Fedora 35

I&#x27;ve been using Linux on a secondary machine since 2011, and as my daily driver since 2018. I&#x27;ve distrohopped quite a bit - Ubuntu (2011), Puppy Linux (2012), Manjaro (2013), LXLE (2014), Solus (2016), and then back to Manjaro (2018). I liked Manjaro because I could get newer packages in the repositories (when compared with Ubuntu) and because of access to the AUR.<p>I made the switch to Fedora 34 a few months ago from Manjaro. It has newer packages than Ubuntu, has more software than Solus, is more modern than LXLE&#x2F;Puppy Linux, and is more stable than Manjaro in my experience. I got tired of running `pacman -Syu`, rebooting, and having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change, or something else. I <i>never</i> had a smooth update with Manjaro, which led to me delaying updates for months until I would have time to debug and fix my laptop after the update. Bit of a security issue, especially with how often browsers update.<p>Fedora has been rock solid, and I haven&#x27;t had any issues with my machine crashing or not booting into a desktop environment after an update. Congratulations to the team, looking forward to (smoothly) updating my laptop today!

Release notes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fedoramagazine.org&#x2F;announcing-fedora-35&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fedoramagazine.org&#x2F;announcing-fedora-35&#x2F;</a><p>See also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29081329" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29081329</a>

Fedora Magazine has more info on what are the new features in this release:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fedoramagazine.org&#x2F;whats-new-fedora-35-workstation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fedoramagazine.org&#x2F;whats-new-fedora-35-workstation&#x2F;</a><p>And also about the differend spins that are available for download.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fedoramagazine.org&#x2F;announcing-fedora-35&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fedoramagazine.org&#x2F;announcing-fedora-35&#x2F;</a>

Fedora Silverblue in particular has changed my workflow, but I came from Ubuntu and I felt like I was lost in an entirely new world so some friends of mine helped me cobble together a set of scripts.<p>So if you come from Ubuntu and want to give Fedora a shot but you need Ubuntu images, versions, etc then this might help you!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;castrojo&#x2F;ublue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;castrojo&#x2F;ublue</a>

Debian 11, Fedora 35... These two distros are very influential. Both were recently released and both come by default with pipewire and wayland.<p>We&#x27;ll have an Ubuntu LTS next year and it will probably be influenced by these releases. A few new problems because of these changes... a lot of fixes because of these changes.

Fedora is my goto distro when I need to get stuff done. I&#x27;ve used it professionally and it has worked just fine with all the proprietary software I needed (jetbrains, zoom, slack, spotify, etc...)<p>Although Arch has a special place in my heart and I play from time to time with FreeBSD, Fedora pretty much just works out of the box, is very stable (in my experience), has decently newish software (even if it is from flathub...) and it&#x27;s not to hard to find rpms around for more obscure software.<p>The only issue that I&#x27;ve come across is with older software... Fedora doesn&#x27;t seems to care that much about backwards compatibility so if I need to run a software with old ncurses version, tough luck.

Just switched to Fedora because Microsoft declared my CPU incompatible with Windows 11. Works great! Cinnamon is a wonderful desktop manager too.

As a GNOME&#x2F;Wayland based desktop Fedora 35 is a definite improvement - it looks decent, Firefox looks and performs great with proper Wayland&#x2F;EGL integration out of the box.<p>I found the height of the Gnome Top Bar or window title bar are way too big for a laptop screen and I could not find a way to change those (used to be done with CSS but that&#x27;s gone looks like) - best I could do was to switch to different themes and autohide top bar with an extension. Hacky but at least makes it usable.

I&#x27;m a huge fan of Arch. Not only can you quickly search for packages, but the packages are actually maintained and kept up-to-date. With Arch, not only is the software usually up-to-date... even if it isn&#x27;t, it is easy to modify a PKGBUILD file—but they actually provide a package search on their website.<p>Even Ubuntu and Debian allows you to search packages on their website, but not Fedora. With Arch, when you search for a package, you can immediately see how the package is built as well.<p>Yes, Arch is not a distro for people that just want to run Linux with a bunch of out of date software. It is for people that want to take some building blocks and create the perfect distro for them. Unfortunately, the choices can be confusing at times, but it has been well worth the effort on my part to find out what software works for me. Once you do that, just keep a list of the packages you install. If you need to reinstall, it is easy enough providing that package list to pacstrap.

And here I am still on Fedora 33 because all of the GNOME addons I use still don&#x27;t work with anything newer than that.

