Fedora Workstation 39 | Hacker News Reader

Fedora Workstation 39

fedoraproject.org

89 pointsbelter73 comments

I've tried a variety of linucies, but I keep coming back to Fedora.

It frequently works the best "out of the box". It typically has the newest stuff. Googleability isn't quite as good as Ubuntu, but it's rare that I find answers that just fundamentally don't apply to Fedora.

I've beeen running a home server on Fedora, and in-place-upgrading since like version 28, and never has the OS been my problem.

I recently swapped my daily driver to Fedora from Windows. My biggest complaint is nvidia's drivers, but that's not unique to Fedora.

For me, that "coming back" Distro had always been Ubuntu but since ~2021, I'm toggling between Mint and Debian. That's largely due to them pushing the snap paradigm down our throats. At this point, it's virtually impossible to escape that as firefox is only available as snap package in Ubuntu and not as DEB.

On the flip side, I don't like the other version of snap (Flatpak) either, especially so since Red Hat pulled that proprietary shenanigan recently. In fact, anyone who is supportive of open source, free software or commons ethos should try to steer clear of anything related to RH after that.

I still type "yum install" instead of dnf, so I don't really use any of the newer distribution mechanisms.

> At this point, it's virtually impossible to escape that as firefox is only available as snap package in Ubuntu and not as DEB.

Sure it is. Just use the official PPA from mozilla. Works great: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

A quick google will find plenty of sites telling you how to adjust the package versioning priorities to keep the MozillaTeam version of FF preferred over the crappy snap one. I still use Ubuntu desktop as my daily driver and server OS, and we have zero snaps installed on any of our systems.

I landed on Mint. It’s just enough Windows to make sense to me.

The license never changed.

What part went proprietary. Show me the license change.

Holy FUD Batman.

It’s a good thing Open Enterprise Linux is here to save us by forking RHEL and their, god awful, GPL packages!

I’m glad to know that pyeri is swearing off so many packages maintained and contributed by Red Hat. Thanks for your sacrifice pyeri

I’ve been tending to come back to Fedora too. One nice thing is that its packages are pretty new without being bleeding edge and without requiring fiddling with things post-install.

Agree that upgrading is painless with it. I’ve never had to pay close attention to what updates change, and it works flawlessly no matter how long it’s been since an install was updated.

Fedora has been my choice of distribution since it was first released two decades ago.

What many don't realize is that the Fedora project is much more than just the Fedora Linux distribution - it is a large and vibrant community of contributors and users with 4 strong values: Freedom, Friends, Features, and First (this last one is why Fedora is often touted as being the first Linux distribution to mainstream radical new features like Wayland, btrfs, and Systemd).

You can find the community forum at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/

> and First

Isn't that arch?

> mainstream radical new features like Wayland

Even if you qualify "First" with "mainstream", I think there might be more Steam Decks (running an arch variant) than Fedora installs :)

> and First

>> Isn't that arch?

Arch will have the packages first and I do love Arch, but it's not exactly a holistic, curated distro like Fedora.

Arch is not always the most up to date. Fedora and openSUSE occasionally beat it to an update. I've seen Fedora packages from git commits where Arch sticks with latest stable as well.

glibc and GNOME come to mind as frequent "not first" packages.

As a bigger thing, I think Fedora implemented systemd before Arch.

Arch focuses on fast packageing of the latest versions of existing applications, but leaves all but the most fundamental architectural decisions to the user. Fedora focuses on implemenring new experimental systems at the architectural level, integrating them with the distro, to make them, hopefully, easy to use out of the box.

Arch may have packages first but generally Fedora will have its packages integrated first; ie, if package A and package B release new versions to work with each other, then Arch may have the new versions first, but when Fedora releases the new versions then they'll be configured to work together, while Arch's packages may take a little longer for them to be configured appropriately

In my case, Fedora became collateral damage after the CentOS/RHEL drama.

I've switched all my personal systems to Debian.

Fedora is excellent but working with different systems on my personal computers and the servers is not something I have time for.

I thought about switching for this reason but there is a logic to having different distros for server vs workstation. It’s nice having an up to date emacs and firefox for example, but I don’t expect a server distro to care about that, or a longer term system like Debian to emphasize that.

