 One of the Linux distributions that I always have to take a look at every time they have a new release is fedora Fedora is really a giant among Linux distributions one of the more popular desktop Linux distributions out there and fedora Although it's a it's a community distribution, but really it has a corporation behind it That's pushing a lot of its development. Of course, I'm talking about red hat, which is owned by IBM But you know fedora was really interesting because they really push a lot of innovation They do things like butterfs as the default file system for example Wayland as the default display server on desktop environments that are able to handle that which forever has been just GNOME, but now plasma has gotten to the point where Fedora now has Wayland by default in both the GNOME edition and their plasma edition today I'm going to take a look at the recently released Fedora 34 with the new GNOME 40 desktop environment So this is going to be my first impression not just of Fedora 34 But also of GNOME 40 because I've actually never taken a look at the new GNOME. So I'm actually pretty excited about this Let's see what I think. So let me switch over here to my desktop and I'm gonna run through an installation of Fedora One of the things about Fedora. I don't use Fedora that often. I typically install Fedora about once a year Every time they have a new release. I'll install it and I always have problems with their installer It seems like every single time I go to install Fedora I have an issue with their installer not that their installer doesn't work It's just I've always found the anaconda installer rather confusing So I'm hoping that maybe they've changed some of the the installer You know the way it works. We'll see so I'm gonna install to hard drive here and That should launch anaconda for us and we wait and We wait now there we go. All right, we have English us selected as our language So that's correct for me. So I just click continue. All right English us has been selected for the keyboard So I don't need to change that so I can skip that step time and date Looks like the central time zone in the US has already been selected for me again I don't need to change anything so I'll skip that step Installation destination. So this is where we choose our drive where Fedora is gonna be installed. Now, this is a virtual machine I'm installing this in today and in this virtual machine. There's only one virtual hard drive. So that's the only one to select build to save Okay, no disselected. So did I I thought I clicked it the first time I think this is one of those things. I always have an issue with is you actually have to like click it twice If you click it too many times, yeah, anyway, I'm gonna click done. I hope that worked that time May have clicked it too many times. No, I think that was it and then begin installation Yeah, it's creating the butter FS file system. I'm gonna pause the recording until this portion of the installer completes All right, and that portion of the installer has completed that took about 10 minutes for that portion of the installer And then I'm gonna click finish installation. We never did create a user name or set a password or anything like that So I'm assuming we'll take care of that maybe after the reboot and the machine is rebooting See how long it takes to boot up here. Of course Fedora is a system D distribution Let's see. Welcome to Fedora 34. All right Now we have this start setup screen here And this is where we can do things like decide if we're going to do any kind of automatic Bug reporting. I'll turn that off for this VM location services. They don't really need that Turned on in this VM as well. I'm not gonna connect to any online accounts here I do need to create a home user. My home user is gonna be called DT and Click next and then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user Then click next All done start using Fedora. All right And it says welcome to Ganon 40. Do I want to take the tour? I probably should since I don't really know anything about Ganon 40 It says get an overview press the activities. I mean, it's a nice little slideshow I thought it would go into a little more detail Yeah So really not much of a point to that slideshow about Ganon 40 if I'm being honest first things first Let's see if I can get a proper screen resolution. So if I hit the super key Would that actually bring up a menu while it brings up this but it used to I thought we would get a list of our apps Or maybe I need to click this button here. I'm again, I'm not that familiar with Ganon. I really haven't used Ganon extensively Since the Ganon two days, I never really used Ganon 3 So obviously I don't know anything about Ganon 40 either, but I'm assuming if I search for display I will get Display settings and I can change the screen resolution to a more appropriate 1920 by 1080 resolution here Yeah, let's keep those changes and close this window here. Yeah, that looks a lot better So other than hitting this super key to get this Overview if I click activities here so I can either click that with the mouse or just hit the super key to get the same menu I will say the menu Does a show and hide rather smoothly here in this VM now for those of you that are going to try to install this in a VM here Inside vert manager. I'm using for a video driver. I'm using the vert IO driver by default vert manager I think uses the QXL driver. That's a little sluggish with Ganon and Waylon So you try to use the vert IO driver and when you do that actually the animations, you know Everything does seem to work rather smoothly. Let me pull up a terminal here And of course, this is going to be the GNOME terminal. How do I zoom in here? I got to remember the key bindings for zooming in and out here and let's do a uname Dash R and they are on one of the latest kernels here. So this is kernel version 5 dot 11 And if I pull up htop htop is not found. Well, let's do a sudo DNF install htop All right, and then give it our strong and complicated password I'm going to go ahead and fire up htop and check system resource usage before I start opening any other programs because This will be a lot closer to what it would be on a cold boot because I really haven't done anything other than open the terminal All right DNF has synced the repositories. It's found htop wants to know is it okay to install htop Yes, I'm not sure why it asks yes or no for that because I specifically asked it to install htop So why ask me again? Yes or no because I wouldn't have typed sudo DNF install htop if I didn't really want htop All right, so we are using right at one gig of ram of the four gigs