 I am a very happy Fedora user and I have been now since July-ish or so. It's been six or seven months since I switched to Fedora and I have no intentions of switching away and I've become a bit of a fanboy about it if you've followed my channel for any amount of time. I really like Fedora, but I'm not one of those guys who thinks Fedora is perfect, right? I don't think anything is perfect and I think that everything out there can stand to do a little bit better. So what I wanted to do today was talk about five things I think Fedora could do better. Now the first thing I want to say is that this is not the video that I planned on doing today. I was going to talk about Regolith. I've been working on Regolith for the last two days, but that video did not pan out. The way I wanted it to, that will hopefully be tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. I will have a whole rant on that video about why things don't work out as planned, but that's just kind of a side note. The second thing that I want to note is that some of the things that are on this list that I'm going to be talking about today are things that Fedora is aware of and that they're fixing. So the stuff that I'm going to be talking about, or at least a couple of things that I'm going to be talking about are going to be fixed in the future. So I'll point those out as we go along. So the first thing that Fedora could do better is that DNF is slow and this is one of those things that they're aware of and that they're working on. So DNF is the primary package manager for Fedora and in terms of syntax and needs of use, it's very good. It's one of the best package managers out there. I think it's on level with apt, but it is slow, right? Out of the box, especially on first launch of Fedora, it's phenomenally slow. Like it's really, really bad. If you've gone through and done some optimization for DNF enabled parallel downloads, it does get faster. So it's not slow all the time, but it is one of the slower package managers. I don't think it's as slow as zipper, but it is slow. Now, like I said, they are working on this supposedly either in the, one of the releases this year or next year, they're rewriting the entire back end of DNF and it's supposed to be faster. So this is something that is going to be fixed. But as of right now, DNF is one of the slower package managers. And that's definitely something that I'm glad that they're working on. So moving on to the next one. And this one is that the spins that Fedora has. So they have these things called spins. Basically they're alternate versions of Fedora and they come with different desktop environments and window managers. They have several over them and they're all really good, but they're not very promoted. So if you go to their website, which we'll do so now, you'll get a page that looks like this and other than one brief mention, you won't see anything about spins on this website. You'd think that it might be up here in the additions menu, but it's not. All you have are the official versions in the additions menu. But if you want to see the spins, you either have to know the URL or you have to scroll all the way down here to where they had this one brief mention of spins. Now that's probably enough, but I wish it was more prominent. I wish they were more proud of the fact that they have these spins and a little less pushy when it comes to the main one. Now I understand why they are this way. So this is not something that I expect them to change. I just wish that the spins was a little bit more prominent and that they let people know about them a little bit more. Because they are kind of buried just a little bit. So I wish the spins were more prominent. That's the second one. The third one on the list is that they are very passionate about their lack of non-free software in their repositories and in their distros. So when you download Fedora, you're not going to get the Nvidia drivers. You're not going to get anything that's proprietary and a lot of distributions do this, but on Fedora, which is a very mainstream distribution, it can be a little bit annoying. Not that those packages aren't available, but that they aren't there to begin with or that they aren't easily installable right from the go. Like if you have an Nvidia system, you have to mess around with the open source drivers until you get all the way installed, enable RPM Fusion and then install the Nvidia drivers. They really don't have a mechanism for getting you to that point. You have to know the process or Google the process in order to get there. And obviously the Nvidia drivers are the big thing, but there are other places where this becomes a hindrance. So recently they disabled several codecs inside of Fedora on AMD drivers, which means that there are certain situations where the video rendering and video encoding on your system will go much slower than it used to. And they did this for patent reasons, right? Because they're not interested in having that type of code in their system, right? And there's really nothing wrong with this. And I don't expect it to change, but this is definitely a downside of Fedora in that you would have you have to be very proactive in your own management of that type of software. You have to go out and search for it and get it onto your system yourself instead of ever relying on any mechanism from Fedora to do it for you. So it's not a great system, especially for new users, at least when it comes to things like drivers, all that stuff is going to be put on the responsibility of the user instead of the distro. Now, again, I understand why they do this, and I don't expect it to change, but it's still something that everyone should keep in mind when they decide to use Fedora, all that proprietary stuff is going to be stuff that you have to go out and get instead of having any mechanism to get it before or after immediately after install. So that's the third one. The fourth one is another one that they're planning on fixing or rectifying. And that is that FlatHub is not enabled by default. Now, originally, from my understanding, they chose not to enable FlatHub by default because there