Fedora 39 Released | Hacker News Reader

Fedora 39 Released

fedoramagazine.org

164 pointsxdfg13345113 comments

I've been a huge fan of Fedora, and it seems this release does 90% of what I want, but since I'm on a Framework 13 with a weird screen resolution, I once again fall into DPI scaling hell. GNOME locks fractional scaling behind an experimental option, apps like Signal are blurry and apps like Steam just seemingly ignore any attempt to scale properly.

For what it's worth KDE seems to handle at least the blurry X scaling issue and supports fractional scaling by default.

Maybe one day, everything will just work...

> Maybe one day, everything will just work...

I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 2004.

>> Maybe one day, everything will just work...

> I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 2004.

I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 1994.

Driver support is better, and no X11 Modelines, which is nice.

Since '95 here... I'm just happy I don't have to visit a library to get 0.1% as far as I can today with a simple search query. We've got it good now, all things considered. I'm sure others feel differently, but I cannot complain.

> We've got it good now, all things considered. I'm sure others feel differently, but I cannot complain.

/deadpan/

I can complain, and I do it all the time, especially on internet forums. It's not my fault other people haven't fixed my complaints, even though I've offered no assistance. That's their fault.

People say "you've got it good now", or "you're not helping", or "show us the source code", or "First world problems", or "I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire".

These people think I'm some sort of an entitled, self-righteous, hypocritical, bleep-hole.

Jack Handey “Lowering my Standards” vibes (a very amusing short essay).

Thanks, I'll take that as a compliment :)

As a kid, I remember his Deep Thoughts SNL bits, as an adult, I bought a couple of Jack Handy's Deep Thoughts books.

In hind sight I'd say that was more The Onion "People Don't Like It When You Call Them Stupid"

https://www.theonion.com/people-dont-like-it-when-you-call-t...

Well you're in luck, because 2024 is the year of the Linux desktop.

Every year is the year of the Linux desktop.

Sure, emulating Windows games via Proton....

I guess Windows was never a real desktop OS either because no developer bothered porting the entire NES library to it.

They wrote new games for it, there was no need to emulate NES.

Finally!

> but since I'm on a Framework 13 with a weird screen resolution

Hold up, is this a reason to not buy a Framework?

The problem isn’t just with Framework laptops, an increasing number of x86 laptops are built with odd resolution panels that require fractional scaling. Very few offer panels that are conducive to 2x integer scaling, and while typical lower DPI panels that don’t require scaling are a config option on some models, that often also comes with other major tradeoffs like low brightness or bad color reproduction.

It's 2256x1504 and 3:2. It's a nice screen, but it's one that absolutely works best at 1.5x scale since 1 is unreadable and 2 wastes plenty of screen real estate.

As an idiot who's never used a screen with more than 1080p resolution, is there a reason why just increasing font size doesn't work?

Not all UI elements scale with font size.

Illustrations, nested element containers, navigation controls, etc. It looks very comical when you first see it.

Desktop apps scale their layout based on the number of pixels, not on text size. So (with the notable exception of browser apps and by consequence Electron apps) you will just end up having bigger text in a badly laid out window if you just increase text size.

Big fonts, small UI components. Looks bad and requires more accuracy with mouse movements.

Padding inside boxes/buttons looks all weird.

Since for me less is more I'm doing 200% non-fractional with a smaller font. The problem is that I need a different font size from my 1920x1200 laptop screen (usually secondary, far away from me, with documentation websites/slack/etc) and my primary 4k.

For browsers I can change the default font size and forget the controls, since I'm using vimium, but stuff like Skype/Slack/Zoom/etc needs more dancing whenever I change the display.

Most of the time that is actually much better than fractional scaling.

On a laptop you are severely constrained by the screen real estate, so minimizing the size of the clutter and focus on the content (text) is a great tradeoff in most circumstances.

No, though Gnome really isn't set up for it. Or being useful, really. But on my Framework 13 with KDE I have no issues. I prefer 1.25x when standalone and 1.5x when docked and used as a second screen (it's farther away) and KDE works fine with both and switches automatically. I don't even think about it, and can't think of anything I personally use that still gives me the blurry window in xwayland issue.

