 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 891, 9 November 2020 |
Welcome to this year's 45th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
How people organize their desktop environments is a very personal choice. Some people like a screen full of icons, others want a blank desktop that only holds windows. Some people like lots of status updates and notifications while others want a quiet space without distractions. In our Questions and Answers section this week we talk about one way to organize application windows that sorts them into tabs. What do you think of Material Shell and its tab-like approach to windows? Let us know your thoughts in this week's Opinion Poll. In our News section we talk about Arch Linux gaining accessibility options on the distribution's install media along with an enterprising user getting the Linux build of Chrome running on FreeBSD. We also report on CentOS 6 nearing the end of its supported life. First though we share a review of Fedora 33, a fresh new release that features cutting edge hardware support and version 3.38 of the GNOME desktop. Joshua Allen Holm shares his opinions on the latest version of Fedora. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of this past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a terrific week and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: Fedora 33 Workstation
- News: Arch install media gains accessibility options, FreeBSD can run Linux build of Chrome, CentOS warns version 6 nearing end of life
- Questions and answers: Treating windows like tabs
- Released last week: ArchBang Linux 0111, Emmabuntus DE3-1.03, UBports 16.04 OTA-14
- Torrent corner: Absolute, ArchBang, Archlabs, Arch Linux, Bluestar, Emmabuntus, LibreELEC, Pardus, SparkyLinux, Voyager Live
- Opinion poll: What do you think of Material Shell?
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (11MB) and MP3 (8MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Joshua Allen Holm) |
Fedora 33 Workstation
In late October, the Fedora project released Fedora 33 in several different versions. Workstation, Server, and IoT (Internet of Things) are the three core releases. Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Silverblue are considered emerging editions. There are also several spins and variants that feature alternate desktop environments or are tuned to a specific task. I will be focusing on Fedora 33 Workstation for this review.
Fedora 33 Workstation introduces two interesting new features: Btrfs as the default file system format and swap on zRAM, the later of which was already in use in Fedora IoT. The rest of the updates include the usual refresh and polish of everything. Fedora 33 Workstation ships with version 5.8 of the Linux kernel, GNOME 3.38, and all the various applications and development tools are the latest versions.
Installing Fedora 33 Workstation
I began by copying the Fedora 33 Workstation image to a flash drive and rebooting my computer. The release notes mentioned that there might be a problem with Secure Boot, but I left Secure Boot enabled to see if I would have problems, which I did. I then reset my computer to use the factory keys and then I could successfully boot Fedora 33's live image with Secure Boot enabled.
Fedora 33 -- Live desktop with Welcome to Fedora window
(full image size: 2.4MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Secure boot issue sorted, the system quickly booted to a live desktop environment with a Try or Install dialog. I selected the Try option so I could look around first. Once I was done looking through the various aspects of the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment to see what had changed, I started the Anaconda installer to begin installing Fedora 33.
Fedora 33 -- Anaconda installer
(full image size: 161kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
In Fedora 33, Anaconda handles only part of the installation experience, so there are very few options available. Keyboard, Time & Date, and Installation Destination are the only three things the user can adjust at this stage of the installation. Of those three, Installation Destination is the only one that has any real complexity. However, for the purposes of this review, I selected the automatic partitioning option in order to try Fedora 33's new Btrfs defaults.
Fedora 33 -- Initial setup wizard
(full image size: 1.8MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
To complete the installation process, I rebooted the computer. When the desktop environment loaded for the first time, GNOME's Initial Setup wizard ran to complete the installation. There were a few privacy options to configure related to location services and automatic problem reporting. Then the setup wizard created a new user, which has administrative privileges, and set the password for that user. There is no prompt to configure a root password, so it is not possible to log in as root unless the user sets a password for that account later.
Fedora 33 -- Welcome tour
(full image size: 1.9MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
After the setup process has completed, a much improved version of the GNOME Welcome Tour pops up. This tour shows the basics of the GNOME environment like the Activities overview and the notification area. After viewing the tour, I was finally ready to start exploring Fedora 33's GNOME 3.38 desktop.
Fedora 33's GNOME desktop
As much as I wanted to try out the various enhancements to GNOME, the first thing I did was open the Disks applications and some command line utilities to see what the new Btrfs partition scheme looked like. I was pleased to see that I would no longer have to deal with the frustratingly small home partition that I would get stuck with when using the default options in previous Fedora versions. I would still have to deal with making sure not to fill up a tiny 64GB drive, but I could now download large ISOs without running out space in a partition despite having a large amount of free space available on the drive. There are not any tightly integrated graphical utilities to take advantage of Btrfs's advanced features, but just the switch to the Btrfs is a massive quality of life improvement over Fedora's old default partition scheme for me.
Fedora 33 -- GNOME desktop showing applications
(full image size: 2.0MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Exploring the rest of the GNOME desktop, I found a familiar experience, but with a few new enhancements. It is now possible to manually sort the applications displayed in listing of installed applications. However, this change makes manual sorting necessary if you want to have the applications alphabetized. I have always sorted the applications I add to the dock by task (web browser & e-mail client, office applications, IDEs, and miscellaneous utilities), but I always liked having the full list of applications alphabetized. Now, every single time I install a new application, I need to manually drag it into alphabetical order. Even the Utilities application group that is created by default does not have the items in it alphabetized. If there is any rhyme or reason to the default ordering of the Utilities applications, I cannot see it.
