 Hi, I'm Matthew Miller. I am the Fedora project leader, and I have given a talk like this at DevConf many times, not every year, but lots of the years. It's really sad to not be there in person. I suppose I shouldn't go on too much about that. Let's celebrate the happiness. I'm wearing my 10 years of Fedora shirt like I usually do for presentations. So there we go. That's the same at least. I'm going to try and go through this quickly and get to Q&A fast because I don't like being in a vacuum talking to my slides. There are some polls over in the poll section. Go ahead and do the polls. That would be fun. And here we go with the talk. Wait, I thought there was a slide before this. Okay, here we go. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about what's going on. I'm going to talk about where we're going next. I'm going to show you some graphs because that's an important part of my State of Fedora talk. And I'm going to talk a little bit about why you should involve, but the last session covered that a lot, so I'll go quickly there. And then we'll get to questions. Yeah. So the first thing, how things are going. When this year started with the pandemic, I mean last year, DevConf was one of the last things that happened. And then everything got locked down and it was looking to be a pretty bleak year. And I wasn't expecting very much. But it turned out that we were actually awesome in Fedora. Congratulations, everybody who's part of the project and to everybody who's around it as well. I chose this quote from a vlogger about Fedora that I really liked because in some of the times in my talk on Fedora, I actually had like burning dumpsters in the slides. Like I felt like things were not going well. But here's a great quote about how we are on fire in a good way. And I'm really proud of this. It's awesome. And that's really translated to a lot of Linux enthusiast community really rallying behind Fedora in an awesome way, which is great to see for a distribution that is getting to be 20 years old to see all of this enthusiasm from people who look like they might not have even been born when Fedora was started. So cool to see that here. And it wasn't just just, you know, various enthusiasm. Some of the really big podcasts as well. The 2020 tuxes had Fedora as the listener's choice on Linux Unplugged. And in the Destination Linux podcast, they also picked us I think three of the four people picked it as the best distro for 2020. So that was very cool. We are really seeing a lot of popularity and enthusiasm. And I think in general, one of the quotes from this this show was Fedora, I feel like they love what they're doing. I don't know why love is capitalized there. But I think that and that's that it's nice that that comes through. I really love what I'm doing. I hope that you as part of Fedora do and if you are interested in Fedora, I hope you find something to love as well. I think it's really nice that that is coming through in what people are seeing as well. Again, it seemed like it was going to be a hard year. We really missed having the flock conference in person. But we turned out to have a very awesome virtual conference using the same hop-in platform with Nest with Fedora. Instead of flock to Fedora, here's some screenshots from people that Marie all put together. That was really fun and successful. We did some fun things like play Minecraft. Here's an incredible Fedora logo built out of, I assume, wool. I'm not sure. That was the landing spot. It was really cool. And we did some VR meetups. We've been doing a Fedora social hour every week. Look on discussion.fedoraproject.org to come join us. Everybody is welcome. You don't have to be a really highly technical contributor. Come chat, hang out with the main rule of the social hour is no talking about work. You can talk about your day job, but not Fedora work. Sometimes we do it in VR like this, but mostly we just do a video call and just chat and things. Of course, big news this last year was Fedora being shipped on Lenovo laptops. We hope to do a lot more of this and should be coming out on new models. And this time, hopefully with worldwide launch or close to worldwide launch when they come out as close as we can get. And again, it crossed more than just the one model this time. We'll see. That was a fun thing we did this last year. And the last session was about the community outreach revamp. This is what's going on for the coming year. This is one of our big efforts. The whole last session was about this, so I won't talk too much about it, but this is a really awesome objective for us and important for Fedora. Because while we really feel like we've had the technical side of the project is going very well, the part of the the mind share part of the project, there's a lot of great effort there, but it's not been very well connected. So the mind share team and the ambassador's team are working on kind of connecting all these things together so that things like the websites are connected to the out the ambassadors who are talking about Fedora and trying to encourage people to use Fedora and telling telling our stories connected into the into the marketing and all of these things all together. I think this is a really good effort and it's going to really pay off in the next year. Also, of course, on the engineering side, Fedora 34 is coming out soon. There's a poll about whether you're already on it. This is the wallpaper. It's beautiful. Thanks to Mo Duffy for this. I love it. It is nice and peaceful, and I think it's kind of a good reflection of where we want to get away in the in the COVID times, a nice calm place to relax. This is the night view of it. There's a day view as well, so it's one of the night day wallpapers. It's very nice. And also this year also Mo did a lot of work on this. We are finally ready to launch the new Fedora logo. Here are some mock-ups of it in place. We can talk in more detail about why this new logo, but we wanted something that kind of addressed some of the issues we were having with it functionally, while also kind of reflecting back to the heritage of the existing logo and not looking like something completely new. So this is this is ready to go and we're going