 Today I'm going to be taking a look at the recently released Fedora 37. Fedora is one of the more popular desktop Linux distributions and this is the long-awaited release of Fedora 37. And I say it's long-awaited is because the release date for Fedora 37 got pushed back a little bit. And for those of you that are kind of new to Linux and how these releases work, you really have two camps of Linux distributions. You have those groups of Linux distributions that typically they set a release date and they always meet it. They always release on the date. They say no matter what they're releasing on that date that they set six months ago, a year ago, whatever it happens to be. You have another group of Linux distributions that they set release dates, but those release dates are tentative, if you will, right? They're more suggestions. That's not really a hard, fast release date, right? It's we may release on that date, but we probably won't. And Fedora is in that second camp, right? Fedora almost never releases on the actual release date. They always push back their releases. So this is not unusual for Fedora, but I've downloaded the ISO for Fedora Workstation 37 and I'm going to run through a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine. So I downloaded the ISO for Fedora Workstation 37. The ISO is just under two gigs in size. And I'm going to go ahead and let's go ahead and boot directly into the live environment. I'm going to run through an installation. All right. And we are in our live GNOME desktop here. Let's go ahead and get into the desktop here. And we have the option here for the installer. We can try Fedora, meaning close out the installer and just play around in the live GNOME desktop, right? Or we can install to hard drive, actually run through a proper installation. And I'm going to go ahead and run through the installer. So the first screen of the installer is asking about the language. And this is the language to be used during the installation process for the installer. The default language is English. That's fine for me, English US. That is correct for me. So I don't need to change anything. Let me move my head. I'm going to click continue. And then we have keyboard time and date installation destination. Now the keyboard is defaulting to English US. So I don't need to change that. And it has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. You can see America slash Chicago. I'm not in Chicago, but Chicago is in the central time zone in the US. So I don't need to change that. But we do need to select a drive to actually install Fedora to. And this part of the Fedora installer is confusing as hell. I always miss this up every time I've ever installed Fedora ever. And I'm talking about going back more than a decade. I missed this part up because there's one drive in this virtual machine, right? And it has a checkbox here, meaning we've already selected the drive to actually install Fedora to. I don't actually need to select it. But I always think I have to select it because when I click it, the box turns blue. And that actually kind of makes you think, Hey, you selected a drive, right? But no, I actually unselected the drive. It was already selected before, you know, when it had the checkbox. If I click it again, I get the checkbox, although it still stays highlighted blue. That's very confusing because a lot of times I uncheck the drive and then click done. And of course, we're not going to be able to install Fedora until we actually choose a disk to install to all of this. Do I want to encrypt? No, I'm not going to encrypt this virtual machine installation. I'm just going to click done. And now the only thing I need to do from this point on is click the button here begin installation. And this portion of the installation will take a few minutes. I'm going to pause the recording. I'll be back once this section of the installer has completed. And that portion of the installation has completed that took three or four minutes. Let me move my head here. And to complete the installation, we need to go ahead and reboot the machine, click the button that says finish installation, and it should automatically reboot for us. So that's what I'm going to do right now. And actually Fedora's installer does not reboot automatically when you click the finish installation button. That's interesting because pretty much every other installer on Linux does that for you the ubiquity installer that Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distributions typically use automatically reboots for you. The Calamari installer that so many Linux distributions use automatically reboots the machine for you. I don't know. Fedora, I will say this about the installer. And once we actually get into taking a look at Fedora Fedora, even though it's a pretty popular Linux distribution, it's not that popular as far as desktop Linux users partly because it is really not the most user friendly Linux distribution out there. It does make some strange choices. And in some ways it can be kind of frustrating to use if you're used to the way other Linux distributions operate. So let me actually go and actually reboot the machine through the menu here. If I go to the session and go to restart and the machine has rebooted and there's still some setup here. You see the setup program, the installation is really just installing the base system. But you will notice during that installation process, we never created a user or a password or any of that stuff, right? So there's still some work to be done. So start setup. First thing privacy, do we want location services turned on? It's turned on automatically, but you could turn it off if you wanted to automatic problem reporting. So crash reports, do you want to automatically send them by default? It's turned on, you could turn that off if you wanted to. Now the crash reporting that Linux distributions ask about, I typically leave that turned on because I do want to help these distributions get better. So if sending those automatic crash reports helps, hey, why not the location services? Honestly, I'd probably turn that off for privacy reasons, but that's just me. In this case, I'll leave the default. So now the next screen is interesting enable third party repositories. So