 Okay, so today I'm going to be talking about Fedora 35 and I've been using Fedora 35 now on hardware for over a month, closer to a month and a half at this point. And I have several thoughts. So I'm going to try to be more organized with this review than I have in the past. I'm still working on the format of these long term reviews. So they're not perfect yet. So I'm still working. So they're going to be a little bit rambly as I go through and try to get my mind around how to do this properly. But today's Fedora 35, let's go ahead and jump into the first section, which is installation. So upon installing Fedora 35 or opening up live ISO, this is what you get. And you do get the option to try Fedora before you install it, similar to what you would with Ubuntu or Linux Mint or something like that. And it's good. Like that first section is not a bad introduction to an ISO. It's when you get into the installer that I start to have problems. So this first screen is not actually a big deal. You're just selecting your language and make sure that's correctly and hit continue. And then we get to this screen and this screen is where we have some problems because it's not great. So it does a good job of recognizing your language for your keyboard and your time zone. Even when I was installing this on hardware, the first time, which is what I'll talk about in a little bit, it recognized that stuff fine. That section I have no problem with whatsoever. It's this other part here where you're talking about partitioning your hard drives where we have a really big problem. And the problem is that this is an inconsistent part of the installer. So sometimes this thing works just fine. So what you're supposed to do is go into this thing like I just did, hit the hard drive that you want to install on and then hit done. Now, first of all, why is the button up here in the upper left hand corner? That's I mean, you can be, I mean, down here is where you're looking for it. Maybe you look for it down here, maybe in the center, maybe even up here, but you don't look at the upper left hand corner is literally the last place you'll look. But whatever. So we had done and oh, look at this. It failed. Look at that. No disc selected. Now you saw on camera, we're recording this. You saw that I selected a disc. So I'm going to have to go in here, do it again, hit done and see if it worked this time and it did work that time. So that's the problem. It's not consistent. It doesn't work half the time and it gets worse when you have multiple petitions. So in this VM that I'm installing this on right now, all that's there is that one VM drive. That's all there is when you have multiple petitions and you have multiple drives connected to your computer, it gets worse because the consistency goes down. When I installed this the first time on this computer, I had to do that process four times in order for it to finally get my choice. On the one behind me, which I have a lot fewer in terms of hard drives and partitions already, it only took a couple times. The point is it's not a good experience. Not something that a new user is going to be very happy with at all. Even an experienced Linux user who has installed Fedora a couple times now still finds it incredibly annoying to have to go through and do that. One of the things that has to work when it comes to a Linux distribution is the installer and it has to work flawlessly. There can be bugs and stuff like that in the language selector or the keyboard chooser or even the account selector, whatever. Those can be poorly designed all you want. But the one thing you don't want to mess up is the partition manager because that thing is something that you have to have 100% trust in in order to allow it to mess around with your data and your hard drives. If that is not 100% trustworthy, that's a problem. And honestly, the rest of the installation is fine. So what you do is just hit begin installation and it begin installation. You do all your account setup and stuff. After you've done installing, it's fine. It installs on butterfs, installs all the software and installs GNOME 41. It does fine. But that one little piece of the installer just is not good. And the thing about it is, is that this is not a new bug. I installed Fedora for the first time probably three years ago and I had the same problem then. So that bug is something that is persistent and it's been there for a long time. And I know for a fact that several other YouTubers that have reviewed Fedora over the years have had the exact same problem. So in terms of installation, other than that one bug, it's fine. I think that they've gone a little bit out of their way to be a little bit too unique in terms of installer granted this installer is old. So technically they probably did have to do it from scratch when they first came up with this. These days, I really wish they'd put some effort into either making this better or just using something like Calamari's or something like that because this installer is just not getting the love that it needs from Fedora. OK, so the next thing I want to talk about is out of the box experience. When you first boot into Fedora for the very first time, you're going to see something like this and you can go through and hit