The real trouble is this idiotic concept of "scale" in the first place as if ancient assumptions about pixel density cannot change. It's nothing to draw vector elements or fonts larger, and it's next to nothing to have more than one size of display element (tiny) users could select from.

The only way to make Gnome usable is to use the accessability options

It's a good reason not to use GNOME.

"What makes you think sharpness is a metric?" https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

My ThinkPad similarly needs to run at 150% scale to be usable and I’ve also found that KDE still has issues even if it handles scaling better. The biggest one is that only C++ window decorations draw correctly under Wayland with fractional scaling enabled — the much more common Aurorae themes are blurry looking which is unfortunate, because only a handful of themes are C++ and mostly minor variants of Breeze.

Mine too- I was a bonehead and bought a "3k" display for my w541. I've found that 100% scaling w/ "large text" enabled in accessibility settings strikes a good balance.

I bought a Framework 13 when it first came out, with exactly this hope. I gave up after about one month of madness and ordered an M1 Max Macbook Pro. I also installed Windows on the Framework with WSL. Now it gets used very rarely (like for when I want to do Windows development, or for my parents to use when they visit) and mostly sits around gathering dust.

Desktop linux has burned me one too many times for me to trust it again.

I've run almost exclusively Linux for the past 7ish years. First with Dell and then System76. It's been an overall very smooth experience.

I decided I wanted to get a machine with a powerful video card recently, so now I'm running an Alienware with Windows for the first time since 2005 on my primary monitor and my Linux machine on a side monitor. The only real win for Windows is that it remembers my audio/video settings with a lot of peripherals plugged in. Linux seemed to forget every few hours and Zoom meetings were a nightmare. If WSL was more consistent it would get a stronger vote, but there are weird experiences in there.

Before buying the Framework, I used a MacBook Pro for ~11 years. I am perfectly comfortable with the command-line and ssh into a Linux VM every day at work (windows laptop). I use a tmux+neovim setup that mostly works without any problems (except for random LSP issues at times).

I can just get all of the advantages of a *nix shell but with a better UI, using macOS. I have zero regrets from switching back to a Mac after my month-long experiment. My only regret is that I didn't order the M1 Max as soon as it was out and couldn't get the amount of RAM I wanted (it had a long wait by the time I decided to buy).

Why isn't fractional scaling supported from day 1? I mean if you're going to do dpi scaling in the first place, why in the world would you restrict it to whole numbers only? Is it some insane hardcoded hack or something?

Scaling with changing dpi is the easiest thing in the world. Anyone who has written a program with some kind of 'zoom' feature (be it a game, image editor, image viewer, etc) knows how easy it is.

Fractional scaling was enabled briefly during beta but too many apps were blurry so they reverted and postponed it to Fedora 40

Are Signal and Steam apps from Fedora? Is this a problem specific to Fedora 39?

They are not, but that's not what users care about. See e.g. complains about old apps for Windows being blurry when DPI scaling was introduced.

What I don't get is why apps are still blurry on 4K screens last I tried it on Ubuntu, with 200% fractional scaling. If they're non-blurry on 1080p, shouldn't it be a perfectly linear 1:1 upscale?

How is 200% fractional scaling?

Fractional Scaling works pretty well out of the box on Ubuntu. It seems they apply patches to support it. As someone who just swapped from Fedora 38 to Ubuntu 23.10, Ubuntu definitely wins in terms of being a polished desktop experience.

I'm using the same setup and use 100% scaling and "Large Text" accessibility settings. Good enough for me, as a workaround so I thought it's worth mentioning.

Steam fractional scaling should work since their big UI update a few months ago. Try launching Steam with this environment variable: STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=1.5

Awesome this fixes it!

For those using the Flatpak: sudo flatpak override com.valvesoftware.Steam --env=STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=1.5

I tried using Wayland, but I forgot to write down the 7 esoteric GPU related options I had to pass to vscode to make it usable without visual glitches and eventually just gave up and went back to X11

Why not using Fedora KDE?

KDE seems to be much less stable for just about everything, but especially under Wayland.