is proprietary software on FlatHub. And as we just talked about, they don't care for proprietary software. So they just ignored FlatHub and had the user enable if they wanted to use it. So if you aren't aware, Fedora uses FlatPak extensively. And that's not really all that surprising, giving that FlatPak and Fedora are very related projects, right? A lot of the developers who work on Fedora also work on FlatPaks and the surrounding ecosystems. So there's a lot of intermixing there. So Fedora uses FlatPaks by default, but all of the FlatPaks that you can install by default on Fedora all come from Fedora itself. There's no access to the primary repository of FlatPaks, which is called FlatHub, unless you enable it yourself. And that's the way it is right now. Like I said, they are fixing this supposedly in Fedora 38. FlatHub will be enabled by default. What I don't know is whether or not that's going to be filtered at all. So like they have that problem with proprietary software. I don't know if it's going, you're going to get the full breadth of FlatHub or if there's going to be filters on it. I don't know. It's possible they'll go either way. But it is good that they are rectifying this, because if you're going to rely on FlatPak, you're handicapping yourself by not allowing users to have immediate access to all that software, because FlatHub has a ton of applications and not having it by default is not a good thing, because it requires the user to know that FlatHub exists. So if you're a new user and you figure out that FlatPak is there, but you don't know FlatHub exists, you might not be able to discover that any of that software is actually there available to you. The last one is that a lot of software is just not available. So I honestly didn't think that this was that big of a deal up until like the last week or so. I've been using Fidora for quite a while now. And for the most part, any application that I need is either an RPM Fusion, the regular Fidora repositories or in FlatHub. That's basically still true. But the more obscure stuff, especially when you're dealing with like window managers and Waylon window managers in specific, you know, a lot of the stuff and dependencies that they need are just not there, which means you have to build the stuff yourself. And the problem with building the stuff yourself is that they all, the things that you need to build often have dependencies that are even more obscure than the things you're trying to build. And that means that you're probably going to have to build those dependencies as well. And it just, it's kind of a, it's a rigmarole. It's a very hard and very tedious process to have to go through these obscure things. Now, this is not going to be a problem for a lot of people. If you're just using mainstream software, you're going to have a grand time and you're going to be able to get any piece of software that you need from either FlatHub or the Fidora repositories or RPM Fusion. It's when you start exploring into the more esoteric stuff, like say for example, Hyperland, where you'll become, it's a little bit more of an issue. Now, there is a solution for this that they have. It's called Copper. And that's a AUR-like collection of repositories that has some of the more obscure libraries and stuff like that. But it's not as full as the AUR and the discovery is atrocious. Like it does have a search on it, but you have to, first of all, you have to know the exact package name to search or at least close. And the website is horrifically slow. It's like really, really bad. So discovery on Copper is not that great. And not everything is there anyways. So, and some of the stuff that is there is phenomenally old. So you may not be able to use it even if the thing you are looking for is there. Also, and this is another problem with Copper, is that they don't require descriptions. So a lot of the stuff that's been uploaded has been uploaded for quote-unquote personal use and they allow that. That's perfectly fine with their rules. But that means that the person who uploaded it doesn't have to put a description. They'd have no obligation to say what that package actually is. Even they don't even have to put the right name if they don't want to. They can do whatever they want. It's basically the wild, wild West. And if that's the way they wanna run it, it's fine, but it does make it really hard for users who come in after to kind of discover any packages that are on there for, especially when it comes to more obscure libraries, right? Obscure dependencies I should say, right? So that the idea behind Copper is to solve the problem and not enough software being available, but it's imperfect. So I hope that that is something that they continue to work on. Because honestly, I really do like the idea of Copper, even though it's a little bit too PPA for me. But it works fairly well when you discover something. So like for example, for ages, I3Gaps was not in the Fedora repositories. You'd have to go to Copper to get it. And I'm glad that that was there, right? That saved my bacon for ages over the last seven months. And now that I3Gaps has been merged into regular I3, it's not that big of a deal. But previously, I was very happy that Copper existed. I just wish that it was better. So those are the five things that I think that Fedora could do better. And like I said, two of them for sure, they are definitely working on. So I'm glad that that's happening. So I don't want this to come off as I'm bashing Fedora at all because everyone knows that I truly like Fedora. I just wanted to point out a few things that I think that they could definitely do better. And I think that overall, they do a really good job of ensuring that their distribution just works very, very well. So good job, Fedora. Keep it up, guys. I'm gonna continue to be a big fanboy. That is it for this video. If you have comments on any of this stuff, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linus Cast. Links for Liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube because we're all absolutely amazing without you. The challenge is to not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.