
Fedora, the distro that has been on the bleeding edge and leaving the users to do most of the bleeding. Now, in Beta form with warnings!
(Sorry, it's an old joke, but still holds up well).
The beta version of Red hat's Fedora 37 is available for download – but it's still far from finished. Back in April we looked at the beta of Fedora 36, but the final shipping version came out rather later than planned. It looks like the Fedora Project is aiming to avoid this happening again, since the beta of next month's …
Hey Liam! Just a few notes:
"new to version 37 are CoreOS and Cloud Base editions as well"
Just to be clear on this, CoreOS and Cloud have been part of Fedora for many releases now. What's new in F37 is they're getting official Edition status (back, in Cloud's case). CoreOS was previously an "emerging Edition", which is what we call things we're pretty sure we want to be Editions in future but aren't ready yet. Cloud was an Edition for some time, then was demoted in favor of the former Atomic Host (which is now basically CoreOS), now its maintainers made a case for it to be an Edition again and that was approved.
Editions are the 'flagship' products, kinda - the thing we direct you to if you just want Fedora. The things at the top of the download page.
"The Reg FOSS desk spun up the GNOME version under VirtualBox for a quick look, and it was a bumpy ride. The installer crashed repeatedly, especially at the disk partitioning stage. Once we finally coerced it into installing, we tried to update it using the Software app, but that crashed too.
We tried to send a bug report, but the bug reporting app crashed as well. Even updating from the shell using dnf update failed...To install, you have to click through a warning that this is an unfinished version, and we suggest you take that very seriously."
This is not normal at all. We definitely would not knowingly ship a beta in this state, it is not supposed to blow up all over the place. We're fine shipping beta with little polish issues or unfinished things, but nothing that severe. It's gone through quite a lot of testing and we absolutely didn't see anything like that. We don't block on or really test on VirtualBox, though, since we don't control it, so if there's a bug in VirtualBox we can't really do a lot about it.
Did you try on a different virt system, or on bare metal, and see the same thing? Is there anything unusual about the VirtualBox config you deployed on? How much RAM did you give it? It definitely needs at least 2G, 4G would be safer for a desktop install (though 2G shouldn't blow up all over the place). I'll try and install on vbox tomorrow here and see how it goes.
Thanks for the clarification re CoreOS and Cloud Base editions.
Re installing the GNOME beta --
I have a fairly standard VM config for distro testing, which I have mentioned a few times in the past.
I create a new VM every time, with a descriptive name. So, calling it Fedora makes VBox create a new VM of type " Linux" with subtype "Fedora, 64-bit".
The default RAM allocation is just 1GB but I give it 4GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores, which I do for all 64-bit distros.
I enable 3D acceleration on the default graphics adaptor, `VMSVGA`.
As Fedora is not a lightweight distro, I gave it 16GB of virtual disk.
When installing, I accept defaults as far as possible. VBox defaults to BIOS rather than UEFI, so F37 tries to create a BIOS_BOOT partition and then a root Btrfs volume. It failed. I tried creating the partitions for it; it failed. I re-ran the installer hoping it would use the partitions it created last time; it failed.
So, I deleted the VM and tried again; on about the 4th attempt, it succeeded and completed the installation.
GNOME Software failed to update, showed and error, then crashed. Bug Reporter opened, asked if it could upload 2.5MB of data. I said yes, but it asked for a Fedora Bugzilla access key. I don't have one (I think!) so I clicked Cancel. It crashed, then reopened, and now the bug report was 25MB. I gave it permission and it crashed again. 3rd time around, it succeeded and uploaded the crash data. It was then automatically rejected because it did not contain enough useful information.
`dnf update` failed with package download errors on a Linux firmware package. I cleared the cache and retried. Same error. Rebooted, retried again. Same error.
So I did:
`dnf upgrade -y a*`
`dnf upgrade -y b*`
...etc etc. Manually for all 26 letters. Under `l` the Linux firmware package gave errors but everything else completed.
*Then* I did `dnf update` which said there was nothing to do.
Rebooted and since then no more crashes.
Any more info I can give you, please let me know.
Wow, that definitely sucks, sorry for the trouble. It's a bit baffling because we've definitely not had any other reports of things being that crash-y, and we're definitely testing stuff like installing to BIOS and making sure the installer doesn't fall over. So there's definitely something odd going on, but your config doesn't sound out of the ordinary at all.
I didn't get around to trying it on vbox yet myself, but I really will do by end of day...I hope...sigh.
On the key thing - there's been a security push on RH Bugzilla which means API consumers aren't allowed to let you just log in with a username and password any more. You have to use an API key. You can create these from the web UI, go to your user preferences page and click "API keys" - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=apikey should be the link. It is kind of a pain, honestly, but hey, Security(tm). If the tool didn't explain this clearly enough, that's bad...I'll have to take a look at exactly what that dialog says, if I get time.
How is nouveau in this release?
My pc (approx 2 years old, i3 cpu without onboard graphics plus low-end nvidia gpu) won't boot from Fedora 35 or 36 usb media. When I last needed to reinstall back in June after disk failure I had to boot / install Fedora 34 and upgrade.
After installation / updates nouveau "works", but is flaky enough so I end up using the proprietary drivers instead.
Well I fired this up using Linux virtualisation and it worked flawlessly, so this is probably a bug in virtualbox, I've always found virtualbox to be crash-tastic on beta Linux installs where Linux virtualisation is always stable.
Gnome is still awful, differently awful than before but still awful. The new text editor has even less options than before more icons without labels and having to hunt for line numbers is obnoxious, the system tray, you click an icon and it brings up options for all of them not the one you clicked, with more options like "Balanced" and no explanation I know its probably a power saving option but the average user isn't going to know this nor are they going to want to mess about with it, if its a desktop set balanced if its a laptop set power save its not complicated.
Then we have applications with stupid names like "connections" which is remote desktop as it turns out and needs three intro slides to explain what it is. The file browser is still bad and can't give the directory size in a useful place, nor can you right click and create a text file, and file open/save dialog still can't sort folders first!
The Gnome devs have serious curse of knowledge problems. At least I can now right click on desktop and find the option for changing screen resolution!
Fedora 37 Cinnamon spin is a delight as always though apart from some of the gnome based issues like the aforementioned open/save dialog
This post has been deleted by its author
So, see my question above.
When F37 ships, or indeed, when Ubuntu 22.10 ships, can our highly-esteemed readers arrive at a consensus on which desktop(s) I look at?
Fedora has one of the biggest selections there is.
I personally like Xfce. I have tried Fedora MATE on bare metal, and it's quite nice, but doesn't work well on widescreens IMHO, and all my vaguely modern laptops are widescreen now. I am not especially fond of KDE but I try to give it regular coverage. I haven't looked at KDE 5.26 yet.
LXDE is very static now because its primary developer has moved on to LXQt.
I can maybe do 2, but not really more.
So, which?
I agree with this, but I wonder if the author is trying to avoid the normal, "oh god its packing Gnome as default" which perhaps means that distro developers should take a long a hard look at their default offering assuming that those people who hate Gnome are in the majority, if we're the just the vocal minority then as long as they provide alternatives then that's fine.
Personally I think the only way to make the Gnome developers take note that their desktop is crap is for it to relegated to alternative desktop environment status