Fedora 36: Time to finally switch?

[@lsatenstein]

Hi Stephen' Thank you for providing such great contents. Particularly interesting to me were the fstab changes to support rebooting from snapshots. Re fastest mirror. I was advised by dnf gurus that the parameter should only be used the very first time you use dnf , and then turned off. dnf itself seems to have an algorithm that selects the dynamically changing fastest mirror(s).

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Hi Leslie, thanks for watching! Great tip on dnf post-install behavior, will definitely keep in mind for posterity. :)

[@NarekAvetisyan]

Thank you for the presentation Captain Picard. Live long and prosper.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for tuning in to the show! :)

[@icyblue878]

Hey Stephen! Thanks for putting out good content, I just found you on KZbin and you've already helped me learn a lot! Your Arch install script video was great! So is stuff like this!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for the encouragement! :)

[@ShaneJoseph131083]

Thank you for this video, I'm considering Fedora and the ability to select a snapshot in grub is what I always wanted. This is one of the features I loved in openSUSE. Great tutorial, awsome content as always. I'll be following this for my next install.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Great choice, and thanks for watching! :)

[@seanpaul7069]

nice tutorial. Fedora being used by professionals, they should include something like snapper/timeshift by default and have it preconfigured. Even the the BTRFS subvol creation should be done automatically, like other calamares (i.e endevaour os) Otherwise, to me BTRFS is not fully utilized by Fedora 36 by default. Hope to see a complete ready to use system in future.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks! Same here...

[@peppe540]

There is no such thing as coincidence. The last two weeks I was dabbling around in Fedora, including KDE. And liked it a lot, dnf is great also, Fedora is very polished, also in docs and forums. But the complexity of setting up snapper and not having snapshots available from Grub made me turn back to OpenSuse who has all that covered from install. Still a better way imho, but your very clear tutorial, including options for btrfs, grub and dnf will certainly make me do a retry. But I'll leave that until F36 is final. OpenSuse Tumbleweed is working very smoothly now. Thanks a lot, Stephen!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Good to hear about Tumbleweed, thanks for sharing! :)

[@arashjahdkaran1220]

I would like to thank you for this helpful video, been a fedora user for about a year and I just haven't dived into these details ever.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad you like it!

[@luiscampos6064]

Nice video Stephen. i am new in Fedora and just looking some detailed tuto about btrfs + timeshift. Good content!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad to hear you found it useful!

[@DanielTolentino42]

Wow, I'm stoked with this setup. It's one of the most solid workstations I can think of.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Agreed - very tempting choice!

[@karenhenson3786]

So good Stephen - again! Fab details worth everyone's attention. That word by the way I have pronounced it 'Aunty-near' ha! Seems to work 🤔🙄😜 Will install Saturday and try it out for a while. Really like the grub-btrfs and how you stepped through it looks great. Thanks Kx.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks Karen, glad you like the video! :)

[@davidmoser8150]

Great video on Fedora, seen the "day after" installing Fedora 36 beta. Thinking to maybe start over and reinstall following Stephen's method in this video. Good learning experience!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for watching and the kind feedback! :)

[@mikemcmahon67]

Sincerely appreciate the level of detail here! Having just completed a Fedora 35 install on my workstation, I appreciated the changes they made to their partitioning tool. A couple of questions from the Linux inexperienced: 1.) With regards to the mount options, am I understanding correctly that this is done particularly in the case where the device is an SSD and that there is a potential issue regarding disk life if you were to leave the default relatime option enabled? 2.) Once Fedora 36 comes out of Beta I plan to install it - given that the system is configured to my liking, is there a potential issue with doing an in-place upgrade? Is a fresh install a safer bet? Is a backup of the /home/ directory sufficient to carry across my existing configurations? Looking forward to seeing more Fedora 36 content!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for watching! 1. Basically yes, it’s for SSD. 2. If you have all your important data backed up, try an upgrade first, as there haven’t been any fundamental or structural changes between 35 and 36 that I’m aware of. :) Good luck!