Aside from the nice, but needs an auto-sort option, application sorting feature, GNOME 3.38 is really polished. From a graphical/user experience perspective, everything is just a little nicer than GNOME 3.36. Not so nice that a user must upgrade immediately, but certainly nice improvements for those that do upgrade.
However, not everything in the Fedora 33 desktop experience was perfect. I will admit my computer is a fairly weak machine with not a lot of RAM, but I found myself dealing with constantly crashing Firefox tabs and notifications that Evince crashed after exiting the program. Both are probably related to the way Fedora handles running out of RAM, but I did not have this problem in Fedora 32, and other distributions using the same releases of Firefox and Evince are not displaying any problems. I am hoping this will be fixed at some point, but right now it makes using Fedora 33 rather annoying.
Default software selection
The default software selection of graphical applications included with Fedora 33 Workstation is very slim. Basically, Firefox, LibreOffice Calc, LibreOffice Impress, LibreOffice Writer, and various GNOME utilities are the entire list of pre-installed applications. LibreOffice is at version 7, but for some reason Fedora 33 does not have icons for LibreOffice Draw and LibreOffice Math. It is still possible to access to those parts of LibreOffice by opening one of the included LibreOffice components, closing the document, and selecting a new Draw or Math document, so I have idea why they decided to remove the icons for those applications. Maybe some advanced features are missing from those LibreOffice components, but the document types are still listed as options, unlike the Base component, which is disabled. Installing the libreoffice package using dnf creates the icons for those two applications and installs the LibreOffice Base component. In earlier version of Fedora, installing the libreoffice package only added the Base components and a few other extra features, so I am not sure why they decided to remove the Draw and Math icons.
On the command line, Fedora 33 comes pre-loaded with a selection of development tools. Fedora also includes podman and tools for working with containers as part of the default package selection. One other change on the command line is that nano is now the default editor. In previous version of Fedora, nano might not even be installed if certain package groups were not installed.
Installing additional software
GNOME Software is the graphical application provided to install additional applications. On the command-line, the dnf command can be used to install addition RPM packages and flatpak can be used to install Flatpak applications. However, the Flathub repository is not included by default, so the only Flatpak applications available are a small list of applications provided in a Fedora Flatpak repository.
Fedora 33 -- GNOME Software
(full image size: 438kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
As is typical when I use Fedora, I had to install the RPM Fusion repositories and enable the Flathub Flatpak repository. However, that is only to gain access to a few packages. The amount of packages available for Fedora is very large. Were it not for some codecs from RPM Fusion and Zotero from Flathub, I could easily use just the software packages in Fedora's repositories.
I was extremely happy when I found out that Fedora 33's repositories contain packages for RStudio (both the desktop and sever version) and GnuCOBOL. I use both of the those all the time and usually have to download the RStudio RPM directly from the project's website and compile GnuCOBOL myself, but Fedora 33 lets me install both of those things right from the Fedora's repositories.
Final thoughts
Fedora 33 is the first time I have ever been frustrated with a Fedora release. From the Secure Boot issue to the constantly crashing Firefox tabs, this release of Fedora was not a pleasure to work with. It was not awful, but it was no where near what I have usually experienced from a Fedora release. I am sure all the issues will be fixed eventually, but, for now, I have a hard time recommending Fedora 33. Maybe people with better hardware will have better luck (the Firefox issue does seem to be related to not having enough available RAM), so try Fedora 33 out, if you are a Fedora fan. Maybe things will have improved by the time they put out a possible point release to deal with the Secure Boot issue, but nothing to date has fixed any of the issues I had when working on this review.
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Hardware used in this review:
My physical test equipment for this review was an ASUS VivoBook E406MA laptop with the following specifications:
- Processor: Intel Pentium Silver N5000 CPU
- Storage: 64GB eMMC
- Memory: 4GB of RAM
- Networking: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
- Display: Intel UHD Graphics 605
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Visitor supplied rating
Fedora has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.3/10 from 352 review(s).
Have you used Fedora? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Arch install media gains accessibility options, FreeBSD can run Linux build of Chrome, CentOS warns version 6 nearing end of life
The Arch Linux team has announced that, starting with the project's 2020.11.01 snapshot, Arch installation media will offer accessibility options. David Runge posted the news: "We are very happy to announce that accessibility features have been added to our installation medium with archiso v49. From release 2020.11.01 onward these are available via the 2nd boot loader menu item. A specific installation guide can be found on the wiki. Many thanks go to Alexander Epaneshnikov who integrated the features from the TalkingArch project into archiso's releng profile, which is used for creating the installation medium. Note: The boot loader timeouts have been set to 15s to allow blind users to select the menu item as the boot loaders themselves do not offer accessibility features."