start setup and answer the questions about location, privacy and automatic problem reporting. We'll leave those things on. And then third priority repository as you want to enable that. That's very important. I'll talk about that later. And well, next, and then you can add your online accounts here. I'm not going to do that. We'll just skip that. And then you're going to set up your account. So in this case, we're going to do this and that's fine. And then it's going to ask for your password and then next and then we're done. So the startup wizard is very simple. And I understand why they're doing it that way because so the setup is actually fairly simple once you've got it installed. And it's enjoyable. It's not anything that's overburdened or anything like that. So then we get a tour here for GNOME 41. Take the tour or don't take the tour. I'm not going to bother going through that. But the point is, is that they do have a tour which is telling that because GNOME 40 and 41 are so much different than GNOME 33 series or whatever how they call it. It's a good that there's a tour there. It was not the greatest tour, but it's not that bad. If you ever do need to get to the tour again, you can go through and just search for tour and it'll come back up. And then we just, you know, this is all the tour consists of. I mean, nothing interactive at all, just a series of slides. So not great, but it's OK. Anyway, so this Fedora installs the latest version of GNOME that's available, which is probably the greatest thing we can say about it because there's no other distribution out there really besides maybe arch that will give you the purest GNOME experience if that's what you're seeking. So out of the box, you don't get a ton of software on Fedora. You get the standard GNOME stuff. You get on videos, going on photos, going on maps, going on clocks, going on weather, going on contacts, going on calculator, g edit, the system monitor that comes with standard with GNOME and that's pretty much it. You also get LibreOffice and Rhythmbox for music and office work. And then in terms of utilities, most of the stuff is also just standard GNOME fare, the font viewer and so on and so forth. You also get boxes and the screenshot tool. So that's out of the box. That's really what you get. And it's not bad. I will say that it's just it's not bad if you are into GNOME and you're expecting to have a GNOME experience. This is the most pure GNOME experience you're ever going to find on any distribution and you're always going to get the most latest and greatest in terms of GNOME updates. So whenever GNOME 42 comes out or wherever it is, you'll get that pretty much immediately on Fedora, whereas you'll probably have to wait for that kind of stuff on Ubuntu or whatever distribution you're using. And the thing about Ubuntu and every other distro that uses GNOME is that they pick and choose what part of the GNOME stack that they're going to use. So you'll end up with one version of Nautilus and one version of G-Edit and one version of whatever. You'll never get a consistent versioning across the entire board because they kind of pick and choose what they want. So with Fedora, it's all GNOME 41 all the time. And if that's what you're looking for, this is where you're going to find it. In terms of speed and memory and stuff like that, you'll find that GNOME uses the same amount of memory. It always has a lot. And so you're not going to want to use this on a system that uses, you know, that has a small amount of memory available to it because this is going to choke up a lot of your memory. This is using almost half of the memory that I gave it, which is just insane, right? It's just not a very low in terms of resources distribution. It never has been or at least desktop environment, I should say. This really has less to do with with Fedora and more to do with GNOME. Now, you will notice that the more memory you give GNOME, the more it uses. That's usually the case with with GNOME. So I gave it, I think, five gigabytes. I'm not actually sure. No, actually, I gave it eight gigabytes. That's right. I remember now I gave it eight gigabytes. And because I gave it that much, it's using more than it would if I'd given it four gigabytes. It's a weird system that way. But that's the case. Now, you will notice that you'll have some odd behavior in GNOME. I think this is a GNOME problem, not a Fedora problem. But when you open up certain applications, for example, the terminal, sometimes it opens up on one workspace and sometimes it will open up on another workspace. What workspace it opens up on really has no rhyme or reason. It just opens up wherever it decides it wants to open up. Now, if you notice, if you're watching earlier when I opened up the first time, it appeared on workspace two, even though I had workspace one focused, it's a little weird, right? And I've noticed that on my hardware install, it does that as well. So just today, when I was logging in to begin this review, I opened up Chromium and I was on workspace one and Chromium opened up on workspace two for whatever reason. Again, and the weirdest part about it is that it's inconsistent. So you would expect maybe there's a rule or something saying, hey, always spawn this particular program on this