[HN Gopher] Fedora 39 Released
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Fedora 39 Released
        
       Author : xdfg13345
       Score  : 130 points
       Date   : 2023-11-07 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fedoramagazine.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fedoramagazine.org)
        
       | habibur wrote:
       | Thanks to the team. Had been waiting for it. Release was delayed
       | several times to fix bugs related to RaspberryPi.
        
         | jsight wrote:
         | In some ways, that is nice to hear. I'm glad the Pi is getting
         | attention.
         | 
         | Is the 5 supported?
        
           | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
           | Doesn't appear so.
           | 
           | https://pagure.io/arm-image-installer/blob/main/f/boards.d
           | 
           | rpi2,rpi3,rpi4 is all that I see. I'm sure they'll work on
           | supporting it in the future. I'm not sure rpi5 was even
           | announced when they branched f39 from rawhide.
        
         | wheelerof4te wrote:
         | At this point, they should just focus on the x86_64.
        
           | candiddevmike wrote:
           | Why do you say that? ARM usage is surging, especially on the
           | hobby side which Fedora has seen a lot of use.
        
             | otherme123 wrote:
             | I'm a daily user of Fedora Desktop and Fedora Server (plus
             | a couple of VPS), I couldn't be happier. But I tried it a
             | couple of times on a Raspberry, and for some reason it's
             | much worse than the Raspbian, so I waste time and SD cycles
             | in installing Fedora, fighting bugs and going back to
             | Raspbian.
        
               | habibur wrote:
               | worst two that I found are
               | 
               | - the audio jack doesn't work. Maybe it's because I
               | installed the server installer instead of the client.
               | 
               | - GPIO ports doesn't stay on unless you lock it and keep
               | your program running.
        
       | tapoxi wrote:
       | I've been a huge fan of Fedora, and it seems this release does
       | 90% of what I want, but since I'm on a Framework 13 with a weird
       | screen resolution, I once again fall into DPI scaling hell. GNOME
       | locks fractional scaling behind an experimental option, apps like
       | Signal are blurry and apps like Steam just seemingly ignore any
       | attempt to scale properly.
       | 
       | For what it's worth KDE seems to handle at least the blurry X
       | scaling issue and supports fractional scaling by default.
       | 
       | Maybe one day, everything will just work...
        
         | Handprint4469 wrote:
         | > Maybe one day, everything will just work...
         | 
         | I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in
         | 2004.
        
           | sillywalk wrote:
           | >> Maybe one day, everything will just work...
           | 
           | > I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in
           | 2004.
           | 
           | I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in
           | 1994.
           | 
           | Driver support is better, and no X11 Modelines, which is
           | nice.
        
             | lagniappe wrote:
             | Since '95 here... I'm just happy I don't have to visit a
             | library to get 0.1% as far as I can today with a simple
             | search query. We've got it good now, all things considered.
             | I'm sure others feel differently, but I cannot complain.
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | Well you're in luck, because 2024 is the year of the Linux
           | desktop.
        
         | jklinger410 wrote:
         | > but since I'm on a Framework 13 with a weird screen
         | resolution
         | 
         | Hold up, is this a reason to not buy a Framework?
        
           | jwells89 wrote:
           | The problem isn't just with Framework laptops, an increasing
           | number of x86 laptops are built with odd resolution panels
           | that require fractional scaling. Very few offer panels that
           | are conducive to 2x integer scaling, and while typical lower
           | DPI panels that don't require scaling are a config option on
           | some models, that often also comes with other major tradeoffs
           | like low brightness or bad color reproduction.
        
           | tapoxi wrote:
           | It's 2256x1504 and 3:2. It's a nice screen, but it's one that
           | absolutely works best at 1.5x scale since 1 is unreadable and
           | 2 wastes plenty of screen real estate.
        
             | tmtvl wrote:
             | As an idiot who's never used a screen with more than 1080p
             | resolution, is there a reason why just increasing font size
             | doesn't work?
        
