubuntu, openSUSE). F36 was the same in this regard.

ROCm was also significantly easier to get installed on TW surprisingly; this repo was working fine on F36 but broke days ago: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/co...6/rocm-opencl/ Meanwhile for TW I just add AMD's official SLES repo and install rocm-opencl no problem.

One interesting thing is with a SDL 2 game (RuneScape) and Pipewire; I was able to do SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pipewire for it on F36, but that doesn't work on TW even with pipewire installed (presumably TW's SDL doesn't have it compiled-in).

That's why I prefer Solus, it's aimed at desktop users and the repository is one of the best maintained.

This was years ago, but I got a bad config (typo) pushed to the main repo for vsftpd https://dev.getsol.us/T1236

It wasn't anything major and there's a good chance I was the only person using vsftpd on Solus at the time, but it was interesting that there were no other checks before that was pushed live

[WannaBeOCer]

Just to specify that RPM Fusion and Packman are not third -party repositories, but community repositories.
For the rest I use tumbleweed that being a rolling release everything is updated and I have never had problems.

Anything not in the official repository is considered a third part package/third party repo if you needed to add one.

RPM Fusion is a third party repository but a trustworthy one. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_party_repositories

Pacman is a package manager, I assume you’re referring to the third party repo called AUR: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/uno...r_repositories

I’ve had openSUSE tumbleweed installed for about 2 months now. Zypper is the slowest package manager I’ve ever used. I double checked my repos proximity. Today I installed ~2400 packages and that was about an hour. I’d prefer to use RHEL’s dnf rather than use Zypper, while Solus’ eopkg and Void’s xbps run circles around both of them.

I’m looking forward to using SerpentOS but until then Solus has been the most stable rolling release I’ve used.