But I've learned to understand that some peoples' experience is almost the exact opposite.

I speak for my own experience but KDE has been incredibly stable on my machines. For work, I use Plasma on Debian Bookworm and after putting in some work to set Plasma up the right way (set up my favorite fonts, scaling factor, etc.), everything works without issues/crashes. On my personal machine, I'm using Fedora Kinoite (immutable Fedora with KDE) and the experience has been similarly splendid. I do feel that Kinoite is a bit more polished than Debian but I guess that has more to do with Debian's opinionated principles rather than anything else.

I used to think like that between 1995 and 2009.

Nowadays, the Linux kernel is all over the place at my phones, TV, DVD player, and tablets, yet GNU/Linux only on a surving netbook, from the netbook glory days, Asus 1215B.

In case it helps anyone, you can fix blurry X11 apps in GNOME by disabling fractional scaling like this:

  settings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "[]"

Indeed it isn't the best experience and hopefully XWayland gets some better defaults, but fractional scaling cannot work well unless apps support it natively since text needs to be rendered at the correct DPI or exact 2x/3x multiples.

Dynamic triple buffering for GNOME has been postponed again, fractional scaling is nowhere in sight, but they landed

> a new workspace switcher and a much-improved image viewer.

What a joke of a product management. Sometimes I envy guys who can rewrite workspace switchers again and again on Red Hat's money.

Do you envy Sisyphus? Very similar situation, I think.

Sisyphus only has one rock to worry about.

And still lacking VRR support. All we have is this needlessly drama laden multi-year MR https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154

Oh, I forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder. And lacking VRR is even more insulting now, since SteamOS has a working implementation for Wayland.

Given how much Valve is doing for desktop Linux, I guess one day SteamOS will be the default distribution.

In my excitement with the beta version of Fedora 39, I installed it and had fractional scaling for a few minutes- until I installed updates and rebooted. It was gone. That was the last time I touched it.

Fractional Scaling is a *must* these days, with the high res laptop screens.

Even though Linux is open-source, it's not immune to the force of money. There are paying customers for Red Hat, and maybe they don't care about DPI scaling that much.

Modern high-res screens in notebooks are almost unusable with Gnome. You need to enable "Large fonts" under accessibility to make it remotely usable. And these screens are becoming more common. So where do paying Red Hat customers use Gnome for then if it's not on notebooks and desktops? For servers?

That seems likely, yes

Mostly severs yes, desktop Linux died somewhere around 2010.

I doubt any of Red Hat paying customers are caring about image viewers or other important GNOME improvements in this release.

Red Hat didn't work on the image viewer. Why do you keep making comments on things you are uninformed on?

Exactly, distros need to kept up-to-date, and by updating GNOME, you get new features for free. Downstream, Fedora grabs these updates. Downstream of that, someone spams Hacker News with the changelog. It's the cycle of life.

> Red Hat didn't work on the image viewer.

Honestly glad to err here. Kudos to Chris Davis, Sophie Herold and other contributors.

> Why do you keep making comments on things you are uninformed on?

I'm informed well enough on the facts that a) Red Hat is the top contributor to GNOME; b) development of core GNOME features is going too little, too late, while every release is boasting about not-so-important stuff getting done. So I'm being vocal about that, because why not?

> Exactly, distros need to kept up-to-date, and by updating GNOME, you get new features for free. Downstream, Fedora grabs these updates.

If only two thirds of GNOME weren't contributed by full-time Red Hat employees, sure.

Community members outnumber Red Hat developers.

> If only two thirds of GNOME weren't contributed by full-time Red Hat employees

Can you actually confirm that they're actually instructed by Red Hat to do this? Or is there just a large coincidental overlap between GNOME contributors and Red Hat employees?

Because many of the new "features" are either unwanted or at worse distracting

Which features in the new release did you not want?

I can't believe LOL!

How many people do you think Red Hat pays to work on all projects within the GNOME namespace on their GitLab? There were no Red Hat employees involved in the development of the new image viewer. It was a community effort.

Will you be stepping up to provide resources?

Why are you ignoring all the other work Red Hat did this cycle with regard to things like HDR?

Does Fedora 39 support 10bit displays finally?