               | onetoo wrote:
               | Not all UI elements scale with font size.
               | 
               | Illustrations, nested element containers, navigation
               | controls, etc. It looks very comical when you first see
               | it.
        
               | joaonmatos wrote:
               | Desktop apps scale their layout based on the number of
               | pixels, not on text size. So (with the notable exception
               | of browser apps and by consequence Electron apps) you
               | will just end up having bigger text in a badly laid out
               | window if you just increase text size.
        
               | alimbada wrote:
               | Big fonts, small UI components. Looks bad and requires
               | more accuracy with mouse movements.
        
               | rodrigodlu wrote:
               | Padding inside boxes/buttons looks all weird.
               | 
               | Since for me less is more I'm doing 200% non-fractional
               | with a smaller font. The problem is that I need a
               | different font size from my 1920x1200 laptop screen
               | (usually secondary, far away from me, with documentation
               | websites/slack/etc) and my primary 4k.
               | 
               | For browsers I can change the default font size and
               | forget the controls, since I'm using vimium, but stuff
               | like Skype/Slack/Zoom/etc needs more dancing whenever I
               | change the display.
        
               | tjoff wrote:
               | Most of the time that is actually much better than
               | fractional scaling.
               | 
               | On a laptop you are severely constrained by the screen
               | real estate, so minimizing the size of the clutter and
               | focus on the content (text) is a great tradeoff in most
               | circumstances.
        
           | scblock wrote:
           | No, though Gnome really isn't set up for it. Or being useful,
           | really. But on my Framework 13 with KDE I have no issues. I
           | prefer 1.25x when standalone and 1.5x when docked and used as
           | a second screen (it's farther away) and KDE works fine with
           | both and switches automatically. I don't even think about it,
           | and can't think of anything I personally use that still gives
           | me the blurry window in xwayland issue.
           | 
           | The real trouble is this idiotic concept of "scale" in the
           | first place as if ancient assumptions about pixel density
           | cannot change. It's nothing to draw vector elements or fonts
           | larger, and it's next to nothing to have more than one size
           | of display element (tiny) users could select from.
           | 
           | The only way to make Gnome usable is to use the accessability
           | options
        
         | jwells89 wrote:
         | My ThinkPad similarly needs to run at 150% scale to be usable
         | and I've also found that KDE still has issues even if it
         | handles scaling better. The biggest one is that only C++ window
         | decorations draw correctly under Wayland with fractional
         | scaling enabled -- the much more common Aurorae themes are
         | blurry looking which is unfortunate, because only a handful of
         | themes are C++ and mostly minor variants of Breeze.
        
           | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
           | Mine too- I was a bonehead and bought a "3k" display for my
           | w541. I've found that 100% scaling w/ "large text" enabled in
           | accessibility settings strikes a good balance.
        
         | tantony wrote:
         | I bought a Framework 13 when it first came out, with exactly
         | this hope. I gave up after about one month of madness and
         | ordered an M1 Max Macbook Pro. I also installed Windows on the
         | Framework with WSL. Now it gets used very rarely (like for when
         | I want to do Windows development, or for my parents to use when
         | they visit) and mostly sits around gathering dust.
         | 
         | Desktop linux has burned me one too many times for me to trust
         | it again.
        
           | brightball wrote:
           | I've run almost exclusively Linux for the past 7ish years.
           | First with Dell and then System76. It's been an overall very
           | smooth experience.
           | 
           | I decided I wanted to get a machine with a powerful video
           | card recently, so now I'm running an Alienware with Windows
           | for the first time since 2005 on my primary monitor and my
           | Linux machine on a side monitor. The only real win for
           | Windows is that it remembers my audio/video settings with a
           | lot of peripherals plugged in. Linux seemed to forget every
           | few hours and Zoom meetings were a nightmare. If WSL was more
           | consistent it would get a stronger vote, but there are weird
           | experiences in there.
        