Is your server setup fairly elaborate to the point where it’s tricky to get it right on the workstation? These days I’m mostly just building a jar which is fairly simple. So I don’t feel much impedance mismatch fedora vs deb.

I think that whole thing was a bit overblown. RHEL is free for individuals. When I need the stability of a server OS, I'd rather just use the real thing.

As I understand it, if you exercise your rights to distribute the RHEL source code, Red Hat may terminate your gratis license.

Link to where this was said by rh?

It’s in the EULA. They don’t deny it and it’s their right.

The problem is RMS and all the people supporting FOSS and the GPL say Red Hat, and any other company, are well with in their rights to have that clause.

And this causes people, who didn’t pay for RHEL, won’t pay for Rocky or Alma or any other clone to hate a company they never supported.

https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Red_Hat_GPLv2-Based_EULA_201...

Are you sure ?

https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20...

Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement.

Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services includes: [...] (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software

IANAL but Subscription services in this case abusing Red Hats CDN/Support, not the software.

Correct because it’s free if you agree to the terms. Amazing concept.

It’s like if you let me in your house, let me use your stuff, and then you ask me not to break something and then I break something and you kick me out and I get upset.

Bad analogy, but let's go along with it.

The open source license already says you can go into the house and do whatever you want, including breaking something and kicking you out.

Your additional instruction to not break something goes against the rights initially granted.

To make it worse, one is covered by copyright law and the other by business contract law.

After 23 years, I got fed up with Debian's many idiosyncrasies/breakage and decided to try Fedora. It's been a breath of fresh air, and I've been pleasantly surprised how much of the stuff I want which required fiddling or compiling in Debian is just in the repos on Fedora.

Unfortunately, unless they've fixed all the bugs that were keeping me off Wayland in F38, I won't be migrating to the reportedly Xorgless F39. Better to have loved and lost...?

They're not removing Xorg, they're just making it no longer the default. You're still free to use it though it's getting no official support because Xorg is dead.

When you logged into a fresh install of Fedora 34, you got a wayland session. To get an X11 session, you needed to choose it in a pull-down menu on the login screen.

I.e., It's been at least 2.5 years since Xorg has "been the default".

Alright, looks like I got bad intel. It's F40 that will drop the X session for KDE[1,2], coinciding with the Plasma 6 plan to phase out X support. I understand GNOME is also planning to drop X. Evidently Nvidia is not being allowed to hold up Wayland progress by the Fedora team anymore [3].

I just wish they'd fix Wayland bugs like the mouse cursor being tiny in Firefox when using UI scaling, or text twitching on screen like my video card is dying, both of which go away in Xorg. I'll find my own way to make XScreenSavers work.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-Approves-Plasma-6

[2] https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/395

[3] https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/please-dont-remove-xo...

Also available on apple silicone:

https://fedora-asahi-remix.org/

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/how-to-update-from-fe...

AFAIK still no external monitor support on m2 air - so not much use for me...yet.

Fedora 39 KDE Spin has been flawless so far, and I love the window tiling native support. Also, suspend on Nvidia works again for me.. not sure if it's related or driver release coincidence.

Real tiling (ala i3) or just Kwin snapping?

There's a Sway spin of Fedora now that you might like.

I second this. KDE spin has been absolutely fantastic on both my custom desktop (all AMD) and my Framework 13.

I was mulling what to put on my framework 13 that's nearly en route, I think I'm going to give this a shot.

For me unfortunately the spin has been broken: when trying to login into KDE Plasma Wayland session, I see a frozen image of my laptop's vendor logo (Dell) or the last "black screen image available" (like the underline cursor in top-left corner).

The session works if I login through another tty (F2 or any other F key) and type `startplasma-wayland`, but not through SDDM. X11 works fine too. It's just the transition from SDDM -> Plasma wayland, for some reason.

Yep, this is the kind of stuff I see with KDE all the time. I find it weird that people praise it for stability.

I tried Fedora KDE (I was using gnome) a year back and faced a lot of problems. Maybe its something to do with Fedora and not KDE, but I had a terrible experience with KDE.

For me the only KDE distribution that works is OpenSuse. I tried many others (including Fedora KDE spin) and had significant issues each time. Even KDE Neon was a disappointment. So I’m in the green chameleon land for now.