workspace. But that's not the case because you can close Chromium then be in workspace one and it would open up on workspace one. So it's not consistent. It's really weird. And that's not something that I found that can be changed. And I don't want to talk a lot about how GNOME is un-customizable. I've covered that a lot of times. I've beat that horse to death many, many times. The point is, though, is because it does have some problems changing those problems to make sure that they're fixed. Mostly is impossible. So if you go into the settings and stuff, this is my actual install of Fedora. There doesn't seem to be a way for you to change any of the stuff relating to workspaces. You can change the key bindings. You can, I believe in GNOME 42, you'll be able to change the way workspaces deal with multiple monitors. But other than that, there's not a lot here in terms of, you know, actual changing for that kind of stuff. Now, when I first installed Fedora, I promised myself that I was going to use GNOME the whole time. I broke that promise to myself probably within the first four days or so. And I installed DWM and most of my time on Fedora over the last month and a half has been in DWM the last few days with BSPWM. So I don't have a lot more to say about GNOME. I went through and I customized it and I try to use it every time I logged in just for a little while and then almost immediately ran back to a tiling window manager. But for the most part, I will say this, GNOME is better than it used to be. On Fedora, it's the best GNOME experience I've ever had. But that's not really saying all that much because it's still a GNOME experience. And if you don't like the GNOME experience, you're not going to like this. And that's the way it is for me. If you enjoy the GNOME way of doing things, this is the best experience of GNOME you'll probably ever have because the people who make Fedora also make GNOME. So that their view is kind of here. This is the showcase for GNOME. OK, so the next part is going to be installing updates and installing software. So this is where we're going to be talking about the package managers. So if I open up a terminal here and zoom in, the package manager for Fedora is DNF. Now you can also use other package managers. There's several others. You can also use Flatpak. For me, DNF is really good. I really enjoy DNF. So it has basically the same syntax as you would find with apps. So DNF update and pseudo DNF upgrade. I found DNF to be fairly fast. It didn't have the same problems I had with Zipper when I did a long term review of open SUSE. So when I even when I was away from Fedora for a couple of days, because I was just messing around with my main system and came back and did some updates. I noticed that it was actually fairly fast and that includes the third party repositories that you'll have to have. So in order to get a lot of stuff that you'll want, you'll have to enable third party repositories of varying kinds. You'll have to find the non free stuff. If you want like non free software, including things like Google Chrome and then video drivers, you'll have to get that for several other things as well, even if they're not non free. It wasn't a difficult thing to do. It's just a matter of googling for those repositories and then copying, pasting one line. And then it kind of does the same thing that Ubuntu does when you add repositories. Those things are kept up to date with the regular package manager. And that's fine. And it was a OK experience. It feels a little outdated these days because I'm so used to the AUR and also even Ubuntu has kind of gone away from the whole adding repositories things and has adopted snaps. And I thought that Flatpak would be a little bit more integrated with Fedora. It's and it's not really, but really what surprised me is that FlatHub is not really included out of the box either. You have Flatpak installed, but you don't have FlatHub's repository installed by default. And that really confused me for a couple of weeks because I just assumed that it was so I didn't even make the I didn't even think that the FlatHub repository wasn't enabled because I just assumed that it was there. So when I couldn't go through and install stuff from FlatHub, I assumed something was broken. I went into the FlatHub forums and had a whole conversation spanning like a couple of weeks trying to get this fixed. And all it really ended up being was that you have to enable the FlatHub repository. And the thing is most people probably won't have the problem. They probably just searched for how to use FlatHub on Fedora. If I had done that, I would have saved myself a lot of trouble because I would have found the answer right away. The odd thing is that the people from the FlatHub forum didn't consider that I hadn't done that to begin with and just point that out. Because usually when the person asking the question is doing something stupid, the people in the forums usually are able to point that stupidity out. In this case, they weren't actually I ended up finding the solution myself and the people in the forums never did find a solution. But the point is in terms of package management, you have a lot of options. And I found myself mostly sticking with DNF. I have a couple of Flatpaks