[@kyzitemelos]

Hey Stephen could you make a ZFS on root video for Fedora video? I'm not good at following the guides on OpenZFS, as I'm not the best person to tie up all the loose ends that may be clear to more experienced users. Also, is there a way to automatically add all my HDD's to Gnome Boxes or Virt-Manager? Thanks and keep all the great videos coming!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Hi, thanks for the suggestions, will need to research! :)

[@bersi0]

Hi Stephen, thank you for this fantastic video I expected it for some time !!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad you liked it, more Fedora coming!

[@CesarPeron]

Fast and simple! Thanks a lot, Stephen 👍

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad it was useful! :)

[@123fourU]

Another amazing review Stephen. I got bitten by the pre-release version of F36 few weeks ago so I stayed away. This video of yours will surely make me reconsider lol. Thanks.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

So glad you enjoyed it! :)

[@abobader]

I really recommended any new users to linux, to simply watch your videos, well done Stephen!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks so much! 🙏

[@josephlo6005]

Like your content for this one. I find this very useful for me.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad to hear it!

[@dktol56]

Is a separate ext4 /boot partition really required by Fedora? You lose the ability to rollback the kernel in /boot if isn't part of the btrfs root subvolume. AFAIK, grub has support for btrfs and can load kernels contained within it, or am I missing something?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Interesting questions! For this video I wanted to keep with the Fedora defaults (separate ext4 /boot partition being one) as closely as possible and only the bare minimum changes needed to get grub-btrfs working. Maybe worth testing?

[@jhonyortiz5]

I love KDE and love Fedora. About 6 months ago I was using the KDE spin of fedora and then one day there was an update and it destroyed my OS. I kept trying to boot into it but I kept getting errors about some Gnome files missing. My guess, there were some Gnome dependencies that weren't taken care of. I'm done using a community edition of any distro again. I appreciate the effort and work that the community puts into this but I need reliable updates. I wish Fedora had an official KDE version. The gnome version was working really well for me when I was using it. Edit: I haven't used the "everything" version so I don't know about that one. I didn't even know it was a thing!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for sharing! Fedora Kinoite is a version you might be looking for…

[@corvoattano8531]

Excellent content. Just one question I seem to not find a definitive answer. For discrete NVidia Gpu, If I use nvidia proprietary drivers, do I need to disable Secure Boot ?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for watching. Don’t think the secure boot setting will interfere with the nvidia drivers. Good luck!

[@fargomemorioso]

Thank you very much for the instructive video. I noticed that partitioning this way, the home partition resize automatically. Am I correct? Is that advisable for a clean installation on a real machine? Thanks in advance.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Hi, thanks for watching! Home is not a physical partition but a btrfs subvolume. I use the same method on real machines in production.

[@reptilicusrex4748]

Excellent content and very clearly explained. Thanks.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for the kind feedback!

[@Being_Joe]

I am building a new system and Fedora 36 KDE will be the main system running on there. I was a fan of Manjaro but at some point I manajed to always break the system with a upgrade. Fedora king of just works. Great guide. How would you go about setting up the partitions if you wanted to encrypt your drive?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Very cool! :) For drive encryption, when you get to setting up the rest of the drive as btrfs, simply check the Encrypt box (which I leave blank in the video to keep things short and simple) and choose luks2 encryption which will take care of all your subvolumes including root. Good luck!

[@MichaelSharpTechniSmart]

Stephen, I tried Fedora in Endeavour/Gnome Boxes and it runs well.My hHardware is 2016 Acer Aspire laptop, UEFI, 8GB, 2Ghz i3. Is it fast enough for Fedora 36/Gnome 42? I keep seeing they are trying to support faster hardware to target enterprise.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Hi, are you running Boxes on the laptop? If it runs well for you in Boxes, it should run great on the bare hardware!

