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Why is F34 the Most Popular Fedora Linux in Years? (zdnet.com) 125

This week ZDNet dedicated an article to "the most popular Fedora Linux in years." Red Hat's community Linux distribution Fedora has always been popular with open-source and Linux developers, but this latest release, Fedora 34 seems to be something special. As Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader, tweeted, "The beta for F34 was one of the most popular ever, with twice as many systems showing up in my stats as typical."

Why? Nick Gerace, a Rancher software engineer, thinks it's because "I've never seen the project in a better state, and I think GNOME 40 is a large motivator as well. Probably a combination of each, from anecdotal evidence." He's onto something. When Canonical released Ubuntu 21.04 a few days earlier, their developers opted to stay with the tried and true GNOME 39 desktop. Fedora's people decided to go with GNOME 40 for their default desktop even though it's a radical update to the GNOME interface. Besides boasting a new look, GNOME 40 is based on the new GTK 4.0 graphical toolkit. Under the pretty new exterior, this update also fixed numerous issues and smoothed out many rough spots.

If you'd rather have another desktop, you can also get Fedora 34 with the newest KDE Plasma Desktop, Xfce 4.16, Cinnamon, etc. You name your favorite Linux desktop interface, Fedora will almost certainly deliver it to you... Another feature I like is that, since Fedora 33, the default file system is Btrfs. I find it faster and more responsive than ext4, perhaps the most popular Linux desktop file system. What's different this time around is that it now defaults to using Btrfs transparent compression. Besides saving significant storage space — typically from 20 to 40% — Red Hat also claims this increases the lifespan of SSDs and other flash media.

Although the article does point out that most users will never reach the end of that SSD lifespan (approximately ten years of normal use), it suggests that "developers, who might for example compile Linux kernels every day, might reach that point before a PC's usual end of useful life."

In a possibly related note, Linus Torvalds said this week in a new interview that "I use Fedora on all my machines, not because it's necessarily 'preferred', but because it's what I'm used to. I don't care deeply about the distribution — to me it's mainly a way to get Linux installed on a machine and get all my tools set up, so that I can then replace the kernel and work on just that."
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Why is F34 the Most Popular Fedora Linux in Years?

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  • Missing CentOS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cobbaut ( 232092 ) <paul.cobbaut@gma ... m minus language> on Monday May 03, 2021 @03:50AM (#61340308) Homepage Journal

    Maybe some people (with personal servers) are replacing CentOS with Fedora?

    • CentOS was a good distro and it is a shame that they managed to kill it, but honestly, after the stance of RedHat against Stallman ( https://www.redhat.com/it/blog... [redhat.com] ), i wouldn't touch a RedHat product not even with a stick. I don't support dumb SJWs.

      Honestly, i have already removed all my CentOS installations waiting to decide how to replace them with a distro which isn't run by idiots.

      • by moronoxyd ( 1000371 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @05:02AM (#61340362)

        Let me get this straight: You removed CentOS and haven't yet decided what to replace it with... so your machines currently run on hot air and a prayer? I guess that checks, going by the rest of your comment.

        • He runs Windows 10 with a "my other partition is a Gentoo stage 1" background image.

          *laughs in Linux From Scratch ... or is it crying? ... I can't tell*

          • by martynhare ( 7125343 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @06:03AM (#61340430)
            Fedora is still a prime choice. Fedora has the clearest vision for what it wants to do per-release, with the ChangeSets page always tempting me to dive in early just to get my hands on what theyâ(TM)ve done. Itâ(TM)s always had political issues holding it back (like not offering a non-free repo for those who wish to choose) but where it shines, it really does outperform the competition in ways which make other systems feel incomplete.

            However, if you still want to avoid Fedora due to politics, go for ArchLinux (on the desktop) instead. It has no corporate overlord, uses the latest stuff (just like Fedora) and is very forward thinking in a lot of ways. You also gain the benefits of what I consider to be common sense packaging, where non-free is treated equally to free; meaning if you want to install VLC or a web browser with full codec support, just install from mainstream repos like on any other (non-Linux) operating system.

