Fedora Workstation 31 Full Review

[@Rajiihammr]

I've been a Fedora user since day one, Linux user since 2001. But, I'm also a former radio guy. Pro-tip: Move your microphone much closer and disconnect the pop filter. You don't need it.

[@sudipchatterjee]

I can't say that I agree with the conclusion, but it is an excellent video to showcase the basics of Fedora 31. I think that it can be used by anybody who has some experience in using the terminal. The results published by Phoronix are very synthetic; I don't think users should be worried about those. This feels as fast as Ubuntu or PopOS, and with Fedora, you'll get updates much faster. With Snaps and Flatpaks, app-availability and support are also omnipresent! My suggestion is to try it and use it if you like it. There is no need to think that it is strictly for developers or Redhat folks. Oh, I almost forgot! Fedora systems have a stellar battery life. Fedora is the first major distro that focused on tweaking the kernel to manage the battery power more efficiently; everyone else followed suit.

[@ashishpatel350]

That and fedora is a workstation level distro. It's memory management and stability is off the chains.

[@mihirk953]

Are you getting the same battery life on Fedora 31? I had amazing battery life on Fedora 30, but on 31 I am getting less than half of that and a little heating in my laptop too :(

[@sudipchatterjee]

@@mihirk953 That might happen. Do not worry. As a longtime Fedora user, I can assure you that sometimes battery life takes a hit after a new release is installed. Wait for the devs to release some patches. It'll get better. I had the same issue in Fedora 29, 28 and 22. But in each case, it got better after subsequent updates that are released just after the upgrade to a new version. But if you are in a hurry, take a backup and perform a fresh install. I've seen that, in many cases, some old set up files create unnecessary thermal throttling and degradation of battery life. That happened to me in OpenSUSE and Manjaro. You can do that.

[@mihirk953]

@@sudipchatterjee your reply feels assuring 😄 I have done a fresh install only. Hoping to get the power consumption reduced in future. Maybe that's why my laptop is getting heated a bit.

[@BruceBigby]

Nah. I use the Adwaita Dark Theme under F31, which is the dark version of the default Adwaita Light Theme. Adwaita Dark is awesome in my opinion. Dark backgrounds make colors pop out. The contrast is striking. Everything looks fantastic. However, I still like the Adwaita Light theme for viewing documents, too, but dark is still great. You'll appreciate Adwaita even more in 4K, which is what I have ... dual 4k IPS displays running Wayland with 150% fractional scaling. . Absolutely stunning. As for speed, yes. I have a system with an Intel i7 i4470k Haswell, 32 GB RAM, Radeon RX 590 8 GB , 2 x Samsung SSDs, and a WD HDD. My system feels much faster now than when I first bought it. Also, recently, I purchased Doom 2016 from Steam, and I haven't noticed any hitches or lag at all. This is on a 6 year old Haswell, although I did upgrade my video card from an NVidia GTX 760 to an AMD Radeon RX 590. It's an exciting time for Linux.

[@StenIsaksson]

I don't consider a 3 year old computer to be old.

[@emjaycee]

Fedora itself has grown on me as my Linux knowledge has improved. These days I really like it... just not vanilla Gnome lol. I've got both the Cinnamon spin and Deepin desktop installed on a couple of drives and really like them both. The update from 30 to 31 went perfectly. Just a smooth, modern desktop experience overall. Cheers :)

[@eddieoconnor4466]

You're speakin' my language now!....I've been using Fedora since release version 12!!!! Its been a LONG hard road but we've made it to 31 with all manner of bells and whistles included! I give massive props to the developers and maintainers of the Fedora Linux OS. These people have made me a down-to-the-bone Linux user for LIFE! Awesome vid dude! (Is it me?...or are your vids getting better, more informative, and totally worth the time frame dedicated to them?....LoL!) Next up?...will be looking to buy some merch from your store, since...well.....like the Game Of Thrones?....."Winter...Is....Coming" for the Pennsylvania area!...so...I think a sweatshirt and some hoodies will be what I get,.....hopefully there's a beanie hat to match! Cheers!!

[@benstechroom]

Wow, a 3 year old laptop is old? What does that make my ThinkPad from 2012 then? Lol. It's 7.

[@Unixgreybeard]

Thinkpads are timeless.

[@carlosescobar5995]

@@Unixgreybeard the old ones!

[@provakar5496]

I have installed Fedora on a 6 years old laptop. Now it works faster than my 2 years old windows PC in most general tasks! :')

[@Blu3M00nxx87]

I’m a months old Linux user and I wanted to use something other than Ubuntu (personal pref). Arch sounded a little advanced for me. Fedora worked really well so I stuck with it. Stable and great community. It really isn’t that difficult to customize the desktop and almost no one uses the default theme for any distro anyway. While it may lose out on benchmarks, it’s not slow by any means.

[@hammerheadcorvette4]

Welcome to Fedora!