[@MichaelSharpTechniSmart]

Great content as usual. Fedors 36 sure is head turner. I would be interested if you could do the same tutorial with snapper on Gnome with Wayland. Also I want to use an external USB formatted in btrfs, but Timeshift expects not just btrfs but the root name has to be @ - what do you think?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for the suggestion! You would like to configure Timeshift to store snapshots on an external USB? I believe you are correct with @... Can't figure out why TS has all these things hard-coded to @ and @home instead of variable configs. Should be simple... ;)

[@MichaelSharpTechniSmart]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 Maybe you can just do a short vid on Timeshift with USB. Thanks Stephen.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Hi, after testing I found that TS "works" with a thumb drive, but not well enough for a proper full/incremental backup scheme. My recommendation would be to perform a manual btrfs send/receive for proper backup bootstrapping, which I've covered in a couple of previous videos and well documented here as well: fedoramagazine.org/btrfs-snapshots-backup-incremental/ Cheers!

[@experimental0000]

After a decade in the Debian world, I gave Fedora a try as I was getting a bit tired of Ubuntu due to the flip-flop nature and mismatch of packaging. So far, Fedora has had no drama and everything just worked. I'm even to the point where OOTB is a nice place to be vs needing to add a ton of extensions/tweaks to it which is rather nice.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Nice, thanks for sharing!

[@CrustyAbsconder]

Mr. Stephen, This is just an idea for a future video. I would like to see someone deep-dive into the new LXQt 1.1 vs LXDE. What would be the reasons to continue to use LXDE ? Where does each excel in 2022 ? What are some of the major problems with either ? Is there any reason to use either on a new computer ? What would be the difference between using LXQt, instead of just configuring a KDE Plasma session to use less resources ? What are you giving up in LXQt vs. KDE ? Is there a method to check the new version of LXQt for stability issues ?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for the suggestions! :)

[@rdg8390]

My first experience was to have someone turn Fedora 35 into a virtual hosting. I had to try and disable libvirt! Not sure how to stop them. I have a KVM virus. Cannot remove it from my Macbook? Any ideas on how to restore EFI on a Macbook? Please do a video on Kinoite 356 when it comes out. Please do a video on Firewalld. How would you harden Fedora for a public facing network. Great video thanks

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Appreciate the suggestions! Unfortunately I’m unable to remotely diagnose much and can only say to make sure all your data is safely backed up before attempting any repairs. Good luck!

[@diegonayalazo]

Thanks for the amazing content.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for watching!

[@Quicken2k]

Thanks. This was helpful. You got a new sub.👍

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Appreciate the sub!

[@androth1502]

how would you rate arch vs. fedora? what's your highest rated distro+dte/tlm?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Still evaluating, my opinion is Arch is perfect for learning Linux, personal workstations/laptops and the Arch Wiki is amazing. My servers are running Debian Stable and I won't be switching them to Arch. I'm finding Fedora might be the next Ubuntu. Cinnamon and Xfce are my current favorite DEs. Many years ago I only used WMs but since the advent of cheap huge monitors instead of a bunch of smaller screens I find stacking DEs more efficient than tiling WMs for my workflows... Again, these are just my current opinions, subject to change of course. Thanks for watching!

[@androth1502]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 thanks for your feedback. as a new user, slowly migrating my devices to linux, I'm kind of overwhelmed by the choices. I've been running arcolinux for a couple of weeks now on a desktop and can't decide if I want to stay with arch or try fedora on an hp laptop.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

If you can, you might shop around using using virtualization such as Virtualbox. :)

[@androth1502]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 I've been poking around in the vbox. fedora is causing me more friction than arch. for the first time, I had to mess around with rpm to add missing packages. and as much as I try, I just can't bring myself to like gnome. im just wondering if the effort is worth it and if fedora with wayland is better for me in the long run.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Try one of the spins or the net-installer - they may already include your favorite DE. :)

[@nanogaminghd4286]

Thanks for the amazing video Stephen. set up fedora 35 with this setup, hope everythings goes smooth when the 36 upgrade rolls out. Also can u show how i can reduce the grub delay from 5 sec to 1or2 sec .. thanks,

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks, appreciate the feedback! Re your question, the following works on my UEFI F36 box: 1. Back up all your important files! 2. sudo nano /etc/default/grub change the GRUB_TIMEOUT line from 5 to 1 or 2 and save file 3. sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg 4. reboot Good luck!

[@nanogaminghd4286]

​@@stephenstechtalks5377 Thanks Stephen. the above grub guide worked like a charm. Just one more question, if i set the timeout to 0, what button needs to be pressed to get into the grub menu if I need to get into the snapshot/ grub option.. Thanks for your help..