            For servers, Slackware will work just fine, provided youâ(TM)re willing to bolt on TOMOYO or the like by hand to harden each network-enabled daemon. Otherwise, you really will be missing out on Red Hatâ(TM)s awesome SELinux integration which really does shield against a lot of nasty problems in the event of an attacker somehow gaining a reverse shell.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Good chance he will be moving into the Debian+derivative ecosystem.

      • CentOS was a good distro and it is a shame that they managed to kill it, but honestly, after the stance of RedHat against Stallman ( https://www.redhat.com/it/blog... [redhat.com] ), i wouldn't touch a RedHat product not even with a stick. I don't support dumb SJWs.

        So based on your disagreement of RedHat's stance on rms you're boycotting their products.

        For all your hate of SJWs it would seem you are one, just with a disagreement on the type of Social Justice you fight for.

      • by MSG ( 12810 )

        CentOS was a good distro and it is a shame that they managed to kill it

        Personally, I think they made CentOS *much* better by getting rid of the point releases.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re: Missing CentOS? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @06:46AM (#61340466)
      Did people run centos as desktop? I would never use fedora as a server after i tried in FC1. Its lifecycle is way too short and creates a lot of work if you were to say run a hosted web service. Customers dont like it when php jumps a major revision and subsequently breaks their website. Thats what made EL and centos great. The backporting of patches into release versions software. No feature change but all the bug and security fixes.
      • Did people run centos as desktop?

        Yes.

      • Yes I did. When CetOS 6 ran out of support my default upgrade was to CentOS 8; but that had the Gnome 3 desktop (which I find unusable); so I upgraded to Debian with the Mate desktop.

    • Re:Missing CentOS? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @07:39AM (#61340514)

      That would be an odd choice, but I suppose it could have been something some people wanted to push for already but momentum with CentOS had prevented it. Some opinion that the stability of CentOS isn't worth the staleness of CentOS, but a larger sentiment that 'well, we are on CentOS, so no'. Then you get a shot and win when CentOS goes away. I'm skeptical and anecdotally have not seen this though. I think the 'Ubuntu refrains from Gnome jump' is a more likely theory.

      Other choices:
      -You want as close to RedHat as possible, you don't mind registering to access downloads, and you either fall under the free usage scenario or could finally push for budget with the CentOS situation: Run RedHat
      -You will absolutely not spend or you absolutely do not want to register and have your usage tracked and audited and want only RedHat release clone content: Oracle (for now, justified skepticism for future), Alma, or Rocky linux
      -You want to stay with the free option close to RedHat, and don't mind not-quite RedHat release level: CentOS stream
      -You are upset with the whole ecosystem as curated by RedHat over CentOS, and want to get further away, but with an option for commercial support: Ubuntu or SuSE
      -You want to get far away from any chance of corporate strategy calling the shots on the welfare of your distribution: Debian

      • Missing Option? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @09:13AM (#61340766) Journal

        All of the above, plus: you want to get as far as possible away from the drama, code churn, personality wars and egos (Poettering). You desire stability and peace, that just plain works.

        So you backup your home directory and install FreeBSD.

          Everything just looks and works like before, but with none of the drama. The only real change is the firewall syntax and package management. The security and scalability features of FreeBSD are just the icing on the cake.

        • by Junta ( 36770 )

          While there may be technical merit to using FreeBSD, from a drama/ego/etc perspective, I doubt that FreeBSD could scale to the user count of Linux without incurring the same general situation. E.g. OpenBSD v. FreeBSD is an example where some drama/ego comes into play in the BSD neck of the woods.

          So the only reason you may have relatively less drama and/or the world at large doesn't care about drama, is the relatively small community. Might as well pick your favorite neck of the linux ecosystem and ignore t

    • by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @09:53AM (#61340890) Homepage

      That was my motivation behind the move from Centos to Fedora Server. I converted with Fedora Server 32 several years ago to try it out. Centos 8 had just came out and I was facing a complete reinstall anyway, and never run Zero versions of any thing. So, I installed Fedora as a test intending to run it till Centos 8.2 came out.

      It ran so well that I never bother with the conversation back to Centos. Then Redhat shot Centos and I said 'fuck it."

      So far it has run just as flawless as centos did. I wouldn't run it in a enterprise environment because there is a kernel update ever week requiring a reboot, but for a home server it has served excellently.