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One of the interesting features of FreeBSD is the operating system's ability to run Linux programs. FreeBSD mostly maintains compatibility with Linux functions, allowing many Linux programs to run semi-natively on FreeBSD. There are some limitations though. FreeBSD support lags a little behind recent versions of Linux and the compatibility layer is typically based on CentOS which is conservative in its software versions. Even with those restrictions, one FreeBSD user managed to get the Linux build of the Chrome web browser running on FreeBSD. The lengthy setup instructions have been posted on the FreeBSD forum.
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The CentOS team posted their monthly newsletter this week. One of the items in the newsletter is a reminder that CentOS 6 is nearing the end of its supported life. People still running the 6.x series should upgrade before the end of November. "This is your final warning that CentOS 6 will be designated 'End Of Life' on November 30th. After that time, it will receive no more updates."
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Treating windows like tabs
I recently came across a technical support thread where the poster was looking for a way to organize application windows together where each window had a tab, similar to the way web browsers group open pages. These tabs would, ideally, be stored inside their own window. This would result in applications nested inside another window, accessible by tabs. The question intrigued me and so I did a little looking around for possible approaches to treating program windows like tabs. Sadly, the thread was taken down by a moderator so I am unable to reference it here, but I would still like to share what I found in case anyone else would like to organize their windows this way.
The first thing that came to mind was task switchers which will group similar applications under one icon. This does not arrange windows into tabs, but it does group them together. This can save screen space and unclutter the task switcher bar. Unfortunately, this approach usually just groups multiple instances of the same application, meaning it won't help if you have a bunch of unique applications running.
Grouped Konsole windows in KDE Plasma, running on Garuda Linux
(full image size: 861kB, resolution: 1326x691 pixels)
Another approach which was dug up from memory was the way some Microsoft Windows applications used to have multiple windows inside the main window. Now this only worked for one application which needed multiple views or documents, much like modern browsers have tabs for their pages. It does not really apply to multiple applications running at once, just one application keeping multiple documents open. Apart from programming IDEs I do not think I have encountered this behaviour on a Linux distribution.
A classic mIRC window containing channel windows
(full image size: 496kB, resolution: 720x540 pixels)
The approach which seems to best follow the idea of arranging applications like browser tabs is offered by Material Shell. While it does not arrange the tabs for applications inside another window, it does arrange the tabs neatly across the top of the screen, similar to browser tabs. Material Shell is available as an extension to GNOME Shell and gives the desktop a minimal look while presenting applications as tabs across the top of the screen.
Running the Material Shell extension in GNOME
(full image size: 156kB, resolution: 1320x691 pixels)
The Material Shell allows users to treat the whole desktop as a window, in a way, with each program presented as a page in a tab, much the same way moderns web browsers present websites in tabs. It is a neat concept that is fairly easy to adjust to using.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
ArchBang Linux 0111
ArchBang developer "mrgreen" has announced the release of ArchBang Linux 0111, the minimalist, Arch Linux-based distribution's first stable release after the recent switch from Openbox to i3 as the preferred window manager. From the release announcement: "November release, i3 tiling window manager based. Have just uploaded a release for November, usual thing - updated packages and configurations. The guide can now be viewed by using Super + g; it includes some basic keybind shortcuts in i3. Firefox is back for now; while huge, it does support many features that other lighter browsers do not have. Minor changes in abinstall fixes to remove installers from Conky post install." The switch from Openbox to i3 was initiated a couple of weeks ago: "ArchBang has been Openbox-based for over ten years. Over the next few weeks I will be working towards switching to i3 tiling window manager. It might be a little different at first but once you get used to it, you will never look back."
ArchBang Linux 0111 -- Running the i3 window manager
(full image size: 3.0MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Emmabuntüs DE3-1.03
The Emmabuntüs project provides a lightweight distribution based on Debian for lower-end computers. The project's latest release is based on Debian 10.6 and features the Xfce and LXQt desktop environments. "Concerning the 1.03 version, the following fixes and improvements were made: Based on the Debian 10.6 Buster distribution. Addition of the OEM install mode via Calamares. Addition of Warpinator. Addition of the zram-tools utility. Update of Multisystem 1.0451, dated Oct-03-2020, with the Emmabuntüs DE 4 support, and addition of a specific theme for the reuse campaign. Updates of: HPLip 3.20.6, Firefox ESR 78.3.0, Thunderbird 78.3.1, TurboPrint 2.50-1, VeraCrypt 1.24-Update7." The new version also includes some cloning options for OEM providers. Further details along with screenshots of the new OEM options can be found in the project's release announcement.
UBports 16.04 OTA-14
The UBports team have announced the launch of Ubuntu Touch 16.04 OTA-14, the latest version of the project's mobile operating system. The new version introduces support for more devices, updates driver and hardware support, and a number of interface improvements were made: "At the beginning of each development cycle, we decide what our main focus for the cycle is going to be. For OTA-14, we chose to focus on Android 9 support. We believe this will help power the launch of our sponsor's Volla Phone delivering it as a daily driver into the hands of its new recipients. This was largely a success: We were able to fix issues with swiping apps away to close them, Ratchanan did quite a number on camera support, and external display support with HardwareComposer2 now works. Given the OTA-14 development cycle was only 34 days, we believe this was a huge success. That's not all, though: Outside of our team's 'new development' commitments, we also merged many changes and translations from our volunteer community." Additional information can be found in the project's release announcement.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,213
- Total data uploaded: 34.6TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
What do you think of Material Shell?
