Fedora 34 Reviewed: A Great GNOME distro that's worth checking out!

[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