 Today I'm going to be taking a look at Fedora 39. Now Fedora 39 was just released yesterday, but it was actually kind of a late release because originally their release date was set for October of 2023, but they had to push it back a few weeks, which is kind of standard with Fedora. Fedora typically doesn't release on time. They're one of those distros that when it's ready, they'll put out the ISO. So a lot of times their releases can be a month or sometimes multiple months late as far as when the release date was initially set to when the ISO actually drops. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to spin up a quick virtual machine. I'm going to run through an installation and first look inside of VM. So I've created this virtual machine. I gave this virtual machine six gigs of RAM. I gave it two threads of my 24 threads CPU. So I'm going to go ahead and boot into the Fedora workstation live environment. And we boot directly into the live environment. The live environment, of course, is the GNOME 45 desktop. So we get a little welcome screen and asking us, do we want to go ahead and install Fedora or choose not now if you just want to play around in the live environment? But I want to actually run through an installation. All right. And the Fedora installer launches full screen and the first screen, of course, is choosing the language. And for me, this is the language, by the way, for the installation process of the language of the installer, by default, it is set to English, English US. That is correct for me. So I'm just going to click continue. On the next page, you have settings for keyboard, time and date, and then the installation destination. So you're partitioning. Now, for me, I don't actually need to fool with keyboard or time and date because the installer has correctly chosen probably due to some geolocation information that I'm in the central time zone in the US and thus I probably want to English US keyboard. So that's great. Don't need to touch those, but I do need the installation destination. So let's click on that. And in this virtual machine, I only have 120 gigabyte virtual hard drive in this VM and you see the checkbox next to it. I think that means that disk is automatically selected. If I click on it, I actually unselect the disk, even though it highlights it in blue and for many people, including me, I would actually mistakenly think I actually chose the disk. But what I did was I unselected it. So I actually need to make sure I go back and click it again to get the checkbox for that disk. And then I'm just going to run through the automatic installation. So I'm not going to manually partition the drive. I'll just let Fedora do the automatic partitioning and click done. And then if I move my head out of the way, since I didn't need to fool with keyboard and time and date, all I need to do now is click the begin installation button and away it goes. And this portion of the installation will take a few minutes. I'm going to step away, grab me a cup of coffee. I'll be back once the installation has completed and the installation has completed that portion of the installer. Probably took about 10 minutes or so. And you can see here in the bottom right corner, I have this button here that says finish installation. So I'm going to go ahead and click that. And now I need to go ahead and reboot this virtual machine to complete the installation. And it rebooted just fine and it launches us into another welcome application. This is called setup and you can see welcome to Fedora 39. We have some more set up to run through. So let's start the setup. And first is do you want to enable certain location services, automatic problem reporting, telemetry, things like that by default. They're enabled. I will leave them enabled since it asked me nicely about it. I'll go ahead and leave them turned on and then I'll click next third party repositories. Do we want to enable third party repositories? Now this is important. If you want to get some proprietary software, especially proprietary drivers that are needed for certain graphics cards, Wi-Fi chips, things like that. So I will enable third party repositories and then I'm going to go ahead and click next and then connecting to our online accounts. Do I want to connect to my Google account next cloud account, Microsoft account? I really don't do any of this kind of stuff. So I will skip that and then about you. So this is us creating our user and password. So my user is going to be called DT and then I'll click next and then we need to set a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password. And it looks like it's warning me that my strong and complicated password is weak. Will it let me set it anyway? It will. That is good. I hate it when some of these installers try to prevent you from using your super secure password and now start using Fedora Linux. So click that and now hopefully the GNOME desktop environment will actually fully launch and it does. Do we want to take a tour of GNOME 45? No, thanks. But what I do want to do is let's go ahead and look for the display settings application. So I type displays there in the search field and let's go ahead and set my display to a proper 1920 by 1080 resolution here in this virtual machine and tell it to keep the changes. So every time that I launch this virtual machine, it will remember from this day forward that I want 1920 by 1080 for the screen resolution. So first impressions of the Fedora 39 desktop here. I've got to say I really love the wallpaper. The wallpaper is very nice, very colorful, yet kind of minimal. I do like the Fedora branding that they've added here in the bottom right of as far as the GNOME 45 desktop environment. I've already looked at GNOME 45 with the release of a boon to last month, which also shipped with GNOME 45. One of the cool new features with this version of GNOME is the dynamic workspace switcher. You can see we have two workspaces and since the first bar there is bigger, we're on workspace one, but if I do the scroll wheel on the mouse, I can actually move over to workspace two. Now neither workspace had anything on them, so it's kind of hard to tell that I actually switched desktops. So let's actually launch something. So let me hit the super key and we'll get our dash here. Let me go ahead and launch the Nautilus file manager. So we're on workspace one and if I