In our Questions and Answers column we talked about the Material Shell extension for GNOME which treats application windows on the desktop like web browser tabs. What do you think of this approach to organizing and switching between applications?
You can see the results of our previous poll on which offers the better experience, Wayland or X.Org in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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What do you think of Material Shell?
| I tried it and like it: | 50 (5%) |
| I have not tried it but like the idea: | 274 (27%) |
| I tried it and did not like it: | 31 (3%) |
| I have not tried it and do not like the idea: | 305 (31%) |
| Neutral/Undecided: | 337 (34%) |
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| Website News |
New distributions added to database
Snal Linux
Snal Linux is a small Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. It features the i3 window manager and it includes the Firefox web browser, as well as a handful of network and filesystem utilities. It is intended to be used as a live image to troubleshoot hard disk, system and network problems.
Snal Linux 1.0 -- Running the i3 window manger
(full image size: 193kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 16 November 2020. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Fedora (by vern on 2020-11-09 00:11:36 GMT from United States)
I've always liked Fedora, I just wish they had an LTS version. I don't like re-installing the OS all the time.
No nothing about Material Shell. First time I ran accross it. Maybe try it sometime.
2 • Fedora (by Pumpino on 2020-11-09 01:21:29 GMT from Australia)
I too had issues with Fedora 33.
I upgraded a VPS from F32 to F33 (yeah, I know, Fedora isn't the best choice for a server, but it's been running for years). Dovecot refused to deliver mail, despite running and me not having changed the config. Log files were reporting unknown errors, which made it impossible to diagnose. I promptly switched to CentOS 8.
On a laptop, a fresh install of F33 XFCE took around 10 seconds to open gFTP. I use gFTP frequently to copy files across my LAN, so it was frustrating. I restored my Xubuntu backup (Clonezilla) and haven't looked back.
3 • Fedora: surprise you end up "frustrated", "not a pleasure". (by Steve on 2020-11-09 01:21:57 GMT from Poland)
Gee, all through thought you liked it, had me interested! Please write more better.
However, as for trying it: what you list is several times faster and twice the RAM as my top, so HMM.
4 • Re: Fedora (by Pumpino on 2020-11-09 01:21:29 GMT from Australia) (by Pumpino on 2020-11-09 01:24:12 GMT from Australia)
Sorry, that should say "retrieve" mail. Postfix was receiving it, but dovecot wouldn't allow me to use IMAP via webmail or Evolution.
5 • fedora (by Mike Johnston on 2020-11-09 01:42:52 GMT from Canada)
It's unfortunate that this release doesn't allow for fractional scaling like previous releases. I am using the plasma edition and it's great, but the only valid option if you want proper scaling.
6 • Fedora 33 (by Jorge on 2020-11-09 01:54:59 GMT from Argentina)
Tengo Fedora 33 con una notebook similar a la de la prueba. La diferencia es que tienes un disco rígido demasiado chico. Como mínimo necesitas un HD de 128GB para que el sistema tenga un buen rendimiento.
7 • fedora 33 (by maek on 2020-11-09 02:15:11 GMT from Tajikistan)
Gave the Mate spin a try over the weekend and for me it is a keeper.
Great things Fedora has include the ability to downgrade openjfk11 (sound very broken) to openjdk8
Try that in Ubuntu or Debian and it is an exercise in frustration.
The bad;
One surprise is that after many apps and tabs open (including vmware)
the system froze and had to be manually restarted. I guess I ran our of RAM and zswap couldn't help
I thought Fedora had early out of memory (earlyoom ) protection by default but maybe that is only for the non-spin version.
I had to download eatlyoom and am in the process now of seeing if it stops memory freezes.
Another you can do is to add a traditional swap parition in addition to the zram swap as a kind of backup
8 • Tabbed applications and Material Shell (by Andy Prough on 2020-11-09 02:59:22 GMT from United States)
I would just use Fluxbox, Jesse. The tabbed window manager. Much more efficient than trying to force a big desktop like Gnome into that behavior. And it does it in a window - much more efficient than the way Material Shell does it. Plus it has auto-grouping, so your applications can be configured to automatically group together into tabbed windows when you launch them, based on your preferences of which applications you prefer to group together. MX has a nicely setup MX Fluxbox version for those wanting to explore this window manager.
9 • Fedora 33 (by Tech in San Diego on 2020-11-09 03:23:59 GMT from United States)
I too agree with Vern. Coming from an Arch background, I've been looking for a stable distro that I can just "set it and forget it". I've tried several Debian/Ubuntu distros but their either to "fat" or have kernels/applications that are 2 to 3 versions behind Arch. One promising note was openSUSE 15.2 with it's use of the BTRFS file system, but I could never get the Plasma desktop to stabilize. Fedora 33 also looked promising so I gave it a whirl only to have disk (fsck) and memory issues. I have plenty of RAM, 16GB, but after letting it run at idle for 24 hours it showed an increase in memory usage from 700MB TO 1.1GB. Memory leak?
