Fedora 34 review — The innovative distro
Out of all the Linux distributions that you can download, Fedora seems to be a very interesting project, and I think Fedora 34 is the perfect representation of the vision the Fedora developers seem to have — a distro that brings all the new projects and innovation that the Linux community have to offer into one stable, and very fast OS.
Installation
The Fedora 34 installer is, in my opinion, one of the best installers out there. It’s very fast — you can be up and running in a short few minutes and it’s quite intuitive. I like that account setup is done after first boot — it declutters the install process and generally makes it easier. The installer only really asks you to select the disk and timezone, and after that, it just installs the system! I think that’s a great way to do it and I’ve never seen that done before.
First boot
Once you boot the machine, the first thing you see is the gorgeous GNOME 40 desktop — more on that later. Since I installed it on my machine for this review, I had to set it up for daily use. I have to say that was very simple to do. Installing Nvidia drivers was a breeze, simply enable the RPMFusion repository, and quickly install the Nvidia driver package. After that just switch from Wayland to X11 in the login screen… and as easy as that you have Nvidia drivers installed.
Installing applications is also fast and intuitive — For GUI users gnome software is available and works well from my experience, and for terminal users, DNF is very simple to use and works quite fast. As for other packaging methods, Appimages work well, Flatpak is installed and enabled by default, but it seems Snap isn’t. If you do need Snap you can easily enable it though.
The innovation
All of the things I mentioned are important, but I don’t think they are why people seem to love Fedora so much. I think people love Fedora because of how innovative it is, and how it uses all the new software.
Fedora 34 is the first distribution to release with GNOME 40, for example. GNOME 40 is interesting because it has switched from the vertical layout of GNOME 3, which confused some new users, to a more traditional horizontal layout.
I think this new layout works great! coming from a window manager it took some getting used to, but once I did it just… flows. It really does work well. It also brings to the table new trackpad gestures, which work really well and are a nice addition to the desktop workflow.
One big thing to note about GNOME 40 is that not all of the GNOME extensions have been updated to work with GNOME 40 yet, so if you have some extension you can’t live without, make sure it’s been updated before switching.
Another project Fedora includes by default is Wayland — the display protocol meant to replace the old X11. Fedora has been shipping Wayland by default since Fedora 25 in 2016!
Sadly because I have an Nvidia card in my machine I could not thoroughly test Wayland. But from what I have seen the project has matured a lot since it began, and it seems to be getting better and better, so keep an eye on it!
Finally, the last major new development Fedora 34 ships with is Pipewire, a project that aims to improve video and audio in Linux. PipeWire allows screenshotting and screen sharing on Wayland, and unifies JACK and PulseAudio streams. The cool thing about PipeWire is that it doesn’t force developers to rewrite their code with PipeWire in mind, and instead, it supports both JACK and PulseAudio applications. From my testing, it works wonderfully.
Final thoughts and verdict
Fedora seems like a really cool project, and I think with the Fedora 34 release they ticked all the right boxes, making Fedora 34 one of the fastest, prettiest, and innovative distros I have ever used. I believe the Fedora devs have done an outstanding job on this release, and strongly encourage you to try it out, even in a VM. Have fun!