this was actually something I had planned on doing potentially at the terminal at the command line. I'm glad I don't have to do that. Because once again, Fedora doesn't enable non free repositories by default. There is a repository of non free software in the RPM fusion repository that most Fedora users are going to enable anyway. So you definitely want to enable the RPM fusion repository, also flat pack, although it's installed out of the box on Fedora, meaning that flat packs, you can install flat packs. There's it's not connected to a repository of software such as flat hub. So you have to enable the flat up repository if you want to install from flat up. So let's enable these third party repositories. Now clicking the button to enable those third party repositories, it doesn't tell me what repositories it enabled. It doesn't tell me if it enabled RPM fusion. I don't know. It doesn't tell me if it enabled flat hub. I don't know. So that again, I wish it had a little more information here to actually let me know what what it enabled there. I'm just going to click next connect our online accounts. I'm not going to connect any online accounts. So Google accounts next cloud, Microsoft accounts, all of that stuff. So I'll skip this section. Now we need to create our username and password. So my username is going to be DT and then I'm going to click next. Now let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. So confirm our strong and complicated password and then click next. And it says all done start using Fedora Linux. All right, welcome to GNOME three. Do you want to take a tour? No, thanks. I've seen GNOME three before. First thing I'm going to do is hit the super key to get in the menu system. And I'm going to look for the displays program that the display settings because I need to change the resolution. So screen resolution here is a little walkie. Let me change to a proper 1920 by 1080. Keep the changes. And now this virtual machine should forever remember that I always want a 1920 by 1080 resolution. So the first thing I will say about Fedora is typically with Fedora, you get a very vanilla, very plain GNOME desktop experience, which typically in years past has been a bad experience. But with the recently released versions of GNOME, especially the GNOME 40 series, GNOME has really become a pretty nice desktop environment out of the box. I mean, with really no extensions, you know, this is usable. So I actually quite like especially this last release GNOME 43 is really good. Let's take a look at what is installed out of the box here in Fedora 37. So you're going to have your standard GNOME suite of applications such as contacts, weather, clocks, maps, GNOME photos, GNOME videos, yada, yada, yada. One interesting thing to note is text editor. So this was a recent change with the GNOME suite of applications. As far as their plain text editor is no longer gEdit. The plain text editor is now text editor. And by text editor, I mean, that's the actual name of the program. Now it's GNOME dash text dash editor. Like if you're launching it from like a run launcher like D menu or Rofi or if you're launching it from the command line, GNOME dash text dash editor. I don't know gEdit was a fine name. I don't know why we needed to change that. That said, the GNOME text editor is a pretty neat program. That's not my favorite text editor, but for a plain text editor, it's definitely usable. We do have Libre Office installed. So we have Libre Office Impress installed. We have Libre Office Rider and Libre Office Calc. Let me open the writer program. So this would be our word processor. And if I go to help and about Libre Office, let's see what version we are on. Looks like we are on version 7.4.1.2. I actually was trying to drag this window and I ended up dragging way too much. All right. So that is Libre Office Rider. And getting back in the menu here, there's really not much else installed. Again, just your standard GNOME applications. We have this Utilities subcategory here where we have our image viewer and our PDF viewer and things like that. But again, not a lot installed out of the box. Now, one thing about GNOME that I have always found a little confusing with these recent versions, not all of the installed applications are here in this menu, because anything that is pinned in the dock does not appear up here. So Firefox is our browser. It does not appear here, because when you pin it to the dock, it disappears from this section of the menu. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Our file manager is also down here. Obviously that's going to be the Nautilus file manager from GNOME. Now, this release of Fedora came out a couple of days ago. There could be some updates. I wonder if Control Alt T would bring up a terminal. No, I didn't think it would. Let me do super and just start typing terminal. Let's open the GNOME terminal. Let me zoom in. Now, typically I would update the system. I would do something like well, not sudo apt. I would do sudo DNF update to update the system. And typically when I do this on a fresh install of Fedora, it always takes a long time. I always complain about DNF being kind of slow as far as package management, as far as the download speeds, and partly is the default settings for DNF are just bad. You can actually speed up DNF. I don't know why they don't speed it up for you automatically out of the box, but you can actually edit a config by sudo vim of the config I believe is slash etsy slash dnf slash dnf.conf. Yes. All right. And then give it our sudo password. Vim is not installed. Well, we can take care of that. So let's do sudo dnf install VIM just because I don't want to use the GNOME text editor. I mean, we could use it, but I'm eventually going to need VIM on the system anyway. So let's go ahead and install VIM. VIM is not a very big program, but you can see this is taking a little bit of time, right? We're having to wait a while. Sinking some repositories. Again, it's just a little slow, but once we get VIM installed, we're going to edit this dnf.conf and see if we can speed things up a little bit. And you can see when it's syncing the repositories, we did enable RPM fusion. So that's good. So that gives us a lot of non free software, especially