For now I will stick with Arch and put up with having to reboot my system with each kernel update.
10 • Window group (by koko on 2020-11-09 06:10:22 GMT from Norway)
I replaced Openbox with PekWM some time ago.. which infact have had this window grouping option for years. https://github.com/pekdon/pekwm
I really hope it does not get forgotten as it's a realy nice WM.
11 • Fedora 33 (by Joe on 2020-11-09 06:58:50 GMT from Switzerland)
I'm running Fedora 33 XFCE on a older desktop (10+ years) and is runnig really good. I have never used Fedora seriously, and it seems to me this is the first time Fedora is working good on my hardware. So I will keep it.
@1 why reinstalling? You can just upgrade.
12 • @1 & 11: upgrading Fedora (by Hoos on 2020-11-09 07:37:22 GMT from Singapore)
I agree with @11. Fedora's upgrade path works really well and I've been doing so across more than 10 releases. However, I never upgrade immediately when the latest release come out.
As seen from Jesse's review, there tends to bugs and problems that need time to be ironed out. I usually wait for about 3 months before upgrading. As I use Gnome with Fedora, this will also give the developers of the gnome shell extensions I use some time to update their extensions for the latest Gnome if necessary.
13 • Fedora 33 (by Ron on 2020-11-09 08:00:02 GMT from United States)
I was a happy Fedora user until Fedora 33. I tried to update my Fedora 32 Xfce system to Fedora 33 and now have a brick. Cannot even reinstall Windows 10 or any other distro on the machine. Getting ready to ship it back to Dell for their techs to reinstall Windows on the machine. If anyone has some suggestions on how to recover from a black screen telling me that no operating system found I sure would love to hear from you. I've tried lots of things as suggested on the Internet but alas, to no joy. (Including third party software). My dell machine is an Inspiron 7472 with 256gb SSD and 8gb memory. Thanks.....
14 • To Joshua Allen Holm's Fedora33 reviews (by Csaba on 2020-11-09 08:50:10 GMT from Hungary)
Joshua Allen Holm:
"However, not everything in the Fedora 33 desktop experience was perfect. I will admit my computer is a fairly weak machine with not a lot of RAM, but I found myself dealing with constantly crashing Firefox tabs and notifications that Evince crashed after exiting the program. Both are probably related to the way Fedora handles running out of RAM, but I did not have this problem in Fedora 32, and other distributions using the same releases of Firefox and Evince are not displaying any problems"
You must create an swap partition. I have experienced similar ones and the swap partition solved the problems.
15 • Fedora as a server (by LiuYan on 2020-11-09 09:15:39 GMT from China)
@2 Me too, Fedora as a non-critical server running for several years.
In Fedora 33, I'd disabled earlyoom service (which is enabled by default) or uninstalled earlyoom package completely, because it brings more troubles than benefits, killing process silently is not a good idea for a desktop user, data will be lost if you're not telling me you're going to kill my process which you think it's not in the avoid list.
Look at the content of /etc/default/earlyoom file
#-------------------------------------------
# Options to pass to earlyoom
EARLYOOM_ARGS="-r 0 -m 4 -M 409600 --prefer '^Web Content$' --avoid '^(dnf|packagekitd|gnome-shell|gnome-session-c|gnome-session-b|lightdm|sddm|sddm-helper|gdm|gdm-wayland-ses|gdm-session-wor|gdm-x-session|Xorg|Xwayland|systemd|systemd-logind|dbus-daemon|dbus-broker|cinnamon|cinnamon-sessio|kwin_x11|kwin_wayland|plasmashell|ksmserver|plasma_session|startplasma-way|xfce4-session|mate-session|marco|lxqt-session|openbox)$'"
#-------------------------------------------
The avoid list is not enough.
16 • Fedora 33 (by Joe on 2020-11-09 09:18:20 GMT from Switzerland)
@12 How about skipping one release and upgrade to the next one? Have you tried this possibility?
17 • Fedora (by Hank on 2020-11-09 09:19:32 GMT from Switzerland)
This version of Fedora is a buggy mess. Typical example of why users try linux and give up.
I am an experienced user, Fedora was redirected to 0.0.0.0
For those who do not know what I mean, I formatted my disk.
Gone to a debian based distro which is showing none of the irritations and usability issues.
No wonder it is at 1 in DW popularity.
18 • Live disk? (by Sergio on 2020-11-09 11:07:56 GMT from Brazil)
@13 Hi Ron. Did you try to boot a live system (USB or DVD)? Yours seems an issue with GRUB that could maybe be easily solved.
Post your question in a user support forum like linuxquestions.org or Fedora's forum and you can be better helped.
19 • Windows as tabs (by Martin on 2020-11-09 11:50:16 GMT from Czechia)
As Andy Prough wrote, if you want windows as tabs, just use a window manager that is designed for it, like fluxbox or i3.