[@47DAF]

I use the default Gnome theme. Always. 😉

[@pietossing]

As a newb the only distribution I've tried that I *really* like a lot is fedora. Building my fedora mini itx machine today. 9700k, 32 gig, couple 1TB m.2, loving life. :)

[@shater1164]

Hello Fedora guys and thanks to J for the review.

[@Spender604]

It's not lagging behind unless you compare to purely rolling releases. Ubuntu based releases are the ones lagging behind since almost everything is frozen after release. Fedora has these biannual updates to the main software stack, but everything else is updated within a week or two of release.

[@alexeiz]

Fedora is for people who run Redhat or CentOS on production machines, or who use AWS Linux (which is also based on Redhat). It's really convenient to experiment or do development using the distro which is very close to the production environment.

[@LloydLynx]

"I am using a pretty old computer [3 yo system76 laptop]." me: **cries in 2nd gen i3**

[@LloydLynx]

@Bebek what specs/model?

[@whenlifegivesyouLSD]

I'm using a Celeron processor (duo core @ 1.5 GHz) and 4 gigs of ram to do web development. I must be a fucking hero.

[@sudipghimire4721]

@@whenlifegivesyouLSD perfectly same as me bro ;)

[@AceHardy]

Taking notes 📝

[@AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Jay. It's not for me but I have found it to be quite good over the last few years.

[@Abhjjit]

Good review man

[@godtable]

I left Fedora because of the long update procedures and fewer software packages for Ubuntu. Then after I learned how to backup my system, left Ubuntu because of snaps, PPAs, Debs, App Images and Flatpaks. Plus some printer drivers were missing, so I switched to Manjaro. I am a little disappointed, because four months in and i have yet a chance to try the Time-shift's restore future :).

[@QBL-lf7jd]

Well, for me 3 years is not that old hardware

[@retroedgetech6158]

Agreed!

[@renebogaards825]

Yes this is revealing to me: one uses fedora in a redhead environment.

[@AndyPandy33]

Fedora is much better when running in Wayland. Both Ubuntu and Pop run X by default, Fedora Wayland by default. Ergo Fedora is for pioneers :)

[@wastingtime9152]

Desktop looks better in Wayland BUT I got screen artifacts in one desktop (I use 3) with an AMD RX 580. Works without issue using Xorg. Other than that I really like it. Hopping to my next distro.

[@BruceBigby]

@@wastingtime9152 I've seen screen artifacts on my desktop background, too. I'm running F31 Wayland. I have an RX 590. Hmm.

[@SwiatLinuksa]

try record anything with OBS on wayland ;))

[@BriansModelTrains]

@@BruceBigby Now playing with Pop OS on a smaller SSD on my workstation. Pretty nice. I know Linus Torvolds uses Fedora with a Macbook.

[@BruceBigby]

@@BriansModelTrains I hear great things about Pop OS so I am a fan of what they do. I purchased two laptops from System 76 about 10 years ago, and I got my dad to purchased a desktop from them about 5 years ago. I support them, but I built my own desktop in 2013.

[@Unixgreybeard]

I'm by no means a RedHat fanboy, but if I wanted to work with their latest dev offerings like Jenkins, Ceph, Gluster, KVM, Podman, Openshift, FreeIPA, I'd choose Fedora. Those projects are definitely heavy hitters. Downloading gnome icon themes is a lot easier than trying to recreate the toolchain Fedora comes with, I'd rather have that OTB any day.

[@maticman94]

Fedora is always hard to review. For me it's a better balance of up-to-date and stable than ubuntu. But having an LTS version would make it easier to recommend. I especially like that most all my software comes from the official repos and rpmfusion; instead of having multiple ppa's to keep software up to date. The community's one of the best I've experienced in linux.

[@carlosescobar5995]

Read the Fedora Mission and Foundations: "We are committed to innovation... We recognize that there is also a place for long-term stability in the Linux ecosystem, and that there are a variety of community-oriented and business-oriented Linux distributions available to serve that need... Fedora always aims to provide the future, first."

[@blkstn5898]

have you ever had cursor delay issues? i had with silverblue 31 and it very annoying

[@adriantrummer6126]

Fedora is the BEST :-)

[@philiprhome3824]

fedora is more for serious engineers and people that want to learn SysAdmins but not on distros like CentOS that are hardcore servers distro and can't use it in daily basis

[@uma9183]

how to slove my kernal probleam in fedora 27 and i need how to slove update probleams

[@alexd5637]

Chris Titus should see this :))

[@CosmicCleric]

Curious, why?

[@johanb.7869]

Indeed. Why?

[@johanb.7869]

@@CosmicCleric I know hwy now: kzbin.info/www/bejne/Z4GboHWihLl1ntE

[@nonegiven]

I like Fedora but Ubuntu is the only one that works on my MSI laptop. Not to pick a fight also, but wasn't one of the so called advantages people claimed about Linux over Windows was that you didn't need to restart your computer after updating?