         | cantours wrote:
         | Why isn't fractional scaling supported from day 1? I mean if
         | you're going to do dpi scaling in the first place, why in the
         | world would you restrict it to whole numbers only? Is it some
         | insane hardcoded hack or something?
         | 
         | Scaling with changing dpi is the easiest thing in the world.
         | Anyone who has written a program with some kind of 'zoom'
         | feature (be it a game, image editor, image viewer, etc) knows
         | how easy it is.
        
         | yett wrote:
         | Fractional scaling was enabled briefly during beta but too many
         | apps were blurry so they reverted and postponed it to Fedora 40
        
         | noja wrote:
         | Are Signal and Steam apps from Fedora? Is this a problem
         | specific to Fedora 39?
        
           | lostmsu wrote:
           | They are not, but that's not what users care about. See e.g.
           | complains about old apps for Windows being blurry when DPI
           | scaling was introduced.
        
             | cloudwalk9 wrote:
             | What I don't get is why apps are still blurry on 4K screens
             | last I tried it on Ubuntu, with 200% fractional scaling. If
             | they're non-blurry on 1080p, shouldn't it be a perfectly
             | linear 1:1 upscale?
        
               | xoac wrote:
               | How is 200% fractional scaling?
        
         | kcb wrote:
         | Fractional Scaling works pretty well out of the box on Ubuntu.
         | It seems they apply patches to support it. As someone who just
         | swapped from Fedora 38 to Ubuntu 23.10, Ubuntu definitely wins
         | in terms of being a polished desktop experience.
        
         | dpc_01234 wrote:
         | I'm using the same setup and use 100% scaling and "Large Text"
         | accessibility settings. Good enough for me, as a workaround so
         | I thought it's worth mentioning.
        
         | davet91 wrote:
         | Steam fractional scaling should work since their big UI update
         | a few months ago. Try launching Steam with this environment
         | variable: STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=1.5
        
         | mikrl wrote:
         | I tried using Wayland, but I forgot to write down the 7
         | esoteric GPU related options I had to pass to vscode to make it
         | usable without visual glitches and eventually just gave up and
         | went back to X11
        
       | dewlinedew2 wrote:
       | Hooray!
        
       | smetj wrote:
       | Best Linux desktop/laptop distro hands down. Congrats Fedora!
        
         | hospitalJail wrote:
         | I am ready to declare it the best OS. I've never been more
         | productive since getting Fedora.
         | 
         | 0 Forced reboots. With windows, forced reboots were a multi-
         | weekly occurance. No dealing with autosaves and reopening
         | anything.
         | 
         | Its so fast, you click and something pops up. With windows,
         | there seems to be like a 0.2s delay on everything. This adds
         | up.
         | 
         | I think I did some of those linux commands that everyone is
         | afraid of doing. But I did that month 1, and I havent done
         | anything since. I don't care if the rest of the world
         | discovered The Year of Linux Desktop was 2023, but I surely
         | figured it out.
         | 
         | Linux Desktop is ready for the big time.
        
           | zamalek wrote:
           | Try out Silverblue. It's immutable Fedora. The one thing I
           | didn't like about mutable Fedora is that update reboot was
           | extremely slow, like 2-5min. Silverblue fixes that one gripe:
           | the update reboot is no different to a regular boot. 90% of
           | the work is done in CI, 10% is done prior to rebooting, and
           | 0% happens during boot.
           | 
           | I went back to NixOS, but Silverblue was an _incredibly_
           | close second.
        
           | vondur wrote:
           | For speed, I've been trying out using Clear Linux. It feels
           | _really_ fast. Getting software for it outside of FlatHub or
           | in the Clear Linux repos basically means compiling from
           | source, but so far it 's been good.
        
       | hddherman wrote:
       | Did the upgrade on both server and workstation platforms, and it
       | was painless. Great work!
        