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Hi, unfortunately if the timeout is set to zero the menu won’t even load so the keyboard will not be checked for a key press.

[@nanogaminghd4286]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 thanks for the helpful guide.. really appreciate it

[@shabang71]

Awesome content Stephen!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad you liked it!

[@GledsonCrist]

Very ver Nice

[@CesarPeron]

Could you please show how to configure Timeshift to automatically create snapshots before installing an app?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Timeshift on Fedora, as far as I know, doesn't include this functionality yet: github.com/wmutschl/timeshift For automatic pre/post dnf snapshots I would recommend using Snapper! :)

[@daleholden]

Hello just trying Fedora 38 on KDE on a VM but when i go to setup EFI it is no longer in the list to choose from has it been replaced ?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

What's your virtualization solution? EFI on the host or the hypervisor?

[@daleholden]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 hi see here just add the https ://i.imgur.com/OEz4Syp.png

[@daleholden]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 i have fixed that part the VM had changed to legacy BIOS

[@zeniktorres4320]

hmm... I'm using openSUSE Tumbleweed and I changed the global scale to 125% and there was no need or prompt to restart, and works fine. I wonder why.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

I believe it can be done on the fly w/o restarting in a Wayland session. :) Thanks for sharing!

[@DmitryKvasnikov]

Thanks very much, what an excellent channel! May be you can help me - I've tried to install Fedora on my old MacBook Air, and did all hard drive configuration according to this video (I removed all partitions from my SSD before it), but then I have error: "Failed to find suitable stage1 device: Apple EFI system partition cannot be of the type efi ... etc etc". I tried to find solution in Internet, but with no success. Thanks anyway and have a nice day!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad you like the videos! Apple tends to not be very Linux friendly. ;) As a possible free solution - and near native speeds - have you looked at mac.getutm.app/ ? If you can spend the money, Parallels is a great commercial solution!

[@DmitryKvasnikov]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 Thanks for advice, will look forward to it! I've used Ubuntu as second system together with OS X, but this time I want to have only linux on this machine! Just tried Automatic configuration and seems like it worked in more simplistic way - creating only /boot, /boot/efi, /home & /root. Will see how it gonna work and how to add Timeshift / Swap later on.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

@@DmitryKvasnikov That's great news indeed - have lots of fun with Fedora!

[@NickDyers]

ofc you have to switch :) F36 is great! just like any other distro reviewers on yt, you have to switch everytime new release announced. its in vbox anyway

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for sharing!

[@michaelmartin5995]

Well done!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for watching!

[@Wonka_Tonka]

how come i don't see the option for EFI but can see the rest like ext4

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

In Anaconda?

[@vosi88]

Is there a tool to take snapshots when dnf runs on fedora? Arch user here tempted by less updates.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

That would be Snapper. :) I haven’t yet managed to get booting from Snapper snapshots working reliably like OpenSUSE but the consolation prize of sorts is that Fedora keeps the last couple of kernels in the boot selection. Good luck with the switch!

[@vosi88]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 yes. And i suppose its less important on a fedora compared to arch which might drop a big change any moment. Still nice to have a back out from nvidia drivers going bad (not that thats happened) etc

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

True!

[@vosi88]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 Yeah just had a play around with snapper but cant get the images to boot up with auditd security errors.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for sharing, I think I read somewhere that they are looking into this for a future release…

[@SylvStone]

to start with something watching a video on youtube crashes on fedora 36. There should be things to do after installing or switching to fedora 36 but still looking for what those things are...

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for sharing - maybe post a video and send to the devs?

[@ajx803]

Thanks for an excellent video. Need some help on my installation. I am trying to install on a spare nvme drive but when I create the btrfs sub volume anaconda is renaming these adding a -0. So @ becomes @-0, @home becomes @home-0.. I even tried v35 and it’s doing the same. I was able to boot and use KDE but not sure how this would affect time shift and snapshots etc.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad to hear it was helpful! Is the spare nvme drive the only one with a btrfs partition?