20 • tabs, windows, or desktops (by fonz on 2020-11-09 12:32:34 GMT from Indonesia)
as others have stated there are a few WMs (window manager) with that built in, no need for extensions that might break sometime down the road. i prefer fluxbox since its just boring, i only need a system/tray icon thing for the usual stuff. or just use multiple desktops the way most WMs have already built in? i honestly think thats the easiest solution, with some WMs supporting multiple displays for different desktops.
last weeks review brought some more hope for gaming on linux. i do hope it makes a much bigger splash for devs to port to linux than steamOS made a long time ago. hence a big reason i prefer a boring desktop, i do need all the resources i can get for gaming and browsing...
21 • GNOME (by Chris on 2020-11-09 14:18:14 GMT from South Africa)
I have never liked Gnome. I prefer LXQt or KDE Plasma.
22 • Windows as tabs (by Jim on 2020-11-09 14:20:42 GMT from United States)
I also endorse the advice given by users to use WMs with tabbed windows feature. Tabbed windows, and Tint2 have become a "killer" feature that I simply cannot work without. After MUCH experimentation, I have settled on Fluxbox and PekWM as my preferred #1A and #1B favorites. As an added bonus, both have floating "root" menus that can be customized EXACTLY how I want them. Perfect for my tastes. I'll take "Customizable Options for individual user preferences in Linux" for the WIN, Alex (RIP)!
23 • Fedora 33 review (by Almost a Linux hater on 2020-11-09 14:36:48 GMT from Brazil)
@ Jesse Smith:
“Fedora 33 is the first time I have ever been frustrated with a Fedora release.”
:-D
Are you kidding? An operating system that can run 'out of memory' in a computer with plenty of RAM (but without a swap partition) is nothing else than TROUBLE. Fedora is truely a nightmare!
As a testbed for RHEL, it's essencially alpha/beta software with no guarantee of either stability or usability. Better call it RedHat's Proprietary Technology Playground. Its sole purpose is create an environment for people like Mr. Poettering try new weapons to destroy the Linux world.
Look at Debian/Arch/openSUSE and so many distros now living in the dark side after adopting systemd (and some other 'gifts' from Red Hat) just to reflect the shiny 'modernity' of Fedora. I'm waiting for the day when even Slackware will do it with pride.
At least, Fedora is not boring anyway. There's a lot of (bad) surprises in every edition... What will come next? Systemd as a 'dependency' of the Linux kernel?
And I want to express my sadness with the fact that reviewers forget to examine some of the most interesting distros (which then keep lost in obscurity) because they waste too much time giving attention to monstrosities sponsored by multimillion dollar companies, namely Canonical and Red Hat.
Such a tragedy made me flirt with FreeBSD/GhostBSD to recover my sanity. I'm pretty sure they will never become a bloody mess like Linux!
24 • Fedora 33 (by César on 2020-11-09 14:42:29 GMT from Chile)
¡Hola!
The big responsible for all the bad, troubles and malfunctions is Gnome...turns any distro into a big lame brachiosaurus climbing a vertical ladder...only problems for this and that, the arcane and the mundane, only problems and more problems.
I tested Fedora 33 with Mate as the default desktop and it does not present any performance problems, for package handling I use DNFDragora or dnf in the console, it works well, fast and without crashes.
Try Fedora but don't use Gnome, use any other desktop environment or window manager.
Greetings from Santiago de Chile.
25 • Fedora 33 memory handling (by Ivan on 2020-11-09 16:54:08 GMT from United States)
I have a computer with 8GB of RAM and am using Fedora 33 as my daily driver.
I don't see Firefox tabs crashing, but on a couple of occasions Firefox itself has been killed by EarlyOOM, and it is a bit annoying. I would rather have occasional Firefox crashes than having the system freeze for several minutes, but I wish I could have a more reasonable compromise.
Apart from that it works fine for me - almost as well as Debian, in fact - though on a <4GB RAM system I'd use something other than GNOME (maybe IceWM).
26 • Fedora 33 - CUPS failure (by Gerhard Goetzhaber on 2020-11-09 17:12:08 GMT from Austria)
Though not being that foolish to ever install Fedora - as any Linux I operate - with anything else than Xfce as desktop environment (MAYBE KDE, but never ever Gnome) and XFS as my only file system (great all over) I do see Fc33 as useless for far:
Since Fedora always builds in just latest versions of any software as a principle by its own Fc33 among other actualizations uses most recent Cups - what is deeply woven into each Linux system and the version applied therefore not to be changed. So I had to recognize this new edition of Fedora no more being able to connect to my Canon LBP7100Cn printer while it's propriatary driver has worked best with all other RPM-based systems as well as Debian derivatives I've been experiencing till now.
What is an operating worth for daily work without the ability to print out and to scan in documents? As a consequence, I will stick with OpenSUSE and (for emergency) CentOS (8.2+) as my only favoured systems (Debian & Ubuntu, on the other side, lack sufficient scanning features) from now on ...