      • by Junta ( 36770 )

        never run Zero versions of any thing. So, I installed Fedora as a test intending to run it till Centos 8.2 came out.

        Your ultimate result may be ok, but this is interesting logic. CentOS 8.0 was effectively Fedora 28 but with a year of extra testing and fix updates. Every Fedora is a 'zero', they just never explicitly put a '.0' at the end.

        The lesson may be '.0s aren't as scary as they used to be', rather than 'fedora never has a .0'.

        • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          It's an old habit. Steams back from windows 3.0 and other hot messes from that time. Reality, you just as likely to be bitten by a update flaw any time.

          • by Junta ( 36770 )

            It's funny, because IBM had a standing policy of designating '.0' as '.1'. Hence you had AIX 6.1 and 7.1, but never 6.0 or 7.0. They still had .0s, but would not label them as such, precisely because customers were wary of '.0'.

    • Yep, that's why I'm running Fedora again.

    • Maybe some people (with personal servers) are replacing CentOS with Fedora?

      I did that for about 6 months until I realized what a PITA it is to have a server OS that gets EOL'd 13 months after release.

      There might be a few people who were using CentOS as a desktop who made the jump to Fedora, but generally people would have gone to free RHEL or another server distro.

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday May 03, 2021 @04:02AM (#61340320)

    ... since I've used an rpm distro. How are they these days? That's an honest question. I'm used to apt Ubuntu and the occasional Devian original plus the occasional arch / manjaro when I want to feel particularly l33t and cutting-edge. I had a short run-in with rpm on SuSE a few months back and it felt like a throwback to 2002. ... Is that just me? Are there some noteworthy updates on rpm distros and how they handle things these days?

    • by getuid() ( 1305889 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @04:29AM (#61340344)

      Can't tell you much about details... been using Debian for ages, some Slack in between, sprinkle some linuxfromscratch for good measure, and SuSE in the '02s. So to me SuSE is always going to be "Nuremberger Windows 2002" any way you put it :-)

      I'm using Fedora Silverblue [fedoraproject.org] now, and I can definitely say it's worth a try. Can't tell much of the difference is because it's "rpm" vs "deb" based, but this is because Silverblue is *so* much more different that I honestly can't say what is owing to a different package manager and what to ... you know ... Silverblue being immutable & all.

      I guess what I'm trying to say is: if you're looking for an escape distro, and Slackware is not your pair of shoes, try Fedora Silverblue :) Switching between "claassic" .deb and .rpm based distributions is like switching between Democrat and Republican -- same shit, different config file. Silberblue is a true 3rd-party choice (and in the true spirit of a 3rd party vote, it may very well suck for you *shrug*).

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      ... since I've used an rpm distro. How are they these days? That's an honest question. I'm used to apt Ubuntu and the occasional Devian original plus the occasional arch / manjaro when I want to feel particularly l33t and cutting-edge. I had a short run-in with rpm on SuSE a few months back and it felt like a throwback to 2002. ... Is that just me? Are there some noteworthy updates on rpm distros and how they handle things these days?

      Uh, rpm distros have gotten past dependency hell. RPM distros used to use

    • Ive always used rpm distros for servers but ubuntu for desktop. But im not sure the comparison you are really making it rpm vs dpkg as they are both just package management. And apt vs yum are both repo tools. I think the architecture of directory structure boils down to Debian vs RedHat (fuck slackware ;-) ). Until systemd redhat type distros kept the layout as close to SystemV as possible. For people that are used to that, it makes finding things easier. Its sort of like growing up with left side driver s
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mrsam ( 12205 )

      rpm in its base form is relatively unchanged from the perspective of basic package management functionality. It still installs, updated, or removes individual packages.

      But these days one uses dnf rather than interact directly with rpm. dnf takes care of pulling in any dependencies, downloading them, and handing them off to rpm to install. rpm's equivalent on Ubuntu would be dpkg, I believe, while dnf is apt.

      The major changes to rpm have been on the development side. By default when you build new packages wi

      • by steveha ( 103154 )

        rpm's equivalent on Ubuntu would be dpkg, I believe, while dnf is apt.

        Just so.

