 Today I'm going to run through a quick installation and first look of Fedora 35. Now Fedora 35 was just released yesterday and Fedora is a really great Linux distribution. If you like living on the edge, if you like bleeding edge software, and I'm not afraid of running things that maybe aren't the most stable distributions, you know, I don't shy away from a little instability in my life, but Fedora I've actually found to be a pretty comfortable distribution like I could actually live in Fedora and do all of my multimedia work for the YouTube channel quite comfortably in Fedora because the repositories of software is actually quite good. The one thing about Fedora though is like the main Fedora edition, of course uses GNOME. I'm not a fan of the GNOME desktop environment and people were really I had some criticism a couple of weeks ago because I did the Ubuntu 2110 video where I took a first look at Ubuntu 2110 and I was very negative, very harsh against that particular version of Ubuntu and their desktop environment, which was GNOME 40 that they extended, you know, for the proper Ubuntu desktop and people were like, man, you're not giving GNOME a fair shot here because what Ubuntu did to GNOME, you know, it's an older version of GNOME and then the Ubuntu crowd they extended it in some weird ways. Just take a look at Fedora. Fedora give you a proper GNOME desktop experience and that's fair enough. And that's what I'm going to do today. So I'm going to spin up a quick virtual machine of Fedora workstation live with the GNOME desktop and we're going to look around. So let me go ahead and switch over to this virtual machine I created. I gave this virtual machine two threads of my 24 thread CPU. I gave this virtual machine six gigabytes of RAM. So plenty of system resources for this VM and we get our boot menu here. Start Fedora workstation live is what I'm going to do that should send us directly into a live environment from the live environment. We should be able to launch the Fedora installer, which I think they're still using the Anaconda installer and not my favorite installer program. I've always found the Anaconda installer quite confusing. Hopefully though, this time around, I've installed Fedora enough times now. Hopefully I remember how to use it this time because it's one of those things part of the problem why it always gives me trouble is I just don't use the Anaconda installer that much pretty much only Fedora uses it. I don't install Fedora, you know, but maybe once sometimes twice a year. So I'm going to choose install to hard drive here and the installer has launched and English United States is the language for me. It's already selected. So I'm just going to click continue and then we need to set up, I guess, keyboard. This is kind of weird. And you know, like you have to click keyboard, you have to click time and date, I guess you don't have to because by default, English US is my keyboard. So I guess I don't I guess I could bypass it, but it's a little weird because most other installers make you at least verify that that's the case. Time and date America, Chicago for the time zone. That's fine for me. So really, the only thing we need to do is the drives, the installation destination. So I click on that and this is the screen that always is confusing because I only have one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine. So obviously, that's going to be where I want to install to when you think there's a checkbox here, right? It's already selected. So I just would click done, right, which this time I think it's going to work. Yeah, and it looks like it's installing all the software. This is going to take a couple of minutes. Well, that's going on. Let me show you guys a little bit of the release announcement worth the wait for door 35 is here. And one of the cool things about Fedora, again, is that they push kind of bleeding edge technology. They were really, I think the first distribution that started shipping ButterFS as default and they did that back in Fedora 33. Of course, now we're on 35. So ButterFS is kind of a mature project these days. I think we can say ButterFS is stable enough that it's OK to use it these days, even though a lot of distributions still default to extend for. They're using GNOME 41. They're also using Weyland. They've been using Weyland for a while. GNOME, of course, defaults to Weyland. They also are using PipeWire by default. Now, I believe this is the first release of Fedora where PipeWire is actually the default audio server. The only other thing of note that I see in the release announcement is Firewall D is the firewall service that they're using now. And I don't know anything about Firewall D on most of the distributions I have. If I play with a firewall, I typically use UFW, the uncomplicated firewall, which is kind of a front end to IP tables. But Firewall D is kind of an alternative. It's they call it a modern firewall server. So it's something I don't know if a Red Hat itself is behind the development of Firewall D or not. But again, I don't know too much about that. For most desktop Linux users, though, I doubt they're going to use a firewall. So it's probably not something most Fedora users are even going to explore. And that portion of the install are completed just fine. And now we need to click Finish Installation. And that should reboot the system for us. All right, and we have rebooted into our newly installed Fedora 35. And this is a setup screen. So start setup. Do we want to turn on location services for privacy reasons? I'd probably turn that off. And that's just me. You guys may have different opinions on that automatic problem reporting. So this is crash reports. I don't mind sending crash reports again, though, that's my opinion. You guys choose what you want to choose on that third party repositories. Now, this is an