to come up with a plan for rolling that out over time. I think it looks really great. Also we have an awesome intern Ella working on a Fedora zine. This is not the Fedora magazine, which is our basically our user-facing blog, but actually a literal paper zine that will have a bunch of art and things from the Fedora community, and this will be shipped to some of you. And we're going to have it for handouts at conferences and things once we have conferences again, again to show kind of what Fedora is all about and have something other than CDs to hand out at booths, something that kind of shows why Fedora is particularly interesting. It's gorgeous. Okay, I promise stats and graphs of course. Here is one of them. This is the Fedora contributors by week graph. I won't go too much into the details here, but basically the solid lines are people who are continuously active in Fedora and that the higher blue line is like drive-by contributions. If you look at the last year, we can actually see that the solid contributions has kind of a nice trend up, which I'm glad to see. I've been kind of worried about the flat line we had for a while there, but I think we can kind of see a positive growing trend there that I hope we can continue. I still would like to see the green and yellow lines. Those are the newer newest contributors and the ones who've been around for a year or so. I'd like to see those go up more and more, but I think it's nice that we have that nice and consistent. The blue, the drive-bys are still down, but that's actually I think for a specific reason, which is that the wiki is now harder to edit to prevent spam, so that's a lot of the drive-bys previously were that. We're going to actually add to these statistics to measure some other things like ask Fedora, which isn't counted right now, which I think will actually make those things go up a little bit more, but yes, what I want to see from the outreach group is for these lines to be going definitely up. It's going to be cool. Ask Fedora. I talked about this is our forum for user questions. It's based around the discourse forum software. I showed the stats for this at Nest, and the basic thing here is, look, they're growing and growing even more. That's really good to see with a lot of engagement and a lot of discussion going on there and a lot of solved problems. Now, the dinosaurs part, I'm going to show some of the stats from Fedora Mirrors, and the dinosaur is a warning that some of these stats are observational. They're like archaeology. We don't do any invasive metrics, any sort of telemetry kind of thing. Basically, we're just looking at the record and trying to discern things from that. There may be errors. The first thing here, this is the traditional thing. I call it the ages of Fedora. We're just going to block things together. The blocks are kind of arbitrary lumps. The important thing here is, yeah, growth in the number of systems out there continues to go at a pretty solid clip up and to the right. That's awesome to see. The spikes are up and down of just, again, the dinosaurs and just changes from time of year and so on, but in general growth. This is using what we call the old counting methodology. That's just one number of IP addresses seen every day in the Mirra network. Fedora Linux is going up, but it's also important. One of our other outputs is Apple, extra packages for Enterprise Linux that run on RHEL and on CentOS and on other RHEL-derived distributions. We count those as well. This is an order of magnitude more use than Fedora Linux. Fedora Linux is very important for its own right, but one of the huge impacts as a community we have is making the software available to people running these Enterprise distributions, which is also a very cool thing. And that really continues to grow as well. We should have put in only Fedora is eternal slide. That'll be for a different talk about the things, but yes, Fedora is eternal and it is the source from all of these other packages. I also have a new stats thing. These slides are not pretty because I was actually working on making the data gathering work and I was up last night still working on it, so I never got around to making it pretty part, but we have a new counting mechanism which uses every once a week. The DNF updates when it's looking for software updates tells that that machine should be counted that week. This helps us get around some networking problems that made it hard to tell whether there are multiple systems at one house or 1,000 systems at one company or just one system. Or if one person is moving around to this isn't happening this year, but in general, someone moving around to five different coffee shops and connecting it from every place would show up five times in the old stats. So this gets around that and gives us a more accurate count. Again, without doing anything that's personally identifiable or anything that's user tracking. So this is still observational but more accurate and it also lets us divide up the data in more interesting ways. This slide basically just shows that the system is working and for our newer releases we're getting data from it. I think in the next year or so we'll be able to do a little more interesting things with this. But one more interesting thing I can do is this count actually tells it sends a bucket of whether it is a brand new installed system installed a week ago, a month ago, six months ago, or older than that. So pretty broad buckets so we can't really narrow it down to specific systems but can give us an idea of usage patterns. And we can actually use this to tell the difference between systems that are just installed and then become permanently installed systems which is actually the red ones on the graph labeled one. Those are systems where somebody installed a system last week and then this week we still see the number of systems that are older than a week go up as opposed to the purple ones which are systems, number of systems that were installed or we saw them one time but they don't contribute to a growing persistent installed base. So we can actually see these ephemeral systems and distinguish between them which is kind of cool because a lot of systems being used for CI and