Fedora 34 - how are you finding it?

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been this excited about a new release. Fedora’s been doing some groundbreaking work of late, in my opinion, and I think the Pipewire + Gnome 40 in Fedora 34 could make this a memorable release!

Unfortunately my machine which I run VMs in usually is down so I’ve not been able to experiment with Fedora 34 yet, but would love to hear experiences of those who have!

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I did run Fedora 34 in a VM, but basically I like Fedora 33 with Dash-to-Dock better. I always need two clicks to get a programs started and with the dock I can do it in one click. I have two problems with Fedora 34;

  • Conky crashes and Ubuntu and Arch derivatives work fine with the same conky file.
  • It has issues with the display settings in Virtualbox, it always starts up in 800x600 display resolution, CTRl + F does not work, so you have to set the resolution through the display settings, but that is forgotten on the next boot or reboot. SOLVED after reinstall.

I also don’t like the way, they hide the codex for e.g. wma and some other file-types, it’s too fanatic Open Source in my opinion.
I don’t like that they compress everything in my Fedora VM, I run all my VMs on top of Ubuntu 21.04 on ZFS, so everything is now compressed twice. SOLVED reinstalled on ext4.

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I tried it in a vm and was really impressed, not enough to draw me away from pop but yeah it was really nice. I was especially surprised how many gnome extensions have been updated to work with gnome 40, way more than I was expecting. Its definitely one to watch.

I didn’t have any screen resolution issues in virtualbox either and the performance felt native. I didn’t try running any games though may some other time.

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Thanks for the detailed info! I found Fedora updated its kernel often and this didn’t seem to suit virtualbox or it guest additions, I think they’re called? That’s why I started running it in Gnome boxes, though I know configuration options are highly limited in that. I wonder how you’re finding audio if it’s defaulting to pipewire now?

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I’ve not tried Pop, but definitely heard great things about it. I think you’ll probably be getting COSMIC Gnome 40 version soon too then :slight_smile:

Having tried Fedora in a VM under both virtualbox and Gnome boxes, it seems that resolution aside, virtualbox does seem to provide smoother graphics, but it’s been a while since I tried it. I found Fedora initially is fine with full-screen resolution under virtualbox but broke frequently on kernel updates. If that’s no-longer happening, or happening as much, that would be progress too :+1:

Because of GNOME extensions and that they would need to be updated for GNOME 40 I have elected to not update to Fedora 34 until later in the year. Perhaps when the extensions I use are updated OR I find them no longer needed because of changes in GNOME 40. I am not an early adopter.

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I’m loving it, despite the rough upgrade from 33. I barely notice any difference, aside from the obvious GNOME 40 upgrade. Sound works as usual with pipewire and has been working perfectly so far. I literally don’t use any extension so no problems there. It’s business as usual despite all the changes and improvements.

On the graphical experience side, it’s quite refreshing. I love the touchpad gestures. Back when I was still using GNOME 3.38, I was a bit opposed to switching horizontal layouts when I heard of it but now that I’m actually using it, it makes sense. I think the GNOME team did a great job, design-wise, but that’s based on my personal opinion. I’m still bummed that you need to use Tweaks to switch between dark and light mode though. I’m looking forward to future improvements to 41 and onwards.

p.s. I’m loving the new Fedora logo. And the default desktop wallpaper is beautiful. I see no reason to change it.

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Yes I’ve heard about extensions breaking between versions. Hopefully all the ones you need get ported over.

As a Debian Stable user I’m far from early adoption too, but new technology becoming stable enough to use as default really excites me, hence Wayland, Btrfs, Pipewire and GNOME 40 all in one, seems pretty spectacular :slight_smile:

Thanks for the detailed feedback and especially pleased to hear it’s plain sailing! If Pipewire wasn’t working it wouldn’t be long before you noticed, I’m guessing! I wonder how long before other distros follow suit? Debian 11 is due soon and I’m already thinking about 12 :slight_smile:

It is defaulting to pipewire. In 2003/2004 I copied all my CDs and LPs to Windows Media Player, so 95% of my music is wma and I have to detect, how to get the wma codex installed. I have it working for Fedora 33, so I’m afraid, it has something to do with pipewire. By the way I still often use a Windows XP VM to play that music with TrueBass and WoW effects :slight_smile:

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Although my main computer is an AMD Ryzen, my video card is NVidia. Although this computer started out with an AMD video card, it was swapped out for the NVidia because all it did was freeze with Windows 10 or blue screen. Once the AMD card was gone, no more issues. But I since switched to GNU/Linux and can’t afford to change the card and pay this time. I’ve heard that Nvidia’s proprietary diver is not ready for Wayland yet. Another reason for me to wait.