[@QBL-lf7jd]

Well yes, sometimes you just need to logout

[@maticman94]

No. If the kernel updates you should always reboot to use the new kernel. Updates to less critical components to require a reboot.

[@alexeiz]

What's your distribution of choice?

[@johanb.7869]

I believe it's Pop! OS.

[@MasterStroke.]

Can I install this distribution in a 32 bits computer?

[@ishanagarwal475]

Agreed I compile pop os theme whenever I install gnome

[@StenIsaksson]

Ubuntu seem to move more towards using Snap. I had some issues with software using Snap so that's why I don't like Ubuntu anymore. And Ubuntu doesn't seem to support the built in "Intel RAID" (RST) on the motherboard either. A lot of other distroes do support it.

[@skipad4306]

the best theme is something basic. a taks bar with fast access to other tabs. cuz workng has to be fast

[@rajkrishan3092]

👍🏻

[@adventuretimemoto]

Your review of Fedora desktop and it's features was pretty good. However your ideology around what and who should use Fedora is complete rubbish to me. I think you miss the point of a distro like this completely and you are very biased towards your person taste.

[@pandasticus]

Agreed. Fedora team and community are just trying to create a free software based Linux system. There's actually a list of user bases Fedora project targets: - Voluntary Linux consumer - Computer-friendly - Likely collaborator - General productivity user This seems like a very broad group to me.

[@adventuretimemoto]

@@pandasticus I don't know anything about who Fedora targets their distribution for. I am not a tech guy. I use Linux because I don't like Microsoft or Apple and feel that open source needs to be supported. Fedora appeals to me because I like using new computers not outdated hardware so their approach to kernel upgrades IMO is the best. Semi rolling for me is the way to go. Also I like the minimalist fresh install it gives you. Start with a small footprint that you can make your own. If I were forced to choose another OS it would be Manjaro.

[@GabiRuta]

I use Fedora for a long, long time, but not with this crappy Gnome. Gnome is a "pain in the ass" Desktop (always was). KDE Plasma it is a better choice. Fedora Developers should choose The KDE as the default Desktop Environment for the future releases.

[@skytale35]

im on a 10 ten year old system, i5, boots up in about 30 seconds on mint cinnamon, everything happens pretty fast, no complaints here. Your casually referring to a 3 year old laptop as being old hardware is counter to most linux users and comes off as elitism.

[@CatalinRaducan]

fedora/centos/redhat are for real men who undestand linux.

[@mr_don_key]

or women ;)

[@BruceBigby]

F31 is suitable for almost nobody?? How can anyone take you seriously with a conclusion like that? I've used Ubuntu in the past and it's not all that. There's nothing that you can't do in Ubuntu that you can't do in Fedora. I'm talking core functionality. It sounds like you're saying that F31's default theme isn't as good as Ubuntu's so F31 is good for almost no one. What?? All major Linux distributions are fundamentally the same. Now, you showed how to install toolbox, but you didn't show how to install the Gnome Tweaks tool to enable a Dark Theme or change the desktop font which suggests that you're being a bit disingenuous about the potential of making Fedora 31 look better. Personally, I don't care for the muted flat icons of Pop OS! I grew tired of the Ubuntu purple. Orange is worse. But that's a personal preference. If I have issues with Fedora, it's related to things like eclipse won't install, but most users aren't developers, or the Lyx GUI flashes when I'm typing, and everything disappears but the line that I'm typing, but most users use LibreOffice. Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

[@serge5046]

@BB For Eclipse first install java-XXX-openjdk.x86_64 (replace XXX with the version you want for instance 1.8.0) Then download the Eclipse tarball from their site. Change directory into Downloads. Untar it: sudo tar -xvf eclipse-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.tar.gz -C /usr sudo ln -s /usr/eclipse/eclipse /usr/bin/eclipse If you wish you can create a .desktop file [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Name=Eclipse IDE Comment=Eclipse IDE Exec=/usr/bin/eclipse Icon=/usr/eclipse/icon.xpm Terminal=false Type=Application Categories=Development;Programming StartupNotify=false Cheers PS: You Lyx issue has been fixed: www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/11692

[@BruceBigby]

@@serge5046 Thanks!!!

[@MarloMitchell]

Libre office is just as good as Office 2003, is it better or just as good as office 2016? Unfortunately, no.

[@danynotonegoro5453]

But... theming is illegal...

[@johanb.7869]

I like illegal dark;)

[@hammerheadcorvette4]

I think it's a little harsh in the conclusion. The "lack of software, gaming etc" is grossly inaccurate. Flatpaks and Snaps bridge the divide. The hardware compatibility is on par, not sure where you perceived that conclusion since there were no hardware testing here. But to each their own.

[@podunkman2709]

I've installed and resolution is like on 20 years old monitor. No way to choose bigger resolution. Yeah, I know... sudo, vi, copy, paste, run, save.... typical Linux crap. Hello, we have 2020!

[@loubraga5800]

i agree! Fedora is so bad that Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is pretty much the only fool still using it ....