27 • Fedora (by Cheker on 2020-11-09 17:13:22 GMT from Portugal)
One thing I forgot to mention last week regarding my Fedora testing is that the window is not resizing automatically. So I uninstalled VMWare tools, installed it again from the VMWare ISO, aaaaand that didn't make a difference. So it won't auto-resize, I don't know why. I wonder if Virtual Box would show the same behavior.
28 • VBox (by Any on 2020-11-09 17:46:37 GMT from Spain)
@27 Try changing the Graphics Controller type from the display options of the virtual machine. VBoxSVGA works fine in most distros in my experience.
29 • @Joshua | Fedora 33 - Firefox 82 - Wayland (by whoKnows on 2020-11-09 17:53:27 GMT from Switzerland)
"I will admit my computer is a fairly weak machine with not a lot of RAM, but I found myself dealing with constantly crashing Firefox tabs and notifications that Evince crashed after exiting the program. Both are probably related to the way Fedora handles running out of RAM..."
Not necessarily. I'd bet on:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/101434
https://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-package-announce/msg297753.html
* I never experienced that crash personally - Not in VM nor on the physical HW.
30 • FTP & Fedora 33 (by whoKnows on 2020-11-09 18:15:16 GMT from Switzerland)
@2 • Fedora (by Pumpino)
"On a laptop, a fresh install of F33 XFCE took around 10 seconds to open gFTP. I use gFTP frequently to copy files across my LAN..."
I didn't use XFCE on Fedora for many, many years, but under Gnome3 I use Filezilla. There's also Taxi, which is very interesting FTP application. Maybe you could check if they are options for you.
31 • Auto-Resize (by whoKnows on 2020-11-09 18:47:35 GMT from Switzerland)
@27 • Fedora (by Cheker)
@28 • VBox (by Any)
Since approx. April, "nothing" works as one would expect in VBox 6.1.X.
Auto-resize works only randomly, bridged networking works or works not ...
However, I didn't try to find the culprit yet.
The problem is that Ubuntu 20.04 and Fedora 33 came out after the April and now it's hard to say: "Everything worked fine before in VBox 5.2.X ".
It worked fine until then, but it worked with Ubuntu 18.04 and Fedora 32.
One thing makes me wondering though - the problems with networking and resizing are not bothering my XP, 7 and multiple Windows 10 VM's. Kinda "Linux only".
32 • Tabbed Windows with i3 (by Matt E on 2020-11-10 02:35:48 GMT from United States)
The i3 window manger can present the windows with a tabbed interface.
https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html
33 • Fedora (by James on 2020-11-10 11:22:01 GMT from United States)
It has been years since I tested Fedora, and I have become a dedicated debian based OS user since then, but it lacked the software I wanted or needed at that time.
34 • Fedora 33 secure boot issue (by whoKnows on 2020-11-10 17:28:54 GMT from Switzerland)
It surprised me though, that Joshua had problems with secure boot.
I have a very similar "junkbook", "funbook" or whatever you wanna call such thing, but the secure boot worked without any issues since Beta. I rechecked again today, with a final release, but it worked fine again.
Processor: Intel Pentium Silver N4100
Storage: 64GB eMMC
Memory: 4GB of RAM
Networking: Intel Corporation AC 1550i
Display: Intel UHD Graphics 605
35 • OS Fedora > BTRFS. (by Yuri on 2020-11-10 23:29:10 GMT from Russia)
Hi.
To those who use F33:
that you think about BTRFS in F33 it self and compared with BTRFS in OpenSUSE?
36 • BTRFS (by whoKnows on 2020-11-11 06:44:09 GMT from Switzerland)
@35 • OS Fedora > BTRFS. (by Yuri)
"To those [of you] who use F33: what do you think about BTRFS [implementation] in F33 [on] itself and compared to BTRFS in OpenSUSE?"
This is a wrong place to ask that question, because in most cases nobody here is using it - exact same case like if you would ask what somebody here thinks of systemd. Comparing BTRFS with EXT4 (or systemd with old inits) is like comparing your bicycle with a 1000 cc motorbike.
"Btrfs is a copy-on-write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features including error detection, fault tolerance, recovery, transparent compression, cheap snapshots, integrated volume management, and easy administration. It provides multiple device storage pooling, RAID-like functionality, fast snapshot creation, and checksumming of data and metadata."
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Btrfs
BTRFS has many useful features incl. the deduplication ...
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Deduplication
... which are extremely useful if you're Amazon, Facebook, Google ... system administrator, but the average user will either not notice any difference or run in trouble, like the OP here.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/170044/btrfs-and-missing-free-space
The thing here is, just how many ordinary people with their 64 GB SSD in the laptops will "rebalance" their filesystems? Just as with systemd - none.
https://ohthehugemanatee.org/blog/2019/02/11/btrfs-out-of-space-emergency-response/
One of the problems in Fedoras implementation of BTRFS is that it doesn't offer any GUI and it renders it more or less unusable for the vast majority of its (average home/desktop) users and despite having such advanced file system installed, most people will still need some backup tools to make a backup, even if the file system is already doing in on its own.
https://fedoramagazine.org/recover-your-files-from-btrfs-snapshots/
This shows us again, that Linux is made by the big companies, for the big companies, and if you're not a knowledgeable system administrator, you've no use for what is theoretically much better. Again exactly the same case as with systemd.