       | doakes wrote:
       | Can anyone speak to their experience with the atomic/immutable
       | versions of Fedora (Onyx, Silverblue)? It sounds pretty
       | interesting.
       | 
       | [0] https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/
        
         | spicyusername wrote:
         | IBM uses Fedora CoreOS / Red Hat CoreOS as the underlying OS
         | for OKD / OpenShift, Red Hat's flagship product, so the bones
         | are solid.
         | 
         | Silverblue works well enough. The biggest drawback is that you
         | need a different development workflow, all container-based, and
         | you have to use Flatpaks for installing Desktop software.
         | 
         | The biggest questions I had while using it were, "Why am I
         | doing this?" and "Is this worth the trade-offs?".
         | 
         | At the end of the day all the benefits I got ended up being
         | theoretical. Is it "cool"? Yea, its really cool. But does it
         | actually solve concrete problems I have when developing
         | software.
         | 
         | In the end, I decided it didn't.
         | 
         | I think its a much different story for using Fedora CoreOS a
         | server. There the benefits are much more straightforward:
         | reliable atomic OS updates, cattle-only servers,
         | infrastructure-as-code deployment by default.
         | 
         | I still probably wouldn't use them in production because they
         | are a niche technology stewarded by IBM, but still, the
         | benefits are more clear.
        
           | jlkuester7 wrote:
           | I agree that the benefits seem way more obvious for a server.
           | I already deploy all my server-side apps via Docker
           | containers with basically no system-level dependencies!
           | 
           | That being said, one of the main benefits I am hoping to get
           | out of Silverblue on the desktop is relief from the almost-
           | inevitable system degradation I have experienced with other
           | Linux distros where, over time (and especially with major
           | upgrades), more and more things slow down and/or stop
           | working. I am not sure if I am just doing something wrong
           | (besides daily heavy use), but historically all my desktop
           | Linux installations have become almost unusable after a
           | couple years. I am only a few months into using Silverblue,
           | but I am hoping that the way the system image is rebuilt for
           | each update makes it more stable in the long-term....
        
           | bryanlarsen wrote:
           | distrobox/toolbox definitely solves concrete problems for me
           | as a developer. Maybe I don't need to be running on
           | Silverblue to use toolbox, but it's a good match.
        
         | bryanlarsen wrote:
         | I'm happily using Kinoite (aka the KDE spin of Silverblue). I
         | bounced off of NixOS, and ended up on Kinoite. It's got a few
         | edges to it, but they're pretty minor and the benefits seem to
         | be worth the drawbacks, IMO. I plan on buying a new dev machine
         | on Black Friday-ish and I'll use Kinoite on it too.
        
         | jlkuester7 wrote:
         | I have been running Silverblue for a couple month now (after
         | years on Debian derivatives) and I can confidently say that it
         | is something you will either love or hate (not much room for
         | middle ground).
         | 
         | If you are the kind of Linux user that treats your OS like a
         | pet, with lots of TLC and endless tweaking to get things "just
         | right", then Silverblue is a terrible choice. It is way more
         | difficult and time-consuming to "hack" stuff together at the
         | system level.
         | 
         | However, if you prefer to treat your core OS as livestock
         | (something rigidly structured and reproducible automatically),
         | then I highly recommend giving Silverblue a try!
         | 
         | As a software developer, I run a lot of random
         | software/dependencies/etc and I have historically struggled
         | with my Linux system stability degrading over time as I
         | add/remove packages and config. My goal with Silverblue is to
         | have a solid base OS that does not suffer from package-drift
         | over time. On top of Silverblue, I use distrobox to run many of
         | my apps/bins in a virtual container. That container is where I
         | do all my "hacking" to get things to work and I consider the
         | container to be expendable. If I start having issues with it
         | working correctly, I can just blow away that container and
         | rebuild it without effective my core system, other containers,
         | or the flatpak apps.
        