important change in Fedora 35 because third party repositories are necessary to get, especially some proprietary software, but it's not in the core Fedora repository. And before you had to jump through some hoops to enable this stuff. Now you can actually enable it right there. And that's it. There's nothing else for you to do. Just click Next. And now you have those repositories enabled. You want to connect to your online accounts, your Google account, your Next Cloud account, Microsoft account. I'm not going to do that. Not in this VM. And then let's go ahead and create our username and password. My username is going to be DT. All right. And then next, let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user for privacy reasons and then confirm the strong and complicated password. And all done. Start using Fedora Linux. So the first thing I'm going to do for purposes of this video is hit super and type display. Well, I guess I have to take a tour of GNOME 41, no thanks. And now let me type display. All right. I didn't know there was going to be a GNOME tour, which I probably should take because I don't know that much about the GNOME desktop environment. But I mean, it's it's not complicated. I don't think I need a tutorial on how to use it. So now that I've set the screen resolution to a proper 1920 by 1080 screen resolution for my monitor here, let me go ahead and click on Activities. And if I go to show applications, now the one thing about GNOME, I still don't understand why they do this is that first screen. If I hit super, why is this the first screen? Why isn't this the first screen? Why is that two actions to get to your applications? Because that seems like what most people are going to want to do is get to applications. Most people are not hitting the super key to get to their virtual workspaces. Like I just don't understand that. Again, maybe they've tested this. Maybe they've done some UX testing with like the community. And maybe they've discovered people are constantly switching virtual workspaces enough to where that needs to be the main screen. Instead of what you traditionally think of as a menu system is actually your applications menu. But I don't know this. I find that a little weird, but I'm going to go with it. So let's talk about the installed applications. So we have GNOME contacts, GNOME weather, GNOME clocks, GNOME maps. And these are all pretty cool applications. I actually do find applications, for example, like the weather application. Is this kind of neat? If I wanted to launch it, if you guys have never seen it, you could select a location. I'm not going to give my location, but since we chose Chicago for the time zone, I'm nowhere near Chicago, but I could use that. And if I do a search for it, I think there were multiple Chicago's. I actually have to select a specific one. OK, there it is. So Chicago, Illinois, you know, they give you the hourly weather, the daily weather. Let's see how cold it is. So no, oh, 27 degrees tomorrow. That's pretty chilly Chicago. And before continuing, I did notice we got a notification. There's a critical software update ready to install. The fact that they say it's a critical software update. I'm going to go ahead and update the system because that's probably maybe like I said, this was just released yesterday and probably already they've discovered some kind of major security flaw or something. So the fact that they labeled it as a critical update and restart and update. So yeah, that was a serious update. Probably a kernel update, I'm guessing. Oh, wow, this is almost like a Windows 10 update, installing updates. So it restarted the machine, but you get the little update bar percent bar here. But it's one of those things, you know, it's not a forced update. You know, I had the ability to to decline that update. It's one of those things. And I see when we criticize those forced Windows updates as Linux users, some Windows fanboys come back to me. Well, you have to update Ubuntu and Fedora and Mint and all these other distributions to you have updates and, you know, you're constantly is it'll notifications are on the screen. You have to update. Yes, it's not you have to update, but with strongly advised, I can decline all the updates. It's different with the Windows 10 with the forced updates. That's going a little bit too far, in my opinion. We don't have forced updates on Linux. All right, and the machine reboots one more time after that update. And we get our login manager. So let me enter my password. If we remember the screen resolution, so I don't have to reset that. So everything looks good here. Let me open up a terminal. So Control Alt T is a key binding that works on most distributions. It doesn't look like it's a Fedora key binding, though, or maybe not a GNOME key binding. What would be the GNOME key binding for a terminal? Surely they've got one set, maybe Super T. That would make sense. Alt T, I could just hit Super and start typing terminal, I guess. It's just weird when you don't have the same key bindings that pretty much everybody else uses. Everybody uses Control Alt T to open a terminal by default. It would just be nice if Fedora added that. I'm going to do a unnamed dash R because this gives us the kernel version. 