installed. Things like Todoist and Bitwarden are both Flatpaks. And installing Flatpaks is a good experience. I enjoyed it a lot in terms of everything else. Everything else I installed from DNF and the regular Fedora repositories and the non free repository. And the thing is everything was there. So I was able to install things like the menu. I was able to install all the dependencies for DWM. I was able to install all the make dependencies and stuff for BSPWM. I was able to make BSPWM here with no problems, even though it had some dependencies. They were all just freely available from the Fedora repositories. So all that kind of stuff, Alacrity was here, OBS was here. Steam was here, Discord proved to be a problem. Because the first time I installed Discord, I didn't have any clue about the third party repository thing. Not really like there when we talked about the out of the box experience when it showed that beginning screening, we enabled third party repositories. That doesn't include everything. So in order to go get the non free stuff, you have to go to the web, find the link for the non free stuff, install it in the terminal. And then you can go through and install things like Discord. I had no clue that that was there. And there's nothing in the operating system that is going to tell you to go do this. So that ended up being a problem. So I had a hard, hard time getting Discord installed. And that was, remember, that was while I was still having the stupidity problem with Flatpak because I wanted to install it from FlatHub, but FlatHub wasn't working, so I had to find some other way. I did end up eventually stumbling upon the non free repositories and got those all set up. And then I was able to install Discord. That's really the only bad experience I had with getting software installed. Now, DNF here is actually proving me wrong that it was fast, but I think there was a lot of updates, but it is done now. The other thing that we should talk about in terms of software is the software store. So this is the software store. It's GNOME software. If you've ever used it for, you're going to be very familiar here. And just like every other version of GNOME software, you're going to have an option here for other things where you can other sources for your software. So in this case, it has FlatHub. I can't remember whether or not FlatHub is there by default out of the box. I think it is. But I remember when I tried to install from FlatHub in GNOME software that it failed out. So I believe that you have to go through and actually still add that FlatHub repository in order for this to work as well. Why this is listed when the repository hasn't been added yet? I don't know. It's a little confusing, and it's something that you kind of have to get past if you're going to deal with getting software from multiple sources. The one thing I will say is that I have SNAPs installed, like I have SNAPD installed. And despite, no matter where I go here, I'm not going to find an option for SNAPs like at all. So SNAPD does not incorporate at all into GNOME software, which I find a little surprising, but not that surprising because Canonical has gone through and made it so that SNAP kind of does its own thing. They even have their own SNAP store. And they've even gone through and forked GNOME software and made it all SNAPs. So it's not that surprising. But I kind of had hoped that it would be since how I went through the trouble of actually installing SNAPs when I was having the FlatHub problems. So that is software and software availability. Overall, highly impressed with the software availability. I thought I was going to have some problems. But once you get past the struggles of adding the non-free repositories and FlatPack and FlatHub and all this stuff, any piece of software you want is there. I also haven't noticed anything being really far behind. Most of it is the most recent version of whatever it is I download. So I haven't had a problem where something is significantly out of date. So that has also been a good experience. OK, so the next thing I want to talk about is gaming. Now, everybody knows that was watched the channel for any amount of time knows that I'm just not a very big gamer. I've never really had. I can't say never really have been, but it's been a long time since I've really been into gaming. So I'm not going to go through and do a ton of gaming benchmarks or something like that. You can find those numbers online through other people who know how to do that stuff way better than I ever will. But I will say that gaming on Fedora was fairly easy. I was able to install Steam right from, you know, software. I was able to install Lutrus right from going on software. I was able to load into those things, sign into those things, install games from those things and play just fine. Because I'm not a huge gamer, I'm not able to tell you how good Proton support is or any of that stuff. But for the most part, despite the fact that I'm using a Waylon system, everything seems to work just fine, which was honestly kind of a surprise for me. I was expecting to have more problems in the gaming section. Now, again, I didn't spend a lot of time gaming, so I'm sure that there's probably spots in here where there's just