The amount of back seat dev that happens whenever Gnome does anything is amazing. You have no idea what the challenges are or how the development process works for this project. The workspace switcher could just be some drive by PR, who knows. Tripple buffering and fractional scaling are hard problems. If you don't think so, feel free to show them how it's done and implement it yourself.

> You have no idea what the challenges are or how the development process works for this project.

The magic of the open source gives you the possibility to see it. And I do sometimes take a look into a shitshow of management which is this three years old triple buffering MR [1]. Don't get me wrong, I didn't examine the code thoroughly, it might be a marvel of engineering, but when it takes you more than three years (and counting!) to land a feature, to the point where some people start to forgot why it was even necessary in the first place [2], and when downstream has to monkey-patch your feature as-is because the benefits are so big [3], you cannot say your development processes are alright.

And it's not only triple buffering, you can see the same pattern in the MR for VRR [4].

1. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441

2. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441#...

3. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/why-ubuntu-22-04-is-so-fast-a...

4. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154

You can see a lot of bugs found (and being fixed) in that MR. Should Gnome add lots of new bugs for little gain?

I won't answer this question because Canonical did it for me. As I mentioned in the parent post, they considered the gain so important that Ubuntu ships triple buffering patch starting from 22.04 LTS. Well, they actually come up with this feature - Daniel Van Vugt, author of the patch (huuuuge thank you, by the way) works for Canonical. So yeah, I promised not to answer, but I'd say GNOME should definitely have upstreamed the changes much earlier.

And that's a good thing.

Gnome is not a distro. It doesn't provide a user facing distro.

It's a DE that other people are building the largest distros on.

They should be adding stuff based on their priorities, while Gnome's priority should be advancing the DE while ensuring their DE does not break all the many major distros that are based off Gnome.

It's a good thing that the distros can then add/fix stuff based on their priorities. That's what open development is about. That's what allows Canonical to differentiate from a Fedora. How they choose to prioritize the features/fixes they build on top of Gnome.

And yet somehow despite Gnome's shitshow management, all the major distros default to GNOME.

Maybe they're doing something right?

> all the major distros default to GNOME

If your definition of major distros is limited to Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, then probably. Linux Mint was born out of rejecting GNOME, Arch is not opinionated, Manjaro defaults to KDE (although "defaults" here may be a wrong word), SteamOS defaults to KDE, openSUSE defaults to KDE, then there's PopOS...

Oh hush, the only reason people don't make their own contributions is because it's hard to keep up with their unstable API

KDE needs more attention. Now it is tucked away as a "spin" that does not inspire much confidence, but in some cases KDE provides much better user experience. Time to add all DEs into ISO and allow selecting the one you want during install, and software too. Like in old days of Fedora Core.

Come to where the air is crisp - Debian 12 is a fantastic KDE experience these days.

I actually have Debian 12 with KDE in a VirtualBox VM and am having issues with some windows appearing semi-transparent and not showing text, it's very weird and hard to explain. It might be because of a VirtualBox setting, i'm not sure. I still prefer it to a fully functioning gnome

I’m running bare metal on a 13900K, RX 6600 gpu (wayland) connected to an 5K Apple studio display and I’ve had zero issues. TBH I can’t run gnome it crashes but KDE has been flawless.

KDE on Debian Bookworm has been perfect for me too!

The KDE spin from Fedora is really nice. It's pretty much vanilla KDE and is kept up to date with every new release of Fedora. I do agree that it should be one the primary download page as an option.

That's one reason why i chose openSUSE Tumbleweed, KDE is their primary desktop. Horses for courses.

Best Linux desktop/laptop distro hands down. Congrats Fedora!

I am ready to declare it the best OS. I've never been more productive since getting Fedora.

0 Forced reboots. With windows, forced reboots were a multi-weekly occurance. No dealing with autosaves and reopening anything.

Its so fast, you click and something pops up. With windows, there seems to be like a 0.2s delay on everything. This adds up.

I think I did some of those linux commands that everyone is afraid of doing. But I did that month 1, and I havent done anything since. I don't care if the rest of the world discovered The Year of Linux Desktop was 2023, but I surely figured it out.