5.14.14 is a very recent kernel. So when we talk about Fedora being bleeding edge, this is what we're talking about. That is a very, very recent kernel. Let's run Htop for system resource usage. Htop is not installed, so I could install it. So sudo dnf, dnf is Fedora's package manager, install Htop. And give it my sudo password. And this should just take a second or two. All right, and that took about a minute to get to this yes or no answer. It had to sync some repositories and that took about 60 seconds or so to sync all the Fedora repositories, including some extra repositories. Remember, we turned on the third party repos. That's going to be these RPM fusion repos. That's where you're going to find a lot of proprietary software that you need, such as your NVIDIA driver, which of course is proprietary. Now that I've got Htop installed, let's go ahead and run it. Because this is essentially on a cold boot because we did the update and rebooted. So that's why I'm running it now. I just want to see what the system resource usage looks like on GNOME on Fedora 35 compared to GNOME on Ubuntu 2110. And it's rather heavy on both. So one gig and we're using one gig or the six gigs of RAM on a cold boot. I don't think that's great. You know, that that's just to me, that's unacceptable for what GNOME is. There's no reason why it's why it should use all that RAM. So let's get back into the menu system and search for some of the default programs again, so hitting super or clicking activities once again, you get the virtual workspaces rather than the application grid. But again, that's going to annoy the hell out of me. We've got GNOME photos, GNOME videos. That's your video player, GNOME calculator, which is kind of a nice calculator. I don't mind the GNOME calculator, but we have like a hundred really good calculators available on Linux back into the applications menu that I've got to click unnecessarily twice to get to the text editor, of course, is gEdit, which is actually a really cool plain text editor, gEdit41.alpha. There's a ton of good extensions for gEdit as far as getting your color scheme, syntax highlighting, line numbers. You can kind of turn gEdit into a proper IDE if you want to. We have our document scanner and we have LibreOfficeCalc. And then down here, we have LibreOffice and Press and writer. Why are they not all in the same group? They're not alphabetized in this. I don't know why this menu is like this. It's kind of weird that you would think LibreOffice, all of them would be grouped together, maybe in their own subcategory, or even if they're not all in like in a subgroup, they should at least be next to each other. I don't understand how it shows the order of these applications, but that's a minor gripe. Let me open up LibreOfficeCalc. Let's see what version we're running here. So LibreOfficeCalc, of course, is the spreadsheet program. This is your alternative to Microsoft Excel. And this is version 7.2.2.2, which I believe is the latest LibreOffice version. And then let's get back to the menu. So click Activities, click Show Applications. Let's see what else we have. The system monitor, GNOME system monitor. We already checked system resource usage using HTop, though. GNOME boxes. This is a virtual machine program. It uses QEMU, which is the similar virtual machine technology that Vert Manager uses, which I love Vert Manager. I think I could just very easily port my virtual machines from Vert Manager into GNOME boxes if I wanted to use GNOME boxes. But really, it doesn't make sense to use GNOME boxes if you're not using GNOME. I guess it's Vert Manager already kind of works. So I'm sure there are reasons why maybe you would use GNOME boxes over Vert Manager. But I don't think my understanding is GNOME boxes doesn't have as many of the bills and whistles, as many options available to you as Vert Manager, which has been around for many, many years. GNOME boxes is kind of a new program. We have the GNOME terminal as well, which is a fine terminal emulator. Zoom in here. One of the things I don't like is I don't like that they chose a plain color scheme, which is just white text on a black background. So I would go in here to Preferences and I would go to Profiles. Click on Unnamed Profile, that's your default profile, and then go to Colors and see if they have any color schemes that are built in. So Unclick, Use Colors from System Theme and Solarize Dark. It's a good one. And now we have, you know, something that's a little easier on the eyes. Well, I have the terminal open again since I didn't do this previously. Let me do sudo dnf. I believe it's list installed. Or it could have been installed list. I forget. No, that was it. That generates a list of packages that are installed by default. And you guys have seen me do this with apt. You guys have seen me do this with pacman, depending on what package manager on your distribution. Once you have a list of all the packages installed line by line, all you need to do is pipe it into the word count program WC and give WC the L flag for line count. And that will tell us exactly how many lines were in that output, which means that's how many programs are installed by default. One thousand seven hundred and twenty three. Let's get back into the menu system and take a look at the rest of the programs that are installed by default. You have a utility subcategory here, which is some of the system tools, disk usage, analyzer, GNOME disk, which is for partitioning drives. I guess you could use it to write to USB sticks and things like that. You have your image viewer. You have your document viewer. Your document viewer is your PDF viewer screenshot utility, which I've never actually used the GNOME screenshot utility. Let's see. This is screenshot 40.0. So that's the name of the program screenshot. Very nice name. Let's go back into activities, show applications. I hate that that takes like two clicks or two keystrokes. Again, I'm sure there's maybe a simpler way to get to that. It's just it's weird that that's the default in more LibreOffice stuff. We have cheese, which is our webcam program. We have rhythm box, which is our audio player. Now, rhythm box is one of the best audio players available on Linux. This is rhythm box 3.4.4. So I actually am a big fan of the rhythm box program. And then other than that, we have tour, which I'm assuming was that guided tour of GNOME or maybe guided tour of Fedora. I forget which one. Yeah, it