How's the grass there? Do you like it?

I pondered about moving to OpenSuse, just to diversify, but I'm afraid my work laptop (Dell Inspiron) may not have the same support like Fedora provides (wifi card, "special" firmware updates, etc).

In my personal computer I use Arch. It took some time to adjust to `dnf` and copr concept of fedora. For example, since fedora isn't a rolling release distro, I had to jump through hoops to get emacs wayland to work.

Fedora is great and my second favorite distro, with OpenSUSE being my favorite one.

Currently I am using Fedora but I am looking at OpenSUSE.

I like Tumbleweed because it is rolling release but also like Fedora for its community.

I hope OpenSUSE will be more popular over time because it is q really good distro.

I switched from Win to Fedora Workstation on laptop 2 years ago. And I'm not regret this decision. Also I have Fedora Workstation on home media server with cockpit. Works great, however its lerning process. Setting everything up for my needs require a lot of searching and trying.

Unfortunately I cannot switch to Fedora on my desktop, mainly because of lack of support of Adobe (need for work), missing 10bit support and CUDA. Linux is not mature for professional work in audiovisual production industry. Which makes me sad sometimes. Quite a lot. Adobe monopoly is frustrating.

Very happy gaming Fedora users here... But I did watch a video on NixOS and the nerdy hacker in me really wants to play with that concept...

I might have to run up some VM's for it maybe.

Fedora Silverblue might be the best of both world for you maybe? I'd look into it at least. :)

If you want to do Fedora Silverblue + nixpkgs, then the steps are a bit more complex that any other environment because of the immutable / requiring `chattr -i /` and some `semanage fcontext` action in the `/nix` bind mountpoint to get things working.

In theory you can use the special nixStatic build of `nix` and it should just work with unprivileged user namespaces but in my experiences with Silverblue you just get mysterious errors until you get a bind mountpoint going.

Bazzite is a silverblue spin that sets up nix for you, among many other things.

I found Silverblue to be quite frustrating, perhaps I should take more time to learn it. IMO, Guix/Nix offer superior solutions.

The problem I have with Nix is that it adds a lot of abstraction/complexity on top of everything. This is fine for power users, but I don't see it ever being used by anyone else. Silverblue also imposes some additional complexity, but it's way closer to vanilla Linux than Nix is, and I believe the usability aspect of it is limited mostly by flatpak. I have used both quite substantially, and they both are good solutions. I love how easily I can reproduce my system in Nix from just a config file, and the ability to nix copy (with the entire dependency tree) to another Nix system is awesome. But I personally think Silverblue is an easier sell to most people.

I absolutely agree on the complexity of Nix, it’s an entirely different paradigm than traditional Linux/BSD distros. That said, in many ways the silverblue/ostree approach seems to be too much of a “compromise”, so to speak. To elaborate, the traditional approaches to package management is disappointing users, straining maintainers, and falling behind the needs of developers. While Nix takes a radical approach and totally redesigns package management, Silverblue would rather present an illusion of a traditional system to software and boxes up the mess in containers.

Ultimately Silverblue is trying to be an “immutable” system without the need to coordinate packages and/or software. And such an approach is highly appealing for enterprise support, but the end result is somewhat of a Frankenstein system. Of course Nix is not without its warts, I can’t stand its language and documentation is terrible.

Overall I find Guix to be my favorite of the bunch. It’s legitimately a wonderful tool to develop with, I agree with the emphasis of reproducibility and bootstrapping, Guile is a wonderful language for configs/scripts, and it comes with a great manual. Even still, I couldn’t recommend GuixSD due to the lack of systemd and the hardline approach to free software (libre Linux).

Have Fedora 39 on my new Framework AMD Ryzen, there's been relatively minimal hiccups getting it going and seems to be great now.

We picked it as one of two distros we provide internal support for because it continues to provide a good balance between being up to date and being stable.

Bought a Lenovo laptop for my daughter's school work but she was not able to use it. So, removed windows and installed Fedora 39 on it. All of the sudden a $480 USD laptop became a full blown python development workstation in no time. Everything just worked out of the box, got my Logi MX Master 3s configured and even touchpad gestures work!!! Can't be happier. I still use my MBP for work, but my personal projects now have their own Fedora powered dedicated laptop. For me, this is the year of Linux on the desktop!!!