         | FireInsight wrote:
         | I'm on a https://universal-blue.org/ -based "custom image" of
         | Fedora Silverblue and I love it. In my image, I ship some
         | essentials software and other things that are just easy to have
         | in there like fonts, plus a script for installing gnome
         | extensions. Then I have a Nix home-manager -based shell
         | configuration containing some common developer tools as well.
         | The bulk of the (GUI) software I use comes as Flatpaks, and my
         | development environment is a distrobox arch container.
         | 
         | I've set all updates to be automatic and almost never have to
         | worry about them. I am on the :latest tag and my computer
         | updates between major versions automatically, and I haven't had
         | any breakage yet. I feel pretty confident in the stability of
         | my system and feel like were the disk to corrupt, I could get
         | back up and running with the exact same setup very quickly.
        
       | reisse wrote:
       | Dynamic triple buffering for GNOME has been postponed again,
       | fractional scaling is nowhere in sight, but they landed
       | 
       | > a new workspace switcher and a much-improved image viewer.
       | 
       | What a joke of a product management. Sometimes I envy guys who
       | can rewrite workspace switchers again and again on Red Hat's
       | money.
        
         | dilap wrote:
         | Do you envy Sisyphus? Very similar situation, I think.
        
           | eVeechu7 wrote:
           | Sisyphus only has one rock to worry about.
        
         | kcb wrote:
         | And still lacking VRR support. All we have is this needlessly
         | drama laden multi-year MR
         | https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154
        
           | reisse wrote:
           | Oh, I forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder. And lacking
           | VRR is even more insulting now, since SteamOS has a working
           | implementation for Wayland.
           | 
           | Given how much Valve is doing for desktop Linux, I guess one
           | day SteamOS will be _the_ default distribution.
        
         | deafpolygon wrote:
         | In my excitement with the beta version of Fedora 39, I
         | installed it and had fractional scaling for a few minutes-
         | until I installed updates and rebooted. It was gone. That was
         | the last time I touched it.
         | 
         | Fractional Scaling is a *must* these days, with the high res
         | laptop screens.
        
         | phendrenad2 wrote:
         | Even though Linux is open-source, it's not immune to the force
         | of money. There are paying customers for Red Hat, and maybe
         | they don't care about DPI scaling that much.
        
           | jsiepkes wrote:
           | Modern high-res screens in notebooks are almost unusable with
           | Gnome. You need to enable "Large fonts" under accessibility
           | to make it remotely usable. And these screens are becoming
           | more common. So where do paying Red Hat customers use Gnome
           | for then if it's not on notebooks and desktops? For servers?
        
             | phendrenad2 wrote:
             | That seems likely, yes
        
               | Ckirby wrote:
               | Mostly severs yes, desktop Linux died somewhere around
               | 2010.
        
           | reisse wrote:
           | I doubt any of Red Hat paying customers are caring about
           | image viewers or other important GNOME improvements in this
           | release.
        
             | tristan957 wrote:
             | Red Hat didn't work on the image viewer. Why do you keep
             | making comments on things you are uninformed on?
        
               | phendrenad2 wrote:
               | Exactly, distros need to kept up-to-date, and by updating
               | GNOME, you get new features for free. Downstream, Fedora
               | grabs these updates. Downstream of that, someone spams
               | Hacker News with the changelog. It's the cycle of life.
        
               | reisse wrote:
               | > Red Hat didn't work on the image viewer.
               | 
               | Honestly glad to err here. Kudos to Chris Davis, Sophie
               | Herold and other contributors.
               | 
               | > Why do you keep making comments on things you are
               | uninformed on?
               | 
               | I'm informed well enough on the facts that a) Red Hat is
               | the top contributor to GNOME; b) development of core
               | GNOME features is going too little, too late, while every
               | release is boasting about not-so-important stuff getting
               | done. So I'm being vocal about that, because why not?
               | 
               | > Exactly, distros need to kept up-to-date, and by
               | updating GNOME, you get new features for free.
               | Downstream, Fedora grabs these updates.
               | 
               | If only two thirds of GNOME weren't contributed by full-
               | time Red Hat employees, sure.
        