Linux Desktop is ready for the big time.

Try out Silverblue. It's immutable Fedora. The one thing I didn't like about mutable Fedora is that update reboot was extremely slow, like 2-5min. Silverblue fixes that one gripe: the update reboot is no different to a regular boot. 90% of the work is done in CI, 10% is done prior to rebooting, and 0% happens during boot.

I went back to NixOS, but Silverblue was an incredibly close second.

I've been running Fedora for around 10 years and I'm pretty sure they don't have a different reboot for updates, except a system upgrade (F38->F39) which is opt-in and takes 30ish minutes on my PC. Normal updates overwrite the files in place, so whenever a daemon/app is re/started it will use the new files then.

If you update using the GUI software updater (Gnome Software), it pre-downloads the packages but (at least usually) the actual update action is "restart and update". That reboots the system and does the actual updating at that point.

If you update using dnf on the command line, it works as you describe.

I see. Yes the first thing I do on a Fedora install is turn off the GUI updater.

For speed, I've been trying out using Clear Linux. It feels really fast. Getting software for it outside of FlatHub or in the Clear Linux repos basically means compiling from source, but so far it's been good.

> or in the Clear Linux repos basically means compiling from source

Or take the path of least resistance and just install it with Distrobox

Ooh. This is pretty cool. I’ll have to give it a try. Thanks.

Still not for casual users. Plenty settings are not possible to do without terminal.

Ie changes in ethtool or scheduling poweroff/poweron or making remote dekstop works when autologin is off.

Can anyone speak to their experience with the atomic/immutable versions of Fedora (Onyx, Silverblue)? It sounds pretty interesting.

[0] https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/

IBM uses Fedora CoreOS / Red Hat CoreOS as the underlying OS for OKD / OpenShift, Red Hat's flagship product, so the bones are solid.

Silverblue works well enough. The biggest drawback is that you need a different development workflow, all container-based, and you have to use Flatpaks for installing Desktop software.

The biggest questions I had while using it were, "Why am I doing this?" and "Is this worth the trade-offs?".

At the end of the day all the benefits I got ended up being theoretical. Is it "cool"? Yea, its really cool. But does it actually solve concrete problems I have when developing software.

In the end, I decided it didn't.

I think its a much different story for using Fedora CoreOS a server. There the benefits are much more straightforward: reliable atomic OS updates, cattle-only servers, infrastructure-as-code deployment by default.

I still probably wouldn't use them in production because they are a niche technology stewarded by IBM, but still, the benefits are more clear.

I agree that the benefits seem way more obvious for a server. I already deploy all my server-side apps via Docker containers with basically no system-level dependencies!

That being said, one of the main benefits I am hoping to get out of Silverblue on the desktop is relief from the almost-inevitable system degradation I have experienced with other Linux distros where, over time (and especially with major upgrades), more and more things slow down and/or stop working. I am not sure if I am just doing something wrong (besides daily heavy use), but historically all my desktop Linux installations have become almost unusable after a couple years. I am only a few months into using Silverblue, but I am hoping that the way the system image is rebuilt for each update makes it more stable in the long-term....

distrobox/toolbox definitely solves concrete problems for me as a developer. Maybe I don't need to be running on Silverblue to use toolbox, but it's a good match.

I'm happily using Kinoite (aka the KDE spin of Silverblue). I bounced off of NixOS, and ended up on Kinoite. It's got a few edges to it, but they're pretty minor and the benefits seem to be worth the drawbacks, IMO. I plan on buying a new dev machine on Black Friday-ish and I'll use Kinoite on it too.

I have been running Silverblue for a couple month now (after years on Debian derivatives) and I can confidently say that it is something you will either love or hate (not much room for middle ground).

If you are the kind of Linux user that treats your OS like a pet, with lots of TLC and endless tweaking to get things "just right", then Silverblue is a terrible choice. It is way more difficult and time-consuming to "hack" stuff together at the system level.

However, if you prefer to treat your core OS as livestock (something rigidly structured and reproducible automatically), then I highly recommend giving Silverblue a try!