        When I'm doing package management on any Debian-based repo, I like to use Aptitude.

        https://wiki.debian.org/Aptitude [debian.org]

        Is there an equivalent to Aptitude for Fedora?

        I think there must be some kind of GUI, but Aptitude is ncurses-based, which I like very much.

        Every time I think about trying Fedora I remember, "Oh right, I won't be able to use Aptitude" and I decide to put it off until later.

    • I've been rotating out distros on my media player box and decided to give OpenSUSE a try. It works well but they don't seem to support standby power saving mode. The docs even say it's not supported. What the fuck? So every other distro could wake up immediately and OpenSUSE takes 15 seconds. Might as well power the damn thing off fully. I mean standby was working in Windows 98...

    • when I want to feel particularly l33t ... Is that just me?

      It's just you. Same as it was 15 years ago.

      Those of us who didn't change, also didn't have any reason to.

      I'm surprised you never looked up how to do something, saw instructions for the different distro types, and noticed they're still all about the same.

    • by MSG ( 12810 )

      At the risk of wading into a battle of mostly opinion, I'd argue that yum/dnf are measurably better than other systems.

      Yum can install a package file on the local system, along with any dependencies from its repo set (advantage over apt). It's also very convenient, as it can also install packages from a repo based on the path to a file the package, or the name of something the package provides.

      It's secure, with the ability to check GPG signatures on every package before installation (and if you see a repo

  • by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @04:20AM (#61340332)

    The one thing I wish were in RHEL 8.x would be btrfs, even if it is just btrfs-utils and a kernel module, so the filesystem can be used. Yes, btrfs has had its issues, but if worried, it can be used on top of MD-RAID (Synology implements this, and if it is any way broken, it would be all over the place.) As a filesystem, it is a useful thing to have as an alternative. For example, I have encountered applications that create tens of millions of small files in a single directory (third party vertical market application, and that's just how their devs roll, so they will always close any issues as "Wontfix") where the only filesystems that can handle the huge amount of files are btrfs and ZFS, because neither filesystem uses inodes. On a small scale, archiving E-mail in Maildir format can result in the same thing.

    Yes, it isn't perfect, and something that one wouldn't use for every task, but it is nice to at least have the option of using. Fedora has had it as an option for years without issue, same with SuSE and Ubuntu. I just wish Red Hat would put it back into RHEL, because stratis is a good product, but isn't a magic bullet for all things, and btrfs has a lot of nice features, including bot rot detection.

    • seems to me some sort of container for those shitty apps, a container that creates the database that they should have used ... a list of tens of million of arbitrary things isnt going to be efficient in one way or another no matter what

      whats that? the file system you want to use is essentially a fully featured database that surely will forever contain bugs? well then
      • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        Even Microsoft binned their database based filesystem WinFS before release. If the company that gave the world Windows 8 and 10 gives up on it as a bad idea that tells you how much the concept truly sucks.

        • the gap is too big - too much complexity to put in a single layer
        • Even Microsoft binned their database based filesystem WinFS before release.

          Because you don't access a database with a database?

        • And yet Be Inc managed to create a database-based file system in the late 90s: BFS. I haven't completely bought into the concept of database-based file systems, but just because Microsoft was too incompetent to get something working doesn't mean it's impossible.
    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @05:39AM (#61340404)

      Fedora has had it as an option for years without issue

      Fedora has had it as an option for years. That's really where the sentence should stop. btrfs has issues. You even said it yourself in the second sentence that it has issues. That may make it suitable for tinkerers, but far less so for an enterprise OS targeted at customers who expect support contracts for all included software. I've heard btrfs described in a lot of ways, but never "enterprise ready". Hell even the project's own feature stability page offers "should be okay" as the best vote of confidence they can give.

    • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @07:49AM (#61340528)

      Yes, btrfs has had its issues, but if worried, it can be used on top of MD-RAID

      I think you have to be more specific about the sort of issues. If it is the case that btrfs problems are only with its builtin RAID, then fine, you are saying skip that and use MD-RAID instead to avoid the problems.

      If you are saying it has other issues, then MD-RAID would just happily replicate those issues across a lot of disks.