just gives us some tips. I guess how to use the desktop environment and each top we installed ourselves. And that's it. Wow. That is not very many programs installed by default. Definitely not bloated. Well, I say it's not. Where is the software center? Well, we have software here. So maybe if you have a program pinned to the dock, maybe it doesn't appear here because of the file manager also is here, but it's not in here. So I guess there's a few things, the calendar, files, software. Let's do the software center and welcome to software. Of course, this is GNOME's software center. And if we explore something, how did we do this? Let's see. I was looking for some categories or something. This is kind of weird, create, work, play or these clickable play. I'm assuming would be games. Yep. And this is kind of laid out a little differently than I remember the GNOME software center installed. Of course, list all the installed applications, explore. And I guess I could just search for something. You just search for games, for example. Maybe I just search for the word game. Maybe I want to install SuperTux. I don't know, click install. SuperTux is kind of a big game, though. I probably should have picked something a little smaller. Yeah, this is taking a while. Let's hung here at installing at 49% for a few seconds here. I'm wondering if the VM surely the VM isn't running out of disk space. I created a 25 gigabyte drive for the VM. So I should have plenty of space available. Yeah, I've got 20.4 gigabytes available, nowhere close to running out of space. So yeah, it's weird that that was kind of hanging on the install. Of course, if we installed it from the terminal using DNF, you know, if there was any kind of error, I'd get that error message. I'm not sure if you get the same kind of error messages through the graphical software center here says loading application details now, though, and then it finally come back to the SuperTux screen. It says installing at 99% now. That was kind of weird. And now it should be installed if I clicked open to make sure SuperTux actually runs. It does. All right. And I'd have to change the screen resolution, make it full screen at 1920 by 1080 and all of that. You guys probably know how to play SuperTux. If you don't know how to play SuperTux cart, definitely install it. One of the best free and open source games available on Linux. And it's cross platform, too. I think you can play it on Windows. I know it's available on Android. It's available in the Google Play Store as well. So that's really it for your desktop applications that are installed on Fedora. Not a whole lot. Again, mostly it's under the hood stuff where Fedora kind of differentiates itself and using a butter FS, choosing Wayland is using pipe wire. One thing I do want to do, I want to check on the background. So I'm going to change background. So right click, choose change background. I want to see the wallpapers that are installed. And the wallpaper pack actually does look quite good. Yeah, I don't know. I'm assuming this is probably a Fedora wallpaper pack because some of them are actually branded with Fedora, I'm assuming these top four. Because the rest of them, starting with this one, look like the standard GNOME wallpaper pack that GNOME has been using for a couple years now, yeah, all of the rest are standard GNOME wallpapers, which are kind of cool. Well, here's one that's specifically Fedora because it's got the Fedora logo. Most of these others, though, I think I've seen before. Yeah, but not bad. I really like that one there, that little abstract art there. That's not bad. That one's kind of weird. I think I'd use this one here. The little and what are they buttons with the little Fedora logo on it? Overall, I think Fedora 35 is right. I think of Fedora 35, kind of like I thought of Fedora 34 and Fedora 33. It's a solid distribution. I'm not a fan of the desktop environment. I think the desktop environment makes things weird. You know, it's one of the things that I don't like is right now we're at a point, especially with Windows 11, kind of putting off Windows users and Windows users wanting to explore other options. You have Linus Tech Tips talking about switching to Linux from Windows on their machines and you potentially have the opportunity to convert millions of people from Windows to Linux. And I do wonder, you know, I don't want them to have a bad experience out of the box. And I think with Fedora and with Ubuntu, their recent release, having GNOME as their default desktop environment, I don't think that's a great experience for the new Linux user. I think that could be off-putting. I think maybe in the future, if I take a look at some of the future releases of Ubuntu and Fedora, I need to spend more time on the alternative desktops. I need to spend more time taking a look and highlighting their variants as far as their KDE Plasma Edition, XFC editions and things like that. Overall, I think it's a solid release and I do want to congratulate everybody that contributed in making Fedora 35. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of this episode. Devon Gabe James, Matt Mitchell, Paul Scott, Scott West, Akami, Ellen Chote, Commander, Angry Kurt, Diokai, David Dilling, Miss Some Stuff, Gregory Heiko, Lee Magsum, Michael Mike, Nitrix, Ariane, Alexander, Peace, Arch, and Fedora, Polytech, Raver, Red Prophet, Steven and Willie. I hope I said everybody's name, although maybe not in the correct order. I want to thank these guys. They're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Fedora 35 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. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I just have you guys, the community, if you like my work and want to support me, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. And yes, I do like this better than a Boon 22110.