As a software developer, I run a lot of random software/dependencies/etc and I have historically struggled with my Linux system stability degrading over time as I add/remove packages and config. My goal with Silverblue is to have a solid base OS that does not suffer from package-drift over time. On top of Silverblue, I use distrobox to run many of my apps/bins in a virtual container. That container is where I do all my "hacking" to get things to work and I consider the container to be expendable. If I start having issues with it working correctly, I can just blow away that container and rebuild it without effective my core system, other containers, or the flatpak apps.

I'm on a https://universal-blue.org/ -based "custom image" of Fedora Silverblue and I love it. In my image, I ship some essentials software and other things that are just easy to have in there like fonts, plus a script for installing gnome extensions. Then I have a Nix home-manager -based shell configuration containing some common developer tools as well. The bulk of the (GUI) software I use comes as Flatpaks, and my development environment is a distrobox arch container.

I've set all updates to be automatic and almost never have to worry about them. I am on the :latest tag and my computer updates between major versions automatically, and I haven't had any breakage yet. I feel pretty confident in the stability of my system and feel like were the disk to corrupt, I could get back up and running with the exact same setup very quickly.

I've been using Silverblue for a few months and pretty happy with it. This is the first time upgrading and it's the best upgrade experience I've had in Linux.

It just downloads the new image in the background and applies my local tweaks, which only takes about 5 minutes. Then when convenient, I can reboot into it. Any problems and you don't even need to rollback, just boot into the old release.

Thanks to the team. Had been waiting for it. Release was delayed several times to fix bugs related to RaspberryPi.

In some ways, that is nice to hear. I'm glad the Pi is getting attention.

Is the 5 supported?

Doesn't appear so.

https://pagure.io/arm-image-installer/blob/main/f/boards.d

rpi2,rpi3,rpi4 is all that I see. I'm sure they'll work on supporting it in the future. I'm not sure rpi5 was even announced when they branched f39 from rawhide.

At this point, they should just focus on the x86_64.

Why do you say that? ARM usage is surging, especially on the hobby side which Fedora has seen a lot of use.

I'm a daily user of Fedora Desktop and Fedora Server (plus a couple of VPS), I couldn't be happier. But I tried it a couple of times on a Raspberry, and for some reason it's much worse than the Raspbian, so I waste time and SD cycles in installing Fedora, fighting bugs and going back to Raspbian.

worst two that I found are

- the audio jack doesn't work. Maybe it's because I installed the server installer instead of the client.

- GPIO ports doesn't stay on unless you lock it and keep your program running.

I just had my unexpectedly smoothest OS major version upgrade.

My desktop is a tricky machine, set up by myself, with all the usual troublemakers: Nvidia 4090, External Audio interface, multiple monitors, many different development, gaming and productivity tools, entire drive LUKS encryption, dual boot with Windows 11 pro, etc. I'm using KDE, BTW.

I upgraded to Fedora 39 using dnf-system-upgrade, and it went flawlessly.

In my 20 years of handling computers, this is the first time with a tricky computer. Even the work's MBP M1 had problems with some third-party software when upgrading. I had similarly good experiences with my Framework laptop, but that was expected.

This anecdote causes me to feel much better about Linux on desktop.

Kudos to the Fedora team for maintaining one of the last remaining products I can fully trust.

Did the upgrade on both server and workstation platforms, and it was painless. Great work!

Time to run a final upgrade on my LXC instances, snapshot them and give it a try at upgrading in place (has mostly worked since 35, wish me luck).

The linked article doesn't seem to link to the documentation page, with all the change logs, so here you go:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/f39/

Perhaps the change that I'm most excited about is official support for using sdboot instead of grub (something I have been manually configuring for the last 7 years):

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/cleanup_systemd_insta...

Man, I can remember the day grub replaced lilo.

I had just spent the past 2 years mastering lilo and thought on top of the world, and then suddenly this new fangled thing called grub came along with all its weird commands and sytanx.

It's been what, 20 years now? I finally feel comfortable with grub. And now you're telling me there's a new kid on the block? sdboot?

I'm too old to learn another bootloader. Maybe I should go back and dig and old copy of Debian Potato or Woody and stick to that...

Hooray!

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