Not kidding, the future should be Fedora Silverblue layered on top of Fedora CoreOS. Immutable Linux is the future, and extending existing images is how they should be layering for each Fedora... flavor :)

It's definitely the future and I look forward to that future arriving.

Still some ways to go I think. But the progress is exciting! And I'm also excited about Flatpak's proliferation and it getting real corporate backing and the full app store treatment with forthcoming Flathub updates[1].

1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-desktop-leaders-unite-be...

I really don't understand how snaps can compete with flatpak. Flatseal makes this such a great experience. Ubuntu consistently backs the wrong horse.

Isn't CoreOS and Silverblue basically the same thing? They're both rpm-ostree things, the difference is that Silverblue/Kinoite/Sericea happens to have a base layer that boots to graphical.target instead of multi-user.target?

I myself am looking to test openSUSE Aeon later, yet another rpm-ostree thing.

Conceptually, they are immutable Linux distros, but they're far from being the same.

CoreOS is optimised for server use, and made to run containers and containers only, with unattended system upgrades/reboots.

Silverblue is a workstation-type distro, centered around Flatpak and pet-type containers for real work (toolbox, distrobox)

The difference is larger than running Fedora Server on your desktop.

So, it sounds like "Fedora Silverblue layered on top of Fedora CoreOS" is incoherent.

I mean, all distros are basically a set of packages on top of the Linux kernel. Technically there is no difference, in practice there is.

Love Fedora ♥

I love Gnome, Fedora's been along for the ride but it's been an excellent distribution in my book. Glad I decided against Elementary (it was right before that project imploded).

Out of the loop - what happened to Elementary?

Version 7.1 was release a month ago. Development for version 8 is going strong. However, Elementary might be behind other distros in switching to Wayland from X11.

OT: that’s the first time that i consciously see someone using emojis on Hackernews.

Edit: how did you do that, I tried adding one to my comment but it gets removed on post.

It's not an emoji. It's U+2665, "Black Heart Suit" - the playing card symbol.

It is a red heart on my phone.

It's an old emoji that gracefully degrades if subsequent versions of Unicode/Emoji 1.0+ aren't supported.

I've been using Fedora as my daily driver since FC16. I love it. It was a bit shaky back then on my VAIO laptop but I have stuck with it ever since.

I've been using sway for a couple of years, every other window manager/OS feels like treacle now.

My experience with Fedora ended quickly, after installing it in the VBox, just like any other distro I've used, it was glitching terribly. Every second letter of any text had been invisible and the whole DE was blinking at a rate of the mouse move speed. After showing this to the reddit Linux community I was told that I'm holding it wrong and shouldn't be using Fedora+VBox, and that I had a driver issue (duh, thanks Sherlock). Went back to Ubuntu and Xubuntu. Sure, they have snaps and some other weird decisions, but at least they work much more stable.

Since fractional scaling got cut from GNOME, I guess I will be waiting a bit longer.

I've tried, and honestly, on my low end hardware, only Arch seems to be the smoothest. I'm running EndeavourOS, which is working amazing smooth here. Fedora always freezes for minutes when the RAM is full. I'm thinking maybe it's ZRAM fault here? And yes, I even tried creating a SWAP file together with ZRAM and no luck.

On Arch it uses zswap....

I wanted to use Debian, but too old packages for me... is Debian testing stable enough?

It is less zram, and more block I/O scheduling congestion on Linux in general[1]. The machine thrashes and becomes unresponsive under memory pressure as I/O requests flood the disks, whether it is for swap, or unpaging and re-paging file-backed storage (open shared libraries, etc.), or simply evicting frequently accessed files from the file page cache.

I run my personal workstations and laptops without swap, and with earlyoom[2], which results in applications getting killed before the machine reaches unresponsive state. I can only afford that because I trust my tools (vim, emacs, firefox, but most likely firefox) would not lose my session if they shutdown unexpectedly. I turn earlyoom off when I play games where I know memory usage will grow suddenly, but the game won't reach the limits of my machine. You can also whitelist specific applications in earlyoom, if I recall correctly.

Some people claim success configuring the kernel to use different I/O schedulers, but I haven't tried that yet.

[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/682582/

[2]: https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

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