back to article Fedora 39 waves goodbye to modularity, but has enough spins to make your head spin

Fedora Linux is released when it's ready, so two decades plus one day after its debut, the latest version is here, with lots of new goodies. Nearly a year before the first Ubuntu release, the first edition of Red Hat's new free Linux distro, Fedora Core 1, appeared on November 6, 2003. There were a few delays to the release of …

  1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

    It was the move from Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora that made me shift to Ubuntu as the OS on my primary systems. It was the relentless pressure of upgrading Fedora that I couldn't stand. The LTS cadence of Ubuntu was much more appealing for my working system.

    Still there (just) after 20 years. Don't like Snaps or Systemd. Looking at other distros including Devuan, Slackware and even non-Linux OS's like FreeBSD now.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      If you want neither snap nor flatpak but want Ubuntu, Zinc is great.

      If you want to banish systemd as well, try MX Linux.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        banish?

        (You might want to check MX Linux's policy on systemd, and then revise either your word choice or your OS recommendation.)

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: banish?

          Yeah, if you really, really want to avoid systemd, I'd be wary of any Linux distro, no matter their current stance. There's always a chance that someone, somewhere will get sick of having to work around systemd and give up, and if that happens to be the Linux distro you jumped to, you're shit on all over again.

  2. simpfeld

    I used Test on the latest Fedora

    I used to test Fedora on my company's enterprise environment (AD, NFSv4, WiFi etc) and home desktop, and reported issues back to Red Hat in the hope of getting these fixed before they became issues on new RHEL releases. I was a large RHEL customer. I used to benefit personally by having CentOS/Rocky at home. Nice symbiotic relationship.

    Now with being called a freeloader and worries about the viability of essential 3rd Party Repos on RHEL, I see no reason to help RH improve their distro, given they are freeloading off my efforts!

    Home is now Debian 12 Servers and Ubuntu based.

    1. danielfgom

      Re: I used Test on the latest Fedora

      I couldn't agree with you more.

      Red Hat have totally broken the Free Software principle of being to redistribute software unchanged, and on top of it called Free Software user's, "free loaders".

      Every Linux user should boycott Fedora/Red Hat/IBM altogether and no longer be their beta testers nor customers. They can get lost and pay for all their beta testing!

      Good choice with Debian 12. I elected to use Linux Mint Debian Edition and couldn't be happier.

      Debian is the grand daddy of Linux and bastion of free software. Far more noble then Red Hat will ever be.

      Don't forget Red Hat works with the NSA, the antithesis of Free Software principles and the enemy of free society everywhere.

      Who cares that Red Hat made billions when they've turned out to be scumbags?

      I CALL ON EVERYONE WHO TRULY APPRECIATES FREE SOFTWARE PRINCIPLES AND FREEDOM OF COMPUTING TO STOP USING CORPORATE BACKED LINUX OF EVERY KIND AND USE ONLY 100% COMMUNITY DISTROS.

      1. Mockup1974

        Re: I used Test on the latest Fedora

        I fully agree with everything you said. My new laptop is arriving next week and I'll be installing OpenSUSE rather than Fedora.

        (edit: ok in fact I fail compared to your last sentence, because OpenSUSE is also corporate backed)

  3. Joe W Silver badge

    I really do not get this...

    "It's also ahead of Ubuntu in the number of editions with alternative desktops, with 11 official spins."

    Yeah... why do you need that? Why can't you just install a meta-package to pull in the DE of your choice, or jut an easy way of getting th packages installed? Why does there have to be a separate "spin"?

    1. demon driver

      Re: I really do not get this...

      From my limited experience in trying several DEs in Ubuntu, my impression is that DEs tend to either really look and feel like the spin/flavour, or be post-installed as a metapackage, with the latter often also causing changes to the look and feel of the original DE, in case that was supposed to remain able to be switched to at will. Too much potentially interfering things under the hood.

      1. corb

        Re: I really do not get this...

        In addition to using metapackages to add/remove DE's, etc., to existing installations, Fedora offers a 0.6gig network installion "Everything" ISO that allows picking components to install in a fine-grained manner: DE's, window managers, dev tool sets, office apps, etc. E.g., if you want something that's completely different from Gnome and the other releases, you can do it.

        A Fedora SIG has for a very long time released updated ISO's -- "Live Respins" of Gnome and the spins wrapping up all the previous updates. It's a nice, reliable way to install Fedora later during a release cycle and avoid most of the inevitable long stream of Fedora updates that happen when you install from a release ISO some time after release day. The ISO's are available on Fedora's infrastructure at https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/live-respins/.

    2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: I really do not get this...

      [Author here]

      > Why can't you just install a meta-package to pull in the DE of your choice,

      You can. Exactly as you can on Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, whatever.

      But having it ready-made is easier if you know what you're doing and what you like, because you can just get it, ready to go and with less effort.

      And it's easier if you _don't_ know what you're doing, because you can just try them all in VMs, or go for the mainstream default option, or read a few reviews and pick the one that sounds like you'd like it.

      So everyone wins.

      1. Martin J Hooper

        Re: I really do not get this...

        Liam were you running the Wayland session of F39 Plasma on Virtualbox?

        I find that the Wayland session works but there is a lot of screen tearing and incompatibilities.

        If you change the session to Plasma on X11 it works fine and I've had no problems with running F39 Plasma other than that.

        The choice of session is right on the bottom left - It says "Plasma (Wayland)" by default.

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: I really do not get this...

          I wasn't able to get as far as installing it. This is the live boot environment, over which you have no control of session type.

          FWIW the GNOME, Xfce & LXqt live ISO versions all worked fine.

          1. Martin J Hooper

            Re: I really do not get this...

            Have you tried the Everything Net installer?

            https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/39/Everything/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Everything-netinst-x86_64-39-1.5.iso

            It downloads the packages from the mirrors before you install... That's the one I used to install and it works just fine.

    3. gombosg

      Re: I really do not get this...

      This is entirely possible via dnf groupinstall. Each DE has its own package group. See official docs here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-administrators-guide/package-management/DNF/#sec-Installing

  4. Peter X

    Childish I know

    I know it's childish/I'm childish, but the borked KDE screenshot says:

    Ur Fdbck

    ...and it amused me. That is all. :)

  5. druck Silver badge
    Flame

    Money isn't everything

    Maybe Debian only having half a million in the bank is why they have never paid anyone to write stuff as shit as systemd and gnome 4.

    1. danielfgom

      Re: Money isn't everything

      Ha ha! Brilliant! Your naked it.

      Don't forget SELinux too....

  6. Code For Broke

    Fedora sucks lemons. Haberdashery's Bowler 1923 is far and away the most handsome Linux distro.

  7. gombosg

    Just upgraded...

    Great user experience! Seamless upgrade both on my laptop and my desktop. For the first time in years, I was able to start Wayland on my Nvidia desktop GPU. Played some games etc. Of course this is not Fedora's achievement per se, but great to see the progress.

  8. JoeCool Silver badge

    God do I miss Douglas Adams

    Such a gifted writer, his prose was sharp and smart.

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