      I think btrfs as stands has got ease of use problems, and thus a huge support liability to a company like RedHat. I have to support some people who use it and they generally get into some problem where they are out of space unexpectedly (snapshots that they are oblivious to). Last one I heard of but didn't actually participate in the debug so I don't know details: it went read-only because it needed some action, and it scared the crap out of them because they thought it was data corruption or something, but turned out to be no big deal. Basically, it's more capable and does some nice things, but for people that are accustomed to 'just a boring filesystem', it can be confusing.

      • I read a great post here once that described btrfs as a system designed by a developer, developed by a developer, to solve the problems a developer was having. This opposed to a file system designed by a competent architect who understands storage systems, developed by a developer, to solve problems that administrators of PB scale storage were having.

        The post then goes on to list a lot of points but one that stuck with me most was that a CoW filesystem designed in the 2010 (okay 2009) somehow has an fsck ut

  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @04:52AM (#61340358) Homepage

    ...compared to replacing SystemD. Slackware and Devuan do their best, but we need a heavyweight distro to bin this PoS and go back to a sane init system. The amount of time I've wasted attempting to configure some - what should be simple - aspect of the system and with init would be simply 2 min edit of bash script I've lost count of. I despite what Poettering has done to linux.

    • Gentoo doesn't give a fuck about systemd unless you do.

      It's also the system if you want to actually understand what you are doing, and have control over your computer (be it for real work, or to be be a "f'in ricer". :) If you go back to nannybuntu and massa Poettering, at least you will know what you lose.

      • If only the package maintainers understood what they are doing.

        Configure just a couple of innocuous USE flags and you can easily get a system that won't install.

        What's the point of USE flags if you can't build the system with any of them?

        • I've had decent luck with keeping the ones from the default profile for my architecture in make.conf, and just setting the flags I need and want on a per-package level, but conservatively, especially for packages that others will likely depend on. I won't pretend I don't ever get blockers or other problems from time to time, but they are never so frequent nor so burdensome to correct, even on my mixed-arch system, as to outweigh the benefits they provide.

          I will fully admit that Gentoo isn't for people who

      • Maintainers of packages need to produce init scripts for an init to be acceptable to most people, few want to diy them all.

    • but we need a heavyweight distro to bin this PoS and go back to a sane init system.

      Sure do you have one? Or are you about to mention the init system that some 15 other projects including many popular large distros were actually trying to replace?

      The amount of time I've wasted attempting to configure some - what should be simple - aspect of the system and with init would be simply 2 min edit of bash script I've lost count of.

      You mean it's more complicated to edit a 10 line configuration file than it is to edit one of the many 150 line scripts which somehow despite their heft achieve far less? Oh darling, It's 2020, surely you've RTFM by now... Surely!

      I despite what Poettering has done to linux.

      "Despite" what you think some of us don't "despise" what Poettering has done. In fact we welcome Linux finally having a

  • by zdzichu ( 100333 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @05:24AM (#61340384) Homepage Journal

    Ubuntu 21.04 ships with GNOME 3.38. There was no "GNOME 39" version. This puts the whole article in BS category.

  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @05:24AM (#61340386)

    And Gnome died for me, ever since they considered the wish to select a theme or colors to be a personal offense of their religion.

    Oh well, at least it's not systemd/Ubuntu.

    • I'm just an average home user who would love to be free of Microsoft, so every few years, I dabble with the latest Fedora. I get a little better, Linux gets a lot better, and I might be close enough to take the plunge next time I need a new system..but Gnome's decision to not allow graphical representations of files on the desktop baffles me. Default install has a "Desktop" folder within my home folder, I'm just not allowed to have anything clickable on the GUI. 5 minutes of googling and everything I find i
      • Plenty of other better desktops out there, don't let GNOME be the thing that keeps you from leaving Windows. GNOME is now a niche thing, not mainstream.

      • by steveha ( 103154 )

        I'm just an average home user who would love to be free of Microsoft

        I urge you to try out Linux Mint. I personally run Linux Mint MATE edition. MATE and Cinnamon are two desktop environments that work a lot like Windows, with some good ideas stolen from Mac OS X.

        https://linuxmint.com/ [linuxmint.com]

  • A simple explanation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @05:57AM (#61340428) Homepage

    which has nothing to do with Fedora's new features is that Michael Larabel, the owner and chief editor of Phoronix.com, one of the most popular Linux websites on the net, has recently switched to Fedora as well and he's been advertising it a lot.