of ram that I gave this VM Which is normal for GNOME. That's always been normal for GNOME 3 As it uses about a gig of ram on a cold boot and that's what GNOME 40 is also using We're not really using any cpu at the moment, but then again, we're not really doing anything That would require any cpu now Let me get a package count as far as the number of packages pre-installed on fedora 34 Now on debian base distros and ubuntu base distros you would do apt space dash dash list space installed in dnf you do dnf Uh list no dashes just dnf space list space installed And I believe that will give us a list of everything installed and then of course to get a line count Let's pipe that through wc, which is the word count program and give it the l flag for line count So that list has 1695 lines in it. That means there's 1695 packages installed out of the box on fedora 34 Actually 1694 because I specifically installed htop So I would say fedora 34 is definitely not a bloated distribution That's actually not that many programs installed out of the box and going to this menu here I mean everything that's installed fits on one screen, although we do have this utility sub menu here Which has nine things in it so but still not a lot of stuff installed I mean we have some of the standard gnom applications gnom contacts gnom weather Which is rather interesting little weather application So if I wanted to search for weather and I wanted to search for I don't know chicago I'm not actually in chicago. I think you guys know that can I actually get that I gotta specify chicago illinois And then we get I guess our hourly forecast does it do any kind of like five day forecast or anything like that? I'm sure it does. I think you got to click daily here Now we get the weekly forecast very cool Yeah, not a bad little weather app and going back into the activities menu here We also have the gnom clock utility gnom maps gnom photos gnom videos And let me click on the little help screen here And this is videos also known as totem. So this is the old totem program Now gnom has renamed a lot of their programs to where they use rather generic names like contacts maps Videos but the actual name of the program is totem So if you launched this from a terminal or from d menu or rophy or something like that You would actually specify totem as the name of the program to run Getting back into the activities and then into this menu That's kind of convoluted to get to your applications menu where you have to do two separate actions Because I would like I mean in most desktop environments and window managers anything that has any kind of application menu Built into it. Typically you hit the super key and right away You're looking at a list of applications, but in this case, I'm actually looking at I guess virtual desktops here In this first menu where really I think the default screen for this really should be the applications themselves That's that's a little weird. That's definitely different than the way everyone else does it and different doesn't necessarily mean bad But in this case, I don't like it Of course, that was the genome calculator a fine calculator The text editor is your standard text editor for uh, the genome desktop environment, which is g edit This is g edit 40 dot zero A very nice plain text editor g edit is actually rather extensible There's a ton of plugins out there that you that are available for g edit You can actually turn it into a a rather nice code editor for those that Prefer a more traditional kind of text editor than you know, as opposed to something like vm or emacs Also under the applications, we have our document scanner settings Now the settings is like your control panel And this is where you have all your settings for system stuff like network bluetooth Notifications power settings the display settings where I changed the resolution earlier We can add and remove users a date and time and all of that Of course, the most interesting thing in the settings manager is actually the background settings because I want to check out some of the wallpapers that are installed out of the box here in fedora 34 because You know the wallpaper pack is the most important thing and I will say the wallpapers Just looking at this wallpaper pack. I've seen most of these wallpapers before I think a lot of these are older wallpapers. They've used in earlier editions. I know I've seen this one here This wintery one before Uh, yeah, I've seen this one here the rocks in the sand here And now this one that they're using by default may be something new and I actually kind of like this abstract art They're going with let's try this one here. That's a little darker. Now since we're using a very dark Theme here. It's almost a black theme for the genom shell theme. You probably want a lighter wallpaper So, you know, something like that is a nice contrast So a light wallpaper with a dark theme really makes You know, everything pop out. That's a really nice photograph as well. How about this one? Just a wheat field and then looks like we have some colored pencils. That's interesting too I'm going to go back to the default wallpaper for now Getting back in the applications. We also have the genom system monitor, which is your graphical system monitor I typically don't like using the graphical system monitors to check system resource usage when I do these kinds of videos Because I like using the same tool regardless of distro desktop environment So I always install the same thing to check that stuff h top because Things can vary between the genom system monitor the xfc system monitor Whatever it is that kde plasma uses for a system monitor, you know, I just want to use the same tool for everything that way It's as fair a comparison as possible between the various distros and desktop environments We have genom boxes Which is for installing virtual machines. Genome boxes is a front end to kvm So it's essentially kind of like a vert manager. It's just, you know, a different kind of vert manager Genome boxes and it's rather simple to use. It's actually pretty easy to spin up a vm in genom boxes I've never actually used it myself because it's a genom application and you know, I don't know if it has any Hard dependencies on a lot of the other genom applications But typically I try to avoid a lot of the genom applications and the kde applications Unless I need them because sometimes they bring in some extra dependencies that I don't need as a standalone window manager user Also under applications, of course, we have the genom terminal, which we've already taken a look at We have rhythm box as our audio player rhythm box one of the