37 • @ #36 (BTRFS) (by Yuri on 2020-11-11 12:06:07 GMT from Russia)
whoKnows thank you very much.
Simply, I find it strange, that RH no longer supported BTRFS in RH and make it as default FS in Fedora.
38 • Treating windows like tabs (by randominternetwhiteguy on 2020-11-11 19:58:40 GMT from Argentina)
Take a look at herbsluftwm and Notion (Not ION :)
39 • +Frustratingly small home partition" (by whoKnows on 2020-11-12 17:17:28 GMT from Switzerland)
"I was pleased to see that I would no longer have to deal with the frustratingly small home partition that I would get stuck with when using the default options in previous Fedora versions. I would still have to deal with making sure not to fill up a tiny 64GB drive, but I could now download large ISOs without running out [of] space in a partition despite having a large amount of free space available on the drive."
When I was reading this part of the review, it seemed to me like a positive improvement, but is it so?
If you are the only user, using your laptop only for yourself, then yes.
However, if you're sharing it with your partner and/or child, then no.
(Because now you get less available space for another users 'home'.)
With this remark, I only want to stress the importance of excluding the personal "iView" and try to see it "God-like" - "from above", from the neutral and unemotional perspective - "as is".
As I wrote last week - every single thing that has some advantage, has some disadvantage too.
It's not always developers mistake - they can't know how you'll be using it.
My way of dealing with too small 'home's was always:
sudo mkdir /example
sudo chown $USER:$USER /example
sudo chmod 755 /example
sudo ln -s /example ~/$USER/example
This has the advantage of having the folder as big as the amount of the free space on the disk, without modifying the partitions sizes.
40 • Ma (by R. Cain on 2020-11-13 15:22:46 GMT from United States)
'Material...' WHAT?
Apparently 2/3 of your readers ("did not / do not like": "undecided")--out of a grand total of 900 respondents--feel the same way.
41 • Material Shell and the like... (by Friar Tux on 2020-11-13 19:05:15 GMT from Canada)
@40 (R Cain) For me, it's a case of 'why?'. Everything you open has an icon on the panel/taskbar. Even when I open two or three instances of a program/app, I can bounce between them by clicking the one I need. It makes tabbed windows irrelevant. I would prefer something like I had years ago in Windows 95/XP - a set of tabs/'drawers' that hung down from the top of the screen in which you could keep your most used programs/apps or most used documents, music, or graphics. (Can't actually remember the app name.) I kept all my documents in the Office Drawer, all my wallpapers in the Pictures Drawer, etc.. I haven't found anything similar in Linux, though it doesn't matter, as the Cinnamon DE allows me to place a second panel along any screen edge with shortcuts to anything on my laptop. Quite convenient.
42 • distro tests (for me) (by occasional.tester on 2020-11-15 07:54:11 GMT from New Zealand)
Interesting week. I have tried MX in the past, so tested up the 19.3 KDE edition. Reviews I find, can be biased or incomplete. My list for what I look for in a distro (with comments/notes):
* actually works without fuss on my hardware, whether off DVD or USB media. [MX ok, Mint Ok, Manjaro some small issues]
* smooth installer with sensible inputs and not a spiderweb of over-options. [all top3 distros check Ok]
* cosmetic bonus - installer ejects (DVD) at the end of the install. [mostly USB nowadays as laptop makers dumped the disc drives]
* first-start post-install not too complex. (eg Emmebuntus fails this one - cobwebs of options]
* sensible default software and fonts. [debian/ubuntu/etc suffer from 96% useless to me fonts, NO consideration of locale during install in this regard]
* ease of installing what I want and not having to remove too much crud. [I want to be up and productive today, not next week]
* version of Python - still 2, or 3. [Python2 support ended in January 2020. Manjaro are on 3, I have to recheck my Mint install, but the brand new MX is 2.7.4 - NOT 3 as in the software list on DW!]
* versions of sofware that I do use are reasonably up to date in the repos. [forget ppas or AUR]
* the DE has to be intuitive. [Cinnamon, KDE and MATE get 5 stars, the others exist why? my 2c]
* the file manager HAS to be up to standard for a power user. [Nemo, Caja and Dolphin pass this test] - dual pane, sane key shortcuts (not suddenly alt-F11 to add a new tab or other homebrew oddities)
* the picture viewer has to be sane and feature rich. No auto-indexing though, which many KDE softwares suffer from. The Mint team's 'pix' is the right balance, GiMP for heavy lifting.
Well, these are some of the things I look for and at when evaluating a distro. Wallpapers are bling and I have my own photos anyway. It could be interesting to read what other folks look for when someone comes along and says "ooh, new shiny distro, please try it."
43 • Distro tests (by Otis on 2020-11-15 22:06:55 GMT from United States)
@42 I like your post, the spirit is the same for me (disagree about DEs loving XFCE as well as Mate).
This comments area will refresh pretty soon.. hoping you can answer: Have you installed on your hard drive anything that you keep going back to?
Number of Comments: 43
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
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