proprietary drivers. So if you're like an NVIDIA user, you really need RPM fusion enabled. So that's good that that was enabled. Now it's telling us the download size is this. Okay, sure. And this is just really slow. It probably took a minute and a half to install VIM. And typically VIM installs in like five seconds. I don't know with the Hapt package manager or with Pacman, you know, other package management systems online. So that's just really, really, really slow. I'm going to up arrow and I'm going to sue VIM slash at C slash dnf slash dnf.conf. And what I was looking for is I was looking for a setting here for max parallel downloads and the default dnf.conf does not even have it even like as a comment. This is weird. You think they even have a comment letting people know this is even possible. But what you want to do is go down and at the end here add max underscore parallel underscore downloads equals. And then you want that to equal any value. I think you can go from any value of like three to 20, you know, but I think a good number of parallel downloads is something probably five to 10 is what I would do. Let's just use five for max parallel downloads here. And then I'm going to escape and colon wq to write and quit. Actually, I didn't need to write and quit. There was one other thing I wanted to add to the dnf.conf. So one other thing is fastest mirror. That is another setting that almost every Fedora user is going to eventually add to this dnf.conf because you're going to get tired of the slow mirrors because again, that's part of the problem is these mirrors that we're trying to grab software from or slow fastest mirror. All one word equals true with a capital T escape colon wq to write and quit. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to update the system. I'm going to do a sudo dnf update and see if the update is a little faster. Yeah, that says it's this download size. Okay, some three hundred and fifty five pages. So it already knows the packages that need to be updated. And let's see if these download speeds actually are good. Yeah, you can tell this is moving along much more quickly than what it was doing with that vim installation earlier. Still three hundred and sixty one packages. It'll take a few minutes. I'm going to pause the recording. I'll be back once the system update has completed. And those three hundred and sixty one packages updated just fine. There was a kernel update. So typically you'd want to reboot the computer, but I'm going to or go that for now because I want to do a U name dash R before I reboot just to see what kernel we were on before we updated because we're still using the old kernel right until I reboot we're on six dot o dot seven. So that's what it shipped with. But you can see already they have moved on to six dot o dot eight. I also want to do a dnf list installed. So let's get a list of all the installed packages. Of course, it spits it out each package on its own separate line. So to get an accurate count, all we need to do is take that output of dnf list installed and pipe it into WC the word count program space dash L the L flag is a line count rather than a word count. So how many lines are in that output one thousand seven hundred ninety three. So that's how many packages are installed out of the box on Fedora workstation thirty seven minus a few packages that I installed personally such as Vim one other program I might install if I was a GNOME user. Typically, you're going to want to install GNOME dash tweak dash tool. So the GNOME tweak tool is just a nice settings manager. What it does, it allows you to change fonts and themes and extensions and things like that. So it's just a nice program that really honestly probably should just be a part of the default GNOME suite of applications. To be honest, I think pretty much every GNOME user probably installs GNOME tweaks. And now that we've done that, I'm going to go ahead and close out of the terminal. I want to launch the graphical software center. So let me search for software. We know RPM Fusion that repository of non free software it got enabled. I wonder if Flat Pack got enabled when I click the enabled third party repository button. So let me search for something that I know is proprietary software and it would not be in the standard repository. Right. So what I need to do is I'm going to search for Discord. I don't know if you guys can see that. This says software needs to be restarted to use these new plugins. Okay. Well, how do I get? That is weird. How do I get rid of that message? Okay. Just restart the. That was weird. I don't know why I did that the first time. But if I search for Discord, which I know is available on FlatHub, right? Discord. Yeah, nothing is returned. So I wonder if I go into software repositories. Is there a nice graphical way where I can just tick on FlatHub or do I have to do this at the command line? I mean, I don't mind opening a terminal and adding something at the command line, but it'd be nice if they didn't make especially newer to Linux users do this. So we have the RPM fusion stuff enabled. We have this firmware update. Now, this is interesting because the firmware update repository of software, some people, their equipment will have available updates for the firmware on their hardware. So that's something that typically you want to make sure you have enabled even if you end up don't need it because some people won't need it for their hardware. But typically you want to have that enabled just in case looks like Google Chrome repository to get the Chrome browser is enabled if you need that. And for Dora FlatHub, it does look like FlatHub is turned on. But it didn't, it didn't find Discord. Maybe maybe I need to search for a different program. Let me search for something else I know that is available on FlatHub as a flatback OBS. OBS is free software, though it should be in the standard repositories. Oddly enough, even OBS and the standard repositories doesn't come up. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not crazy about this. This graphical software center. Let me see zoom is proprietary software with what I find zoom up problem is it's trying to give me hints. And then I guess I have to hit enter to I don't know, because discord discord still not there even when I hit enter. But zoom was maybe that maybe discord is not available on FlatHub. That could be the case. But zoom apparently is unless it's in the standard repositories. No, it's going to install zoom as a flatback from FlatHub. So FlatHub is enabled. I just need to search for something that's actually there on FlatHub because apparently discord isn't. I really like the default fedora wallpaper here. Let me move my head. You can actually see it is branded with the fedora logo here at the bottom. Let me go ahead and right click on the desktop. Let's change desktop background. Let's see what other wallpapers are available. So we should have the standard GNOME 43 wallpaper pack. And one thing about GNOME you have the default theme settings, which is a mixture of light and dark theme. So you're going to have your light windows with the dark panel at the top of the default dark GNOME shell theme. I like dark dark where everything is dark. So I'm going to choose a proper dark theme. And then we need to choose a wallpaper to go with the dark theme. And this is I believe the standard like the default or GNOME 43 is this blue and purple. So what the blue would be blue would be the wallpaper for the light theme, right? If I go to the dark theme, the purple wallpaper. So that's the split wallpapers here. So if you change between a light theme and a dark theme, you get a different wallpaper because typically if you have a light wallpaper, it looks best against a dark theme. If you have a dark wallpaper, it looks best against a light theme. And it looks like other than the standard GNOME wallpaper pack. I've seen all of these before. There's really nothing, nothing to see here other than again, the the artwork here that came with Fedora that so the light wallpaper was the default. I go to the dark theme, you have a darker version of this wallpaper. And I actually like that. Yeah, I think this is a very attractive, very sexy GNOME desktop. Now typically for my taste, I'm going to install probably four or five GNOME extensions to get me the standard like dash to dock or dash to panel because I like having a normal kind of panel with a normal kind of start menu. I'm not a big fan of the GNOME workflow out of the box, but I can use it. I did a video actually just a couple of weeks back of some of my favorite GNOME extensions that I like to install if I have to live in GNOME. So guys, check out that video if you're a GNOME user. One thing I should check out before I go is I should open a terminal and we should check out system resource usage. So let me fire up Htop. Htop is not installed. So let's do a sudo dnf install Htop. And yes, actually install it. I really hate the confirmation about installing a program like if I do a sudo dnf install Htop, you don't have to ask me after that. Do you really want to install it? Well, I wouldn't have typed sudo dnf install Htop if I didn't really want to install it. Again, strange choices for Fedor. There's a lot of directions they go that I find a little odd. But system resource usage, right now I'm using 1.8 gigs of RAM out of the 6 gigs of RAM. I gave this virtual machine. The GNOME desktop has never been slim. It's never been lightweight. It's always been kind of a hog, especially a RAM hog and 1.8 gigs of 6 gigs of RAM. That's that's insanely high. But it is what it is. I don't want to throw too much shade on GNOME. I know a lot of people really love this desktop environment. I've got to say it has grown on me a little bit here in the last year or two. Overall, I think Fedora 37 is a solid release. I think those of you that are Fedora fans and you love Fedora, you're going to be just ecstatic about this release of Fedora, mainly because of GNOME 43. Now who is Fedora for as far as a Linux desktop user? Who typically uses Fedora? Because that's not, again, that popular amongst the, you know, standard desktop Linux crowd, right? Most of the Linux community, they typically gravitate toward Debian-based systems or Arch Linux-based systems here in recent years, as far as their desktop computing. You know, Fedora is a Red Hat project. Well, technically Fedora is a community distribution, but its main sponsor is Red Hat. Red Hat steers development of Fedora. Fedora and Red Hat, they're kind of like sister distributions. Actually, Fedora is the upstream of Red Hat. So there's a lot of Red Hat stuff in Fedora and vice versa. And because of that, I think a lot of the people that love Fedora, typically people that work with servers, a server admins, IT people, people that work with Red Hat Linux on a professional level, they will typically install Fedora on their personal machines just to be in that Red Hat ecosystem. So I think that is a definite use case. Another good use case for installing Fedora is if you want something that has a little bit more up-to-date software, Fedora, even though it's not a rolling release, it is a little more bleeding edge. So this latest release of Fedora has all the latest and greatest packages and kernels and browsers and everything. Everything's going to be on the absolute latest version. So it's a little more bleeding edge, but it's not so bleeding edge. It's not rolling. It's not arch, right? It's not gen2. It's not like that. So if you want some kind of balance between rock solid stable, old and crusty like Debian, right? But you don't want to go to the extreme of arch Linux. You want something in the middle. I think Fedora is the sweet spot. It's the middle ground. I do want to congratulate everybody that worked on this release of Fedora. Job well done. Before I go, I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Gabe James, Matt Maxim, and Mitchell Paul West. Why you bald homie, Alex, Armoredragon, Chuck Commander Angry, Diokai George, Lee Marsdrom, Nate Erion, Alexander Paul, Peacewatch and Fedora Polytech, Realities 4 Less, Red Prophet Roland, Steven Tools Devler, and Willie These Guys. They're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode you just watch would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you want more videos about Linux and free and open source, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. The LSH top really should be default applications. I need to follow a bug report.