For those who don’t know Fedora is an independent distro that is used as a base for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and recently Fedora has undergone a major update.
This new update includes things like GNOME 42 which itself contains things like a new system wide dark mode, and a new screenshot/screencast tool that you can access with Printscreen, but it also has some other cool features too.
The Noto Font is now used for foreign non-Latin based languages which fixes some issues where fonts would be rendered inconsistent, and NVIDIA users finally have Wayland support. You heard me right, the default session for NVIDIA users even with the proprietary driver is Wayland, which means if you are a NVIDIA user you can now finally try Wayland.
This is in no means everything that has been updated or changes in this release. For that I’d recommend you checkout the links below. This is my review, covering the Pro’s and Con’s of Fedora as an operating system.
Fedora 36 Release: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-36/ Download Fedora: https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/
Pros
Fedora always ships with the newest packages for pretty much everything while still being impressively stable. Fedora has a system for testing things called Bodhi where they test packages just to make sure there’s no major issues before pushing the updates. This allows Fedora to still have very update to date packages while still being very stable. However since it is a fixed release distribution it is able to hold back major updates for core system components until the next major release to prevent needing to fix everything as your system is still going, so you only need to fix things on a full distro upgrade.
Fedora is also known for being very bleeding edge for shipping new features. Some examples include Fedora being the first distro to ship SystemD which is now the defacto init system for most Linux distros. And Fedora has also been one of the first to ship things like Wayland, BtrFS, and Pipewire, which are things that a lot of Linux users agree are very good but still not fully adopted yet, especially by distros like Ubuntu.
Fedora is also a distribution that ships very vanilla packages by default. For example, GNOME on Fedora only includes 1 extension for branding and no custom theme. You can also install any Fedora Spin, and you may notice possibly 1 branding change and no other changes to whatever desktop environment you want to run. This is a nice break from all of those bad distros that are just Ubuntu or Arch with a theme on it, and even distros like Ubuntu ship a bunch of bloatware on top of GNOME that just slows it down.
Fedora has it’s own thing very similar to PPAs and the AUR where anyone can get their own repo to make their own packages for Fedora. It’s very easy to make a package and put it up on COPR and you will find a quite a few projects on COPR thanks to how easy it is to make a package for it
Cons
However has good as Fedora is, it does have some minor shortcomings.
A lot of people complain about how slow Fedora’s package manager is and a lot of the Fedora community just shrugs it off. But it’s true DNF is a very slow package manager, even compared to slow package managers like APT. To me though, the slowness doesn’t matter too much because DNF is very powerful and also does things automatically like updating the repo data without needing to run a command like apt update, a future version of Fedora may address this with MicroDNF which could bring some performance improvements, but this won’t be for a good while.
Another issue is that Fedora has very strict guidelines about shipping non-free software which makes it so you need to install a third party repo for basic packages. Packages like NVIDIA Drivers and Media Codecs as well as common applications like Steam and Discord do not ship on Fedora’s repositories and you need to get these packages using a third-party repo called RPMFusion which can be a bit hard to setup.
Conclusion
Overall Fedora 36 is a very very good distribution and while this release didn’t add too much. It is a very polished distro that ships a lot of newer features and new packages while still being amazingly stable.
This article was co-written with PizzaLovingNerd