issues. But for the most part, I was pleasantly surprised when it came to gaming more so than I was really expecting to be. So that is the gaming section. Like I said, I was able to go through install Steam. I have Steam here. I was able to install Lutrus as well and get that set up as well. So that is gaming. I don't know whether or not I would say Fedora is great for gaming or not. That's going to really be your mileage, my very kind of thing. Because if you're going to install Windows things on here, I'm not sure how they'll run. You'll just have to get on here and try it. That's the best I can tell you because I haven't done gone through and done a ton of like trial and error on terms of getting Proton and stuff to work. I'm assuming that it would work fairly decently. But again, you got to remember you're using Waylon. So that could cause problems. OK, so the next thing I want to talk about is stability. And this is where we run into some problems. Overall, Fedora is a stable distro. I never had any real crashes or app crashes or any of that stuff. It all worked just fine. The biggest issue I had in terms of stability came with audio. Now, I don't know if that should be surprising to anyone or not. But Fedora comes with pipe wire out of the box. And it's what you use. And for the most part, it seemed to work OK. But when I wanted to go through and do something with Tyler recording the podcast or whatever, I had a lot of problems. And the thing I experienced most was that pipe wire itself would go back and forth between being OK and not being great. Like between updates, you'd get an update and things would just go to crap and things just wouldn't work. So at one point, for whatever reason, it was reading my microphone here as both an input and an output. Now, if this was like a blue reed yeti that had input and output capabilities, I'd understand. This is a high PR 40. It can only do input. It can't do output like at all. So why it was doing that, I don't know. And I know it was a pipe wire problem because I was having the same problem on Garuda at the same time right after an update pipe wire for whatever bed and it just didn't work. It was so bad. Even before I even considered pipe wire, I thought I was having hardware problems because it was like, this is between distros and having the same problem. But it ended up being a pipe wire problem and going back to Arco fixed it. And then after another update on Fedora, it fixed it here. And then it worked for a little while and then I had problems again. My poorest experience on Fedora overall 100% was audio. Surprisingly, OBS seems to work just fine in terms of capturing windows and stuff like that. Previously on Weyland Systems, I always had a hard time getting OBS to work, but it seems that they've ironed out those kinks. And at least hopefully this video here, which will be my longest video that I've recorded in Fedora, will have come out okay. The only other issue I had in terms of stability is the audacity for whatever reason when I've opened it up to begin with, like the first time, like after a cold boot, I get an error. It's a weird error. I've copied and pasted it and submitted it on their GitHub. But for the most part, it's a really weird error, but it seems like if you just sit close and then go about your day, it works just fine. So honestly, if it weren't for the pipe wire stuff, stability on Fedora would have been fantastic. I just don't think pipe wire is ready for, like if all you do is listen to music and stuff, pipe wire is gonna be fine. But if you try to record videos and stuff and you want that consistency, like where audio always works no matter what, pipe wire is just not there yet. And that leads me to the last two sections. So the last section I wanna talk about is community support. The few times that I had to ask questions, I had no problems finding answers to those questions. The problem that I had was knowing what questions to ask. So I talked about my flat hub problems before, now that's not specifically a Fedora issue, but because of the way I asked the questions in order to get flat hub working, I had a hard time getting a good answer. I think if I'd gone to the Fedora forums instead and asked the same questions, I probably would have gotten an easier and better answer and probably would have had it solved much faster than I did. We also talked about the non-free repos earlier. There's nowhere in the operating system, like without going through and Googling it that tells you that those repos even exist. The only mention of third party repositories you get is in that initial setup. After that, you don't see them ever again. And you don't know that there are more repos that you might need in order to get things that you need to use in order to have your computer function, things like then video drivers and other non-free software, things like Discord. The only way you're ever going to discover that those things exist is going to be going through and Googling it or asking someone else who has used Fedora before, which is what I ended up doing. I got into the Discord and said, hey, I can't install Discord. You know, I got into Discord on my phone, asked them why I couldn't use Discord and that led me to the non-free repositories. But if