best Audio players out there as far as free and open source software. They are on rhythm box 3.4.4 I wonder if they have a hot key to bring up the terminal And a lot of distributions control alt t brings up a terminal That's typically the case for a boon to and a boon to base distros But it's kind of a standard that a lot of other distributions have adopted Control alt t does not bring up a terminal here in genom Now I could go into the settings manager once again and go down to keyboard And to keyboard shortcuts and I could see if they actually had some kind of key binding for the terminal I would assume it would be under. I don't know launchers. Yeah launch calendar email client browser None of these are enabled itself the help browser. I guess some kind of help screen But it doesn't look like they have a lot of key binding set Out of the box. So a lot of this stuff doesn't look like it's been set So I'm stuck with if I wanted to go to a terminal I've got to hit two buttons just to get to the screen and then click a third time to get to the terminal Let's open up our file manager. So if I go into utilities, where is the file manager? That's something I haven't seen. Where is Have I just completely missed it? Let me do a search for it. I believe they just call it files. Yeah, there it is Maybe I was just missing it. But if I did a super and the left key one thing about Ganon I do like, you know, the fact that they do have these minded super left and super right for snapping into one half of a grid the windows and of course super up maximizes Super down Unmaximizes, let me kill the file manager there just taking a brief look at Ganon 40 I will say it's very reminiscent to Ganon 3 If you were on Ganon 3 Ganon 40 looks the same. We still have this centered Time and date. I had the virt manager thing pop down there for a second But if you click on the time and date you get your calendar You also get a notifications section. So if you had notifications, they'd be listed here You also have events. So I guess this is where, you know, and you're like to-do list or contacts and Yeah, your weather applet also appears here world clogs. So if you had some time stuff That is really neat that all of that is integrated into this one little pop down I will give those guys props for that. That's pretty smart in my book. Your cistray over here I like how everything sits in the one applet. I'm assuming that's just one applet since it's all three are highlighted When I click on it, you have your power sessions here And of course that is the volume control and that is the network manager overall I will say uh fedora 34 looks rather clean very polished fedora always looks good. It always looks like a professional Corporate kind of product. And that's one of the things I really give fedora credit for as far as ganon 40 Ganon 40, I will say also looks very clean and polished as far as workflow I honestly Kind of can't stand the workflow the fact that to get to an applications menu you have to click twice Just to get here And then after clicking twice you have to click a third time to launch the application Assuming you can click on it with the mouse or do a search for it. That's way too much effort Just to launch your applications, you know, really you just need a hotkey To bring up that kind of menu or hotkey to bring up a run prompt And I think they do have one. I can't remember what it is. I think it's alt f2 For a run prompt. Yeah, so you do have that. That's like a built-in uh ganon run prompt So that probably would be something I would use most of the time in ganon rather than in that activities menu Or I may just install a third party run prompt, you know, something like d menu or rofi I know a lot of people might complain about ganon as far as ganon three and now ganon 40 There's no, uh, I guess default dock. There's no panel or dock as far as where your applications are sitting I mean you got this top panel, but honestly that top panel really doesn't do much. I mean it holds a sys tray And it has this activities thing that you could click on but really you don't even need that if it's hotkey to super Anyway, it's almost like that panel is wasted space. It doesn't seem like it does As much stuff as what you would think a panel would do I will give ganon 40 credit as far as Pushing the boundaries and doing things different. I mean it does things differently than every other desktop environment known to man Um, as far as for me, it's just not me I I can just so used to a different kind of workflow more efficient workflow more keyboard driven workflow But I don't want to get off track with ganon 40 Fedora 34 looks like a fantastic distribution the installer which I always said I had a problem with that installer was really easy I didn't have to click on anything. All I had to do was tell it what drive to install to So I know in past versions of fedora. It was a little more involved There were more things to click on and more settings to set I still don't like how you have to click done in the top Left hand corner of the installer because most people when they're in an application They expect when you're done with something it should be at the bottom of the screen bottom center bottom right Or if you're going to put it at the top top right, maybe top left It's like the last place you would ever look for those continue forward kind of button So that's still a little weird and also when I clicked on the drive You actually have to click on the drive twice for it to take effect. That's still a little clunky the anaconda installer It's not horrible, but I mean compared to Ubuntu's ubiquity installer compared to the calamaris installer that so many distributions use now the anaconda installer It's definitely still my least favorite Overall, though I think fedora 34 is a solid product and I do want to congratulate everybody that worked on fedora 34 and those of you That helped contribute to the recently released ganon 40 now before I go. I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of the show absy dalas gave lou michael alan akami archfifty of 30 chuck David the other david dylan gregory louis paul polytech scott steven smith and willie They are the producers of this episode without these guys this quick first look at fedora 34 It wouldn't have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well All these names you're seeing on the screen right now These are all my supporters over on patreon because the distro tube channel has no corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work look for distro tube over on patreon alright guys peace It's like ganon was trying to hide their applications