[@ajx803]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 No. I have another nvme drive that has btrfs running Garuda linux. And those sub volumes are correctly named.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Seems to me that Anaconda might be detecting the subvolumes on the other drive and all the mounted subvolume names must of course be unique for each system - are you dual booting? :)

[@ajx803]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 Thanks for this real time support :D Yes, but these are separate drives. So even though the drives are different sub volume names don't have their own name space; I was not aware of this. Do u see any impact of this on time shift & restoring snapshots. Will the @-0 work?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Unfortunately AFAIK Timeshift has @ and @home hard-coded :/

[@kanishcktewatia597]

0:51 alright amy farrah fowler

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

LOL

[@daleholden]

Great job on your video, Stephen! Your explanation was well laid out and articulated nicely. I have a couple of issues that I was hoping you could help me with, if you have the time. Thank you in advance for your assistance! 1. First issue i am having is with my Fedora 37 KDE. When i do mount | grep home my result is /dev/nvme0n1p3 on /home type btrfs (rw,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:3,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=257,subvol=/@home) So i changed the file like you say but it has not made any difference even after reboot! My current fstab file with yur changes? UUID=e848c51d-7ad6-43ba-a77f-89618f3351d6 / btrfs subvol=@,compress=zstd:1.defaults.noatime.discard=async 0 0 UUID=ac4866fa-91f4-4ded-af46-00a67392fb45 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=827B-F5BE /boot/efi vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2 UUID=e848c51d-7ad6-43ba-a77f-89618f3351d6 /home btrfs subvol=@home,compress=zstd:1.defaults.noatime.discard=async 0 0 UUID=e848c51d-7ad6-43ba-a77f-89618f3351d6 /var/log btrfs subvol=@log,compress=zstd:1.defaults.noatime.discard=async 0 0 2. Also the repo you mention github.com/Antynea/grub-btrfs#-timeshift--version-2206 has changed considerably and i no longer understand how to use it! Please could you explain or have you done a more recent video covering how to use this now it has been updated? I would really like to use it but cannot follow whats in the video compred to the update.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Hi, thanks for watching! :) 1. Did you copy-paste your fstab mount options into your comment? Instead of: subvol=@,compress=zstd:1.defaults.noatime.discard=async 0 0 It should be: subvol=@,compress=zstd:1,defaults,noatime,discard=async 0 0 Commas, not periods. The system ignores malformed mount options so maybe that's why you see no difference after reboot? 2. Lots of changes happening - thanks for the suggestion to make a new video! Fedora 38 is just around the corner...

[@daleholden]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 thank you for your speedy reply and i have fixed issue 1 ( I really should use my spectacles ) looking forward to your Fedora 38 video. On a backup query have you done a video on dual boot Win 11 and Fedora using 2 separate SSD's ?

[@Nicades]

I expected you to add swap when creating partition

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Yeah but would it have helped? :D

[@jesse7631]

Wayland is still glitchy for me on Fedora 36 and my NVidia GeForce 1050Ti.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Yeah it’s one of the reasons I recently switched to AMD… ;)

[@ripp102]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 It's even worse for use hybrid laptop users, we are forced to use x11 and wayland + external monitor on nvidia sucks A LOT. For sure my next machine will be amd (or intel arc if it is good). Anyway proud Fedora Gnome user here

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Awesome, thanks for sharing!

[@Appalling68]

What? No Cinnamon spin? 😉

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Interesting question! :) My impression is KDE is becoming somewhat of a peer to Gnome in Fedora land - maybe true?

[@jdw715]

I use Mageia.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Nice!

[@daninogil]

is the grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg path still applys? or grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg is the correct one

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

AFAIK, nothing has changed in the meantime, it still applies!

[@daninogil]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 I'm using nobara and the grub config file in the installation image is in the efi/EFI folder.Does it still applies there?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Haven’t checked out nobara yet!

[@daninogil]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 your process worked until very recently it is either my bios fault or something in nobara I don't know.

[@daninogil]

grub2-probe: error: cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdc3. Check your device.map. i get this error every time

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Difficult to troubleshoot over YT. :) lsblk? dual-boot?

[@daninogil]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 I'm not dual booting on the same drive windows is on another drive