This defaults to Pipewire (instead of PulseAudio) and some are reporting problems with audio, especially in browser-based conferencing applications like Google Meet. I have Fedora 35 and don&#x27;t use GMeet, but can report that playing videos (vlc) is fine.<p>Edit: See reply about the Pipewire default. However people reporting problems with audio in browser conferencing systems is new in F35.

I&#x27;ve been using Ubuntu since 2005. Most of this time on Thinkpads. My last laptop is the 9th gen X1, and the microphone does not work on the latest Ubuntu (not LTS, but still a very basic function). On a whim I tried a live Fedora On Fedora it just worked. This makes me wonder if it&#x27;s time to change distro after so many years. I always kept to Ubuntu as a switch would slow me down while I learn where everything is but it seems like that barrier is lower these days....

Is there a &quot;translation&quot; guide for distro hoppers? Something that I can tell which distro I&#x27;m coming from and it would tell me to do X in distro Y, do Z?

It is so hard to tell people about using Linux, how great it is, it&#x27;s free, etc, and then you get to the name part and it&#x27;s called &#x27;fedora&#x27;.

Has Fedora fixed its package management? I eventually deleted my Fedora partition and installed Ubuntu because package management was so painfully slow.

What are the advantages of Fedora over Ubuntu - if any?<p>I have been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a few years now, without complaints, but as I will be getting a new laptop in the near future I might consider other distros. Back when I installed Ubuntu 18.04 I shortly tried Fedora, but for as simple reason as I did not like the &quot;look&quot; I switched to Ubuntu and ran with it ever since.

Archlinux doesn&#x27;t even support Secure Boot. Fedora does, and so does Ubuntu, it is much more pleasant this way when dual-booting with Win10 or Win11.<p>Fedora does have a VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED Vulkan problem with Nvidia though that Arch does not. F34 or F35 can&#x27;t launch Wolftestein Youngblood from Steam on X11 session and errors out with VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED. Same system works on Archlinux and can even launch Youngblood in Wayland session.<p>Under Fedora I notice the following things:<p>- in wayland session vulkaninfo fails to run unless WAYLAND_DISPLAY is unset like so: WAYLAND_DISPLAY= vulkaninfo<p>- on Fedora with X11 session vulkaninfo randomly toggles between Mesa&#x27;s software lavapipe vulkan and nvidia&#x27;s vulkan implementation<p>- steam fails to launch a Proton game (Wolfenstein Youngblood) on X11&#x2F;Wayland with &quot;Startup failure: VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED&quot; message<p>- I hear you need to set Vulkan variable: export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=&#x2F;usr&#x2F;share&#x2F;vulkan&#x2F;icd.d&#x2F;nvidia_icd.json before running &#x27;steam&#x27;, I tried and it fixes running &#x27;vulkaninfo&#x27; so lavapipe doesn&#x27;t randomly activate but it had no effect on steam, still getting VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED<p>Vulkan on Fedora is absolute shit show.

I&#x27;m somewhat confused by the &quot;Power Modes&quot; feature ... it&#x27;s being introduced as a Gnome feature, but why would that be tied to Gnome? Isn&#x27;t it usable from other window managers&#x2F;desktop environments?

installer still doesn&#x27;t support root on zfs, i guess. there&#x27;s a &quot;guide&quot; on openzfs wiki but it only provides a suggested partition schema<p>ubuntu at least had a gui tool available in their last LTS, though it only worked for the gnome frontend.<p>nvme fronting a raid is really nice but btrfs and lvm&#x2F;mdadm options just fall short with write holes and other unacceptable failure modes.<p>kind of a shame because dnf is so much better than apt, and i&#x27;d like to play with silverblue.

I have this on a Microsoft Surface Laptop Go, and all the hardware &quot;just works&quot; right after install. Video, external video, touchscreen, sound, networking.

What&#x27;s advantage of Fedora over something like Arch?

If Fedora was rolling release, it would be a candidate for my daily driver.

Is Apple still the only company you can pay for both hardware and software support? Because all I want is to drop down a couple grand and never have to think about &quot;computer maintenance&quot; again. I maintain my car myself because it&#x27;s so infrequent (pretty much just oil changes) but it feels like my computer maintenance is constant.<p>One of the reasons for that constant maintenance seems to be The Web. Remember when you didn&#x27;t need 4 gigs of ram to browse the web? When you didn&#x27;t need a high-power 3D graphics card to look at Google Maps? (bad example but WebGL is mandatory for some simple sites, and if your graphics sucks&#x2F;doesn&#x27;t do hardware acceleration...)<p>I don&#x27;t remember ever having to upgrade my car every few years just to visit a new local business. At some point we need to admit that this constant tech churn isn&#x27;t improving our lives, but it is enriching some billionaires.

meh, Ubuntu is better