    Secondly, out of all prebuilt distros, Fedora normally contains the freshest packages and is generally easy to use. Arch often contains newer and fresher packages but it's a lot harder to use and up until recently it hasn't even had a graphical installer.

    On a grand scheme of things however Linux on the desktop does not exist. I mean some people use it but the general population has no idea what Linux is and most people have never seen it which is proven by web analytics services and Steam Hardware Stats.

    • A lot of the usability issues with Windows are now being resolved at an incredible rate now to the point where the early advantages Linux had (when XP was still in vogue) no longer apply. Plus Windows overall RAM usage is now lower than that of a typical distribution when running a diverse set of applications, despite Windows having third-party libraries (like Qt) bundled as per-application private copies...
      • by Junta ( 36770 )

        Windows having third-party libraries (like Qt) bundled as per-application private copies...

        Welcome to flatpak/snap, where we manage to copy that dysfunction as well!

  • by dremon ( 735466 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @06:04AM (#61340434)
    The default Gnome configuration on the desktop is very much impossible to use even for experienced Linux users. In 99,9% cases the user wants to install Gnome Tweak tool and change the default settings: bring back the minimize and maximize buttons, switch the default batshit ugly Adwaita theme and icons, turn off the dynamic workspaces, install several extensions which with a high probability are broken anyway across versions.

    Ubuntu and alike are minimizing the pain with their own customizations, however I still very much prefer KDE Plasma desktop especially now that it became quite polished in the recent years. Also highly recommending openSUSE Tumbleweed for the desktop, which is a rolling distro. Stable, beautiful, always up to date.
    • by mrsam ( 12205 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @07:10AM (#61340490) Homepage

      I also highly recommend xfce as an alternative to gnome. The updated xfce in F34 looks just beautiful, but it is still a traditional desktop, with traditional semantics that everyone expects.

      • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

        I second the xfce for a desktop. I would say the motto of xfce is "do the job and get the fuck out of the way."

      • Seconded. I usually have the resources to run KDE or Gnome, but still find myself coming back to XFCE every time. I just like it for the same reasons I like Linux in general: it's lean, clean, and does what I need, while otherwise staying out of my way. A lot like Linux in general. I do make sure I have the libraries from both because I tend to run both KDE and Gnome apps, just not either one as a full-blown desktop environment.
      • by short ( 66530 )
        There is also MATE [wikipedia.org]. Switch to it from XFCE, it looks to me somehow more polished/modern but it is very similar (my other box is still running XFCE and it is not a big difference).
    • by Octorian ( 14086 )

      One reason I stick to Fedora on my main desktop, is that they actually do a much better job of packaging KDE than Ubuntu.
      For some reason, the last time I tried Kubuntu, it just seemed janky and sloppily put together. But on Fedora, KDE runs just fine and feels like its as intended.

      I've never liked the UI decisions that Gnome3 made. Similar to some decisions Apple has made, they seem to fall into the category of "probably make sense if you're hunched over a laptop without enough screen space" but downright a

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • That's it? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @06:56AM (#61340480)

    most users will never reach the end of that SSD lifespan (approximately ten years of normal use),

    Only ten years then it's useless? How much more electronic waste are we going to dump in landfills?

    • by gTsiros ( 205624 )

      most hardware is useless after ten years, considering how much more demanding the same common programs become through the years

      we used to email and IM each other with devices that had 64 MB of ram

      my cpu has more L2 cache than that, now

      you want less waste? start hunting down programmers who say "that's what the customer wanted"

      • my laptop from 2009 seems to be able to edit documents and presentations just fine (Core 2 duo with 8gb RAM). I recently replaced the battery because there was a warning that it was losing its charge. I don't see why I need a more powerful one when this one seems to do the same things it did 10 years ago.

      • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

        most hardware is useless after ten years,

        I'm going to respectfully disagree with you. That may have been the case in the 200x, when processor speed was increasing by leaps and bounds. But as of 201x not so much. I know people with 10 year old processors still in service as their main desktop. They play modern games just fine, and so far they have no plans to replace these aging AMD systems.