scroll with the mouse wheel over to workspace two, you can see now we're on an empty workspace by scroll back to workspace one. I get workspace one with the Nautilus file manager again. The other big change with GNOME 45 is their quick settings application here. This indicator here that has, you know, a lot of your sys tray kind of stuff in it. For example, your volume control and Wi-Fi. It also now has the ability to control keyboard backlighting. If you have a keyboard plugged in that has such functionality built into it, obviously I don't have that right now, but if you did, you would have some extra stuff in this quick settings window than what I have here. This is just the very basic stuff here. So that's actually a really nice touch that the GNOME team has added depending on the hardware you have. You will have the different settings in that quick settings menu. So what exactly is new in Fedora 39 as compared to the previous releases of Fedora? Well, one of the things they did is they did change some applications. I do know that they no longer ship the Eye of GNOME image viewer. So if I actually search for image viewer, this particular image viewer application is not EOG, the Eye of GNOME, which has always been the image viewer for GNOME as far back as I can remember. And I've been using desktop Linux for 15, 16 years now, but I go to the about for this application. You can see the Lupe team. So this particular image viewer is called Lupe and this is version 45 of this particular image viewing application. Some other things that they worked on were the software center. If I go to the dash here and click on software and open the GNOME software center here, let's choose to search for something. Let me search for something that is proprietary in nature just to see if we did enable any repositories for proprietary software. If I can type, I was actually trying to type discord and I kept misspelling it discord is here. So if I click on it, it will install discord from the flat hub repository. So it will install it as a flat pack in the release notes for Fedora 39. They did mention that the software center now it's now possible to remove user data when you're uninstalling flat packs in the GNOME software center. So that is a nice touch to just so you know when you remove a piece of software as a flat pack, you don't have a lot of extra user related data, a lot of extra cruft just hanging out on your file system that really has no business being there. If I tap the super key and see what is pinned in the dash Firefox, of course is the default browser, which has always been the default browser as far as I can remember in Fedora. If I go to help and about Firefox, this is Firefox version 119.0. And if I tap the super key one more time, we've already seen the Nautilus file manager. They also have pinned the calendar application, which the calendar application has been getting a lot of work done. I will say it does look very nice, especially in this full screen mode. And I will say one thing that they did work on was the scrolling functionality of this calendar, which is really neat. I'm just scrolling with the mouse wheel and it's super smooth or buttery smooth, silky smooth. So good job on the calendar application. I don't typically use things like calendars and organizers and note taking applications and things like that. But I do know many of you guys in school or at work do use such productivity apps. And if you're one of those people that need a good calendar, the GNOME calendar may be right up your alley. Now, of course, there's more applications installed than just the four things here pinned to the dash. If I click the show apps icon here, you can see we do have a few other things installed. Mostly it's just the standard GNOME suite of applications such as GNOME's contacts, GNOME weather, GNOME clocks, GNOME maps. We do have LibreOffice installed. We have LibreOffice Rider, Calc and Impress. So Rider is the word processing application. Calc is the spreadsheet application. And Impress, of course, is your presentation software. Let's launch LibreOffice Impress. We could choose a template here. So let me go ahead and just open that. And then from here, I could create my presentation where it might be a slideshow or something that I'm presenting, you know, at a conference or something. I actually do sometimes use LibreOffice Impress. It is a really fantastic piece of software. This is LibreOffice version 7.6.2.1. Let's go ahead and close that out. If I hit the super key and go back to show apps one more time, some of the other stuff here includes the GNOME calendar, a document scanner. We have our system monitoring tool. That's going to be GNOME's system monitor, which I will launch it. But because the system monitoring applications do differ slightly from one another, I try to standardize how I view system resource usage in these VMs. Typically, I always use the same system monitor, which is H-top when doing these sorts of videos. So what I want to do is I actually want to go to the terminal. So obviously this is going to be the GNOME terminal. Let me zoom way in. And it's H-top installed. H-top is not installed. Well, let's install H-top. So if I do a sudo dnf install H-top. Of course, I've got to spell H-top correctly, which I didn't. So this command will fill, but first it's going to try to sync the repositories here. If I move my head, it's syncing the Fedora 39 repositories. Since this is the very first time I've done this, this may take a couple of minutes. And you can see it did fail to install H-top because I misspelled it. But you can see it did sync the repos before it tried to search for H-top with two Ps. And you can see some of the repos are third-party proprietary repos, such as the Google Chrome repo, the RPM Fusion, non-free NVIDIA driver repo, and the RPM Fusion for non-free steam-related packages as well. I'm going to up arrow and sudo dnf install H-top without the added P this time. So now I've actually spelled it properly. Let's go ahead and install H-top. I have to answer yes a couple of times. And now that I've done that, if I run H-top to see system resource usage, well, there is a lot going on here. For one thing, there's not much CPU being used right now a little bit, two, three percent. That's kind of standard, but 1.63 gigabytes of RAM, of the six gigs of RAM that I gave this VM, that is exceptionally high because we're really not doing anything. What is actually running? Is there anything? Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what is sucking up all that RAM because good on 45 does run a lot lighter on Ubuntu. I think when I did the same kind of checks on Ubuntu with good on 45, it was around one gig, but around one gig, this is closer to two gigs now than it is one gig. So that kind of concerns me a little bit. Now one interesting touch here is this shell prompt. So obviously this is the bash shell and you see we do have a little bit of color here in the shell, which I believe is a new thing. I hope it's not exactly the fanciest bash prompt in the world, but at least they're trying. So I appreciate that. One other thing I do want to mention is there has been a lot of talk about the Fedora team working on a new version of DNF called DNF 5 and DNF 5 is available, but they did not install it out of the box with Fedora 39 probably due to some bugs or things that they still have to work out. But if you want to actually go ahead and move to DNF 5, you can and to be honest, I do want to move to DNF 5 because the current version of DNF I'm not a big fan. I've always found it kind of slow. I'm really frustratingly slow and it's not something I personally would want to use. So I'm going to go ahead and do a sudo DNF install DNF 5 and then I'm going to do a space. I'm going to go ahead and do attack Y here to answer. Yes, to those questions that it's going to ask as far as do you really want to install it? That way I don't have to do what I did with H top and you know, have to type Y a couple of times to proceed with the installation. And now that that has ran, let's see if I do sudo DNF. If I'm wondering if they're actually using DNF 5 as the name of the binary, if I do sudo DNF install about NeoVim, what looks like DNF 5 is the binary. It's syncing the repos. I will say the sync of the repos went a lot faster with DNF 5 than it went with regular DNF. And then once again, I'd have to answer why to install NeoVim. This should just take a second. Actually, NeoVim isn't a terribly big package, but it's not the smallest thing either. But that installation was very fast. I even though that's the only time I've ever used DNF 5 in my life, if that was the standard DNF experience, I would be happy. I'm definitely if I was installing Fedora, I would definitely go ahead and upgrade to DNF 5. While we have the terminal open, let's go ahead and do a U name. Let's go ahead and check what kernel we are on. I should have done a U name dash R. And that is kernel version 6.5.6, so a very recent kernel. For those of you wondering about Wayland, of course, being GNOME and being Fedora, which Fedora has been defaulting to Wayland for a while, we are on Wayland. You can always verify, by the way, if you're not sure if you're using Wayland or XOR because some desktop environments and window managers do work on both. And if you're not sure which one you're using, you can always do this. You can echo xdg underscore session underscore type. And of course, that's all caps xdg session type. And if you hit enter, I get Wayland returned. Obviously, if it was X11, I would get X11 returned. If you're wondering about the audio server, the audio server, of course, is going to be pipe wire. You can verify that by doing a where is pipe wire. And if pipe wire is installed, you'll get the binary for pipe wire, the location, user bin pipe wire. So pipe wire is the audio server. We already know flat pack is installed. So let's do a flat pack list. Flat pack list actually returned nothing. So it is flat pack installed. It may not get installed until I actually, no, flat pack is installed. It's just we haven't installed a flat pack yet. So the flat pack list command just had no output. Let's go ahead and close out of the terminal. One final thing I want to do is I want to check the wallpaper pack. So if I go to a change background here, so right click on the desktop and change background, let's see what kind of wallpapers we're working with. It's probably, yeah, a lot of it is just the default GNOME wallpaper pack such as this here. By the way, right now it's set to the default theme, which is a white window theme with a dark GNOME shell theme. I actually like the dark themes. So I only want dark colored GTK theme, right? So I want dark windows as well. And you know, these standard generic abstract art wallpapers that ship with the GNOME wallpaper pack are quite nice. We did have the Fedora branded wallpaper here as well. I don't think I've seen this one here with the keyboards before. I don't know if that's a GNOME wallpaper or specific to Fedora, but I really like that keyboard wallpaper as well. Here's another nice piece of abstract art. Yeah, I could get down with that. You know what? I think I might keep that one. Overall, just the few minutes that I've played around with Fedora 39, I gotta say, fantastic release. A lot of the reason it's a fantastic release is due to how great the GNOME desktop environment keeps getting with these version 40 series releases. GNOME 45 is definitely the best version I think GNOME has ever put out. I also think just Fedora under the hood is also getting better. I really am kind of excited for DNF 5. I think the package management and the package manager for Fedora has always been one of the pain points with us. One of the things if you're used to faster package managers, things like apt and Debian or Pacman and Arch. You know, DNF has always been one of those things. Man, I wish that thing was better. It looks like with DNF 5, that problem's gonna be taken care of. I do want to thank everybody that worked on this release of Fedora. I've got to say job well done. Now, before I go, I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Gabe, James, Matt, Paul, Steve, Wes, Armored Dragon, Commander-In-Greed, George Lee, Matthew, Matthew, Nate, Erion, Paul, P.S. Archimador, Realiteats4Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Solar Street, Tools, Devler, Origin 2 and Ubuntu and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick installation and first look of Fedora 39 would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. If you like my work and want to help support me, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. DNF's no longer the worst package manager in Linux. Now that belongs to Zipper.