you're not expecting to have to search for those, that could be a poor experience. As long as you know what questions to ask, I found that the community support was actually fairly good. So that leads us to the conclusion. And my overall thoughts on Fedora 35 is that it's good. I had, for the most part, the overarching experience that I had over the last month and a half was really good. The stability in terms of at least the operating system was really good. The operating, the updates and stuff like that, everything came out really well like that. I enjoyed the package manager. The software availability was really good, which was something that I was worried about. Flatpacks turns out not to be so horrible. Sometimes they don't follow the GTK theme. But for the most part, that was a good experience. Every single piece of software that I needed, I was able to install even going through and installing things like DWM and BSPWM were both really easy. So overall, a good experience. Now, the question I would have for myself would be would I continue to use this as a daily driver? And the answer to that would be no. And the reason for that being is just because it uses pipe wire. Like even Wayland seems to be there. Like it seems to, at least for my purposes, Wayland seems to be working just fine. Like finally, OBS seems to be working okay in terms of capturing windows and all that stuff. Wayland seems to be working fine. Pipe wire, on the other hand, seems to keep getting updates that break it. And when audio stops working, that's not a great experience. Especially for someone who uses their computer to record audio for videos on a daily basis. When that stuff breaks, it makes the whole distro just completely unusable. And especially when something is constantly in development and things break, and that something is a part of the system that is just absolutely required, it makes it for an uncertain user experience. So you can log into your computer not knowing whether or not an update's going to kill your audio. Now, the irony of it is that I use R2 and R2 distro for a real daily driver. And that's a rolling release. So I'm always getting updates that are on the bleeding edge. The thing is, for the most part, I've never had an experience where something like this pipe wire thing has happened for me on Arco. Now, it did happen to me on Garuda. Because Garuda uses pipe wire, Arco doesn't seem to use pipe wire by default. Or at least it wasn't affected by that same bug. So maybe it's possible that I just had a bad luck thing when it comes to the pipe wire those few times. And for the most part, it just works. It seems to be working today. And I guess that's a good thing. So that part of it is too uncertain for me to use it as a daily driver. For everyone else, my recommendation would be this. If you are a GNOME diehard, if you really like the GNOME desktop environment, Fedora is your way to go. It's the most pure GNOME experience you're going to get anywhere. And that is a good thing if that experience is what you're searching for. If that's what you're looking for, you're not gonna find this kind of experience anywhere else. You're not gonna find it in Ubuntu or Debian or Linux Mint or any of those other places. You're just not going to get it. Solis or any of those other distros, this is the most pure GNOME experience you're gonna get. The only exception to that might be Arch, but even then your experience is going to be delayed a bit because eventually, even as up-to-date as the Arch repos tend to be, you're still gonna have to wait a little while to get those GNOME updates. They'll come to Fedora first. So if you're a GNOME person, Fedora is a really good option for you. If you're not a GNOME person, then Fedora could still be for you because it is a good experience. But for you, you're going to have a much harder choice because you're gonna have to make some choices over other variables on what you think makes a good distribution or not. The best recommendation I can give for you is to try it. And I'm happy that I did. Overall, my experience was really good. I'm happy that I installed Fedora. I would probably use it again. I'll definitely review any upcoming versions and see if, you know, how those things have changed. So that is it for this video. I hope I'm able to get some of this stuff edited down because right now this video is an hour long. I'm assuming that I can at least edit out some of the silences. And there's a lot of alms and stuff like that in this video. So be grateful that I do edit these things because this is a little rough. Anyways, if you have comments on Fedora 35, you can leave those in the comment section below. Make sure you hit the like and subscribe button. I really do appreciate that. You can follow me on Twitter. Here comes my dog. Hello, dog. You can follow me on Twitter at LinuxK. You can support me. He can support me on Patreon at patreon.com. Slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Today, Devon, Chris, East Coast Web, Gentoo, Sven2, Petrico, Primus, Marcus, Maglin, Jackson, I have Tool, Steve, a Cyberguide Linux, Mitchell, ArtCenter, Amityus, Carbon-Dated, Merit, Camp, Drashly, J-Dogs, the BSCs, Rock, Peter and Crucible. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.