build systems and tests are different from somebody who is actually running a Fedora operating system day to day and it's nice to be able to sort those out and we can actually see that here. This one again I apologize for it not being pretty. We can actually use this to break down what variant people are using. This doesn't necessarily tell your desktop environment because you could install Fedora workstation and switch to KDE but it gives you an overall view of how people installed it at least and a general idea of operating environment. You can see that about half of the systems are using workstation but we've got a pretty big chunk of people using cloud that's the gray here and then the generic ones which is not labeled as any addition. Then Fedora server is again very popular and then here again in the green is containers. So Fedora and containers I know for a lot of desktop users containers seem skeptical but it really is an important use for the Fedora operating system so that's cool. Then KDE is also a significant chunk of our desktop user base and then some of the other you know Mate XFCE and a little bit of sentiment there as well are also showing up there. I know there's a new i3 spin. It'll be interesting to see how many people are excited by tiling and if we can get that onto the graph. There are others as well but they don't get to the this is a thousand dots. None of them are big enough to to rate a dot here yet. Again a lot of those are probably installed also by you know as generic or by installing workstation and then switching to another environment. But anyways I can use that thing I was talking about an ephemeral system. So here this is a graph of the same thing but only of systems that just show up for one week and then go away. So there's actually a surprising amount of workstation here. I don't know test installs or people who are building I'm actually sure why this is quite so large. Possibly actually when you're doing a live install that might show up here. Not sure but you can see here that cloud and container and server are the predominant overall which again makes sense. And you can see a lot of yeah those kind of test systems going and again this is an important use for Fedora as people test the leading software. And then this is okay this is the see I didn't talk fast enough. This is the opposite. This is the persistent systems and it kind of again makes sense. We've got more more workstation systems generic that's not done with an addition. A lot of these might be systems that were installed in Fedora 20 and upgraded ever since and never got addition labeling on them. Again makes sense that those are long lasting but we also have a lot of long lasting cloud systems which is kind of cool as well. A cloud server and again KD and all right and that was the end. Let's take some questions. All right there have been no questions dropped into the Q&A yet so I will encourage folks to do that. So there was a little comment about the new logo and everyone seems to love it but can you quickly explain some of the technical reasons why the current logo is hard to work with? Yeah so one of the big things is there is no good way to make this be a single color logo and you can hear it on the screen. A single color and still retain the elements of the the logo that are important. So we've seen some pretty like the font awesome version of it is horrific. Sometimes people get rid of the infinity sometimes they just make it an F and it's to kind of destroy the symbolism of the logo to render it in two colors. So we wanted something that could actually be done in two colors because there's a lot of cases where that's important. It also is kind of off center a little bit which makes it hard to work with. This doesn't show the logo type but the the the font we used for that was not an open source font so now it is based around an open source font. I think the TM symbol in there it doesn't actually have to be in the logo and it's kind of annoying to have it there all the time it was with that. And of course one of the other things is that it looks too much like the logo of a prominent social media company and we're tired of those jokes so we wanted to move away from that a little bit. We were there first this is this logo predates Facebook using an F. I said the name I wasn't going to but the social media company using using that F but we didn't make a big deal of it at the time so we decided it'd be easier for us to just move to something that is more for us and there are another number of other things as well. An anonymous question in the chat I'm planning to check out the video you talked about etc but for someone who hasn't tried Fedora how would you make me try it? Yeah so if you're a Linux enthusiast it's easy it's the best one so that's simple but if you have if you are running a different operating system I think the exciting thing about Fedora is that although it is technically good the thing that's important about it is it's an operating system that doesn't belong to a company. Red Hat sponsors this but it belongs to us as people and that includes everybody who is a Fedora user not just the Fedora developers contributors this is a thing that we make together as a community and share it is free for everybody and it's built through all of our effort so it is our thing and you could be part of a thing that is ours and part of this community just by running this operating system and I think that's really the compelling reason to do it. It is something that is worth your time because it is something that it's like you know owning a house versus renting sometimes it's a hassle but it's nice to have something that is your own thing that you can you know if you need to put holes in the walls you can put holes in the wall if you want to repaint you can repaint you can do things with it and in the end it's something that just you know belongs to you and that's really what's important about open source Linux on the desktop I think and you know. All right so the questions are pouring in so we'll try and do this rapid fire could someone like me who has a test system mess up your single week metrics for example instead of installing a new desktop environment