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I can’t wait for the move to Fedora 34 mostly for Pipewire ! OBS and a couple other projects don’t et work with it too well, but that’s coming too. As for the OS itself, I run all apps (except Steam) through Flatpak so the upgrade is fairly smooth. This is kind of my way to say i have a Silverblue type experience :smile: .

As for Gnome, i’m the most boring desktop user in the known galaxy because I use the Desktop as vanilla as possible. I only have “Tray Icons: Reloaded” , and thats because of Flameshot and my VPN icon.
Gnome on Fedora is always vanilla that it’s basically GnomeOS development build barring a couple applications. Some people don’t like that… Some people don’t care. I will be trying the Fedora 34 i3 spin in the future. As for the underlying OS itself, I don’t/won’t use BTRFS so i could care less.

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I’ve had some glitches with pipewire where I’ve needed to restart the service manually and the volume has seemed a little low when watching movies occasionally.

Gnome 40, I’m still double tapping the super key after login because I’m not used to the overview being up initially.

The sway maintainer has a nice optional package (sway-systemd/README.md at main · alebastr/sway-systemd · GitHub) that adds some nice user session stuff and works with systemd-oomd.

For the most part I’ve been really happy with it.

Anyone looking for a different spin of Fedora 34 can go to the https://spins.fedoraproject.org/ page and find KDE, XFCE, LXQT, Cinnamon, Mate-Compiz, i3

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Alt Downloads if you want to do a minimal install. I use the Everything iso for this.
https://alt.fedoraproject.org/

Silverblue because it’s just cool and I need to try it.

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I’ve had it on my laptop for a few days, and overall I like it. Gnome 40 feels very sleek and easy to navigate. I’m looking forward to Ubuntu shipping Gnome 40 with a proper dock, appindicators, and desktop icons, because while I understand the “less is more” philosophy, sometimes you do actually have to have something.

On the Fedora side of things, well, it’s Fedora; I had to add RPM Fusion to get VLC, and installing the RPM of Vivaldi web browser didn’t automatically add their repo, so I had add that manually too. It also didn’t ship an archive manager, so the first time I double clicked a .zip file, it just extracted it right there, which is not at all what I expected. Now that I’ve jumped through those extra hoops though, I’ll keep it on the laptop for the time being.

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Fedora has been my daily driver since ~28, although on the Plasma spin (so the new Gnome 40 update on Fedora 34 doesn’t do anything for me). The 34 release has been more of the same; rock solid yet pushing the industry ahead! I haven’t noticed any difference in pipewire being the default (which is a great thing), and I was already using BTRFS compression, so I’m thrilled this is now the default and one less thing I need to adjust! These releases just keep getting better and better, kudos to the Fedora team!

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I hope you get it working then - this is the first anomaly of Pipewire I’m hearing so far, no pun intended :wink:

Hmm, must be annoying to have incompatibilities, then different incompatibilities with different OSes. Yes, as far as I’m pretty sure NVidia support for Wayland is absent. Hopefully the next PC I get will be AMD all round though. I used GNOME on Debian Stable (10) for a couple of years, defaulting to Wayland and it was almost flawless, but not quite. Let’s see how it runs on Debian 11, though I’ve switched to Plasma now and not sure what it’s support is like for Wayland.

Yes I think Silverblue and others like it are very interesting, as is the notion of not changing underlying system by using Flatpaks.

Sounds pretty good, odd glitches aside!

:+1:

I think this sums-up pretty well!

Thanks everyone for all your feedback. Sorry it’s taken me a while to figure-out it’s better to reply in one go using quotes! (Discourse actually gave me a pop-up suggesting it!)