               | tristan957 wrote:
               | Community members outnumber Red Hat developers.
        
               | Ckirby wrote:
               | Because many of the new "features" are either unwanted or
               | at worse distracting
        
               | tristan957 wrote:
               | Which features in the new release did you not want?
        
         | grigio wrote:
         | I can't believe LOL!
        
         | tristan957 wrote:
         | How many people do you think Red Hat pays to work on all
         | projects within the GNOME namespace on their GitLab? There were
         | no Red Hat employees involved in the development of the new
         | image viewer. It was a community effort.
         | 
         | Will you be stepping up to provide resources?
         | 
         | Why are you ignoring all the other work Red Hat did this cycle
         | with regard to things like HDR?
        
         | yoyohello13 wrote:
         | The amount of back seat dev that happens whenever Gnome does
         | anything is amazing. You have no idea what the challenges are
         | or how the development process works for this project. The
         | workspace switcher could just be some drive by PR, who knows.
         | Tripple buffering and fractional scaling are hard problems. If
         | you don't think so, feel free to show them how it's done and
         | implement it yourself.
        
           | reisse wrote:
           | > You have no idea what the challenges are or how the
           | development process works for this project.
           | 
           | The magic of the open source gives you the possibility to see
           | it. And I do sometimes take a look into a shitshow of
           | management which is this three years old triple buffering MR
           | [1]. Don't get me wrong, I didn't examine the code
           | thoroughly, it might be a marvel of engineering, but when it
           | takes you more than three years (and counting!) to land a
           | feature, to the point where some people start to forgot why
           | it was even necessary in the first place [2], and when
           | downstream has to monkey-patch your feature as-is because the
           | benefits are so big [3], you cannot say your development
           | processes are alright.
           | 
           | And it's not only triple buffering, you can see the same
           | pattern in the MR for VRR [4].
           | 
           | 1.
           | https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441
           | 
           | 2. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/144
           | 1#...
           | 
           | 3. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/why-ubuntu-22-04-is-so-
           | fast-a...
           | 
           | 4.
           | https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154
        
             | tuna74 wrote:
             | You can see a lot of bugs found (and being fixed) in that
             | MR. Should Gnome add lots of new bugs for little gain?
        
           | Ckirby wrote:
           | Oh hush, the only reason people don't make their own
           | contributions is because it's hard to keep up with their
           | unstable API
        
       | rcarmo wrote:
       | Time to run a final upgrade on my LXC instances, snapshot them
       | and give it a try at upgrading in place (has mostly worked since
       | 35, wish me luck).
        
       | butz wrote:
       | KDE needs more attention. Now it is tucked away as a "spin" that
       | does not inspire much confidence, but in some cases KDE provides
       | much better user experience. Time to add all DEs into ISO and
       | allow selecting the one you want during install, and software
       | too. Like in old days of Fedora Core.
        
         | whalesalad wrote:
         | Come to where the air is crisp - Debian 12 is a fantastic KDE
         | experience these days.
        
           | FergusArgyll wrote:
           | I actually have Debian 12 with KDE in a VirtualBox VM and am
           | having issues with some windows appearing semi-transparent
           | and not showing text, it's very weird and hard to explain. It
           | might be because of a VirtualBox setting, i'm not sure. I
           | still prefer it to a fully functioning gnome
        
             | whalesalad wrote:
             | I'm running bare metal on a 13900K, RX 6600 gpu (wayland)
             | connected to an 5K Apple studio display and I've had zero
             | issues. TBH I can't run gnome it crashes but KDE has been
             | flawless.
        
         | vondur wrote:
         | The KDE spin from Fedora is really nice. It's pretty much
         | vanilla KDE and is kept up to date with every new release of
         | Fedora. I do agree that it should be one the primary download
         | page as an option.
        
         | scns wrote:
         | That's one reason why i chose openSUSE Tumbleweed, KDE is their
         | primary desktop. Horses for courses.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-11-07 23:02 UTC)