on my test machine I just reinstalled just to see how it works out of the box. I mean if you do that every week you will show up as an ephemeral system and I guess that's fine because that's what you probably are and you know well maybe that's what a lot of those ephemeral desktop system counts actually are but if you do it once like you know I don't think there are enough people doing that to really matter and again it's not about individual user tracking it's about you know aggregate trends so I'm not worried. How is Fedora CoreOS doing what do you see as the future for it? Oh that's a super thing to mention here these this new stats do not yet count Fedora CoreOS Fedora IoT or Silver Blue which use a different mechanism for updates we're working on that those will be included. Fedora CoreOS seems to be doing really well as a community there's a lot of energy and liveliness around it. One of the things we're working on is getting that more integrated into the whole Fedora processes overall and we hope that that will be labeled an official Fedora edition in Fedora 35. Are there plans to get Fedora and more laptops either from Lenovo or from other manufacturers? Yeah definitely from Lenovo I hope that it is three models this time around I can't speak to the details and we would love other manufacturers as well I don't have anything I can talk about there at this point. Well SlimBook in Europe also ships with Fedora workstation on systems as well so there is at least one other smaller one and there are some other smaller distributors who may be able to install it as well but no huge big deals that I can talk about at this point. Is there a mobile version for Fedora as well? There is an effort to make a mobile version it's really hard because the hardware changes so much and it is so locked down this is a market that Microsoft decided they couldn't justify playing in it's a it's a really cutthroat and everything changes so much and the hardware vendors are not interested in open so there's effort but it's I don't think it's going to be you're going to see a headline thing for Fedora even though it's a it's a really cool project for people to hack on a work on and if you're interested in that definitely there's a mobile special interest group that you should check out and see see what we can get going. So I'll combine two questions because they're kind of related what's the status of Fedora ARM and are there any formal efforts to get Fedora running on the new Apple Silicon? There is it there's some informal efforts to do it I think that's going to be a little bit hard Apple's provided some information I think we're probably never going to run as well as their integrated operating system that's their entire point I hope to see some competitive ARM laptops coming out soon that would be that would be fun Fedora is actually I didn't show this graph you know most people are running Fedora on x86 one of the significant places I see it I see a lot of Fedora cloud running on ARM I assume that is in the AWS Graviton things that's pretty cool to see but yeah so AR64 is something that actually even without IoT being counted like shows up visibly on our graphs which is exciting because we've never had a non-intel architecture even though we've supported them for a very long time they're always kind of lost in the noise like again on the thousand thousand squares waffle chart not not rating a square so ARM rates some squares so that's cool I think that's going to be more and more significant the people who are working on ARM in Fedora are amazing and have been slogging along you know as unsung heroes for a long time and I think they're it's you know probably about about time to get sung one last question an opinion I ran across a few times recently is that Fedora is an enterprise Linux and we should should and can run Ubuntu on servers and Arch on workstations what do you have to say about that that's weird I guess is what I have to say about that now you know if you want an enterprise Linux there is Red Hat Enterprise Linux which you can run you know now you can run in production for up to 16 systems or if you want to be something that is under a where you can get the binaries just by downloading them the CentOS stream is available like those are those are your better choices than those other distros that were mentioned that are that you know is again things that come from the work of Fedora directly but you could also run Fedora for those things if you wanted to but Fedora is also awesome as an individual and user desktop system a lot of people who run rel in production or CentOS Linux or CentOS stream in production run Fedora for testing or run Fedora on their desktop systems so yeah great for the enterprise but super awesome for individuals as well I would I would call that a really a silly point of view don't don't listen all right well with that we are out of time wait I want to end on the positive note I don't want to end on calling something silly give me something else what's the most exciting feature coming in 30 for 34 well I'm pretty excited about the new GNOME desktop user interface I think that's going to be I think there's a lot it's interesting how much research has gone into developing the new UI and I think there's going to be a little bit of bumps because every change is is you know something as significant as this can you know will rearrange somebody's workflow but I think it is nice and elegant and is a step forward for the GNOME 3 UI so I think that's that's one of the most exciting things I think in this room the desktop at least well thank you Matthew I still work a few more questions in the Q&A so you can find Matthew in the Discord session to continue to continue questions or I'm sure you could find his email address somewhere out there on the internet yeah or go go to discussion.fadoraproject.org that's that'll be better than emailing me we can have a public public discussion yes and I miss having a drink with people as commented in there I think we should be going to the bar that does not exist right after this but oh well only only in my mind I will see you over on the Discord chat not video I think because that's enough video for one morning