        I have a old i3 processor from around 2014 in service right now. My current workstation is a i9-9900k. I fully expect to have it in service doing somet

        • by gTsiros ( 205624 )

          a 4digiter responding to my mostly-handwavy comment, i do not know how to feel about this

          you say that you have the 7 year old i3 in service... but you also say that your current

          why is your current workstation not the i3?

          the absolute highest performing cpu i could find from 2011 is the 3970x. Not the threadripper, obviously, but the intel one.

          it's a 150W component with the same processing power as the **30W** i7-7700T from *four years ago*. Its efficiency is AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE WORSE than amd's offerings t

    • How many people still use a computer after 10 years? It has all become waste years before that.
      • Ah in ten years with LEO's and 5G (always-on, everywhere) connections, cloud-computing, and AR/VR implanted (STE)* everywhere; the computing experience will be vastly different.

        *Streaming To Eyeballs.

      • YMMV, but while I've rarely been able to get phones to last for more than 2 years, maybe 3 tops, I still have plenty of both desktops and laptops that are 5+ years old, and some of them closer to 10. Being able to plop Xubuntu onto older hardware is a great plus.
    • How much more electronic waste are we going to dump in landfills?

      I'm sure no one is going to notice that one tiny M.2 stick piled on the 2 TVs underneath it.

      And before you say, "soldered on", I remind you that 2020 isn't even the year of Linux on Desktop, so by the time we get to the year of Linux on Laptop we'll no be using SSDs and rather quantum tunneling data directly into our neurons for storage. This should make my porn collection a lot more fun too.

    • Did spinning hard drives last 10 years?

  • Not because of Gnome 40: The standard layout introduces a windows menu bar for the active applications, it changes the dash from left to bottom, still doesn't display icons on the desktop without addon.
    Not because of how well bugs are treated; exceptions do apply of course. (some projects really are helpful)
    Not because of decisions, or the ways taht a user can influence these.
    Stupid architecture where a lot of things are foced onto the user when they do not need all that software.
    Networkmanager? Gnome-o
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 'In a possibly related note, Linus Torvalds said this week in a new interview that "I use Fedora on all my machines, not because it's necessarily 'preferred', but because it's what I'm used to. I don't care deeply about the distribution — to me it's mainly a way to get Linux installed on a machine and get all my tools set up, so that I can then replace the kernel and work on just that.' Linus actually said this at the Debian Conf14 which was held in Portland, OR in 2014. Linus lives in the very weal
  • So what are the features of Fedora?
    TFS talks about the possibility to choose the desktop environment. Almost all Linux distro offer the same choice.
    And BRTFS might not be the default, but it's available as an option during the installation if you want it.

    So what makes it special?

    • You get to be a guinea pig for Red Hat's random brain farts, some of which might show up in Red Hat Enterprise someday (and half of those make it crappier, glad I got my employer's Red Hat server count down from triple digits to six)

  • Whenever someone making commercial software decides to support Linux, they tend to focus on Ubuntu and cease caring beyond that point. I really wish I didn't have to depend on 3rd party attempts at copr repos that repackage those things (not always staying up-to-date). They usually work, but sometimes they don't and you're suddenly SOL at getting anyone to care about fixing the issue.
    While I do still run Fedora on my primary desktop, that issue is probably my main continued frustration with doing so.

  • It has sucked since 3. Slow, doesn't look that pretty, and who ever decided to put app controls in the window title bar area needs to be beaten and then shot out of a cannon into the sun.
  • The most popular of all the herpes variants?

  • The Windows 8 UX of Linux desktops. I swear whenever I press that evil menu button and that giant honking menu with massive icons comes up I want to find the people who made it like that and lock them in a closet with a TV playing Jersey Shore on an infinite loop.
  • So GNOME has two digit numbers now that the wretched GNOME 3 drove everyone with a brain away?

    Why even mention that crap if you're trying to promote a distro? No one with two or more neurons talking to each other between there ears is going to be using GNOME.

  • I hear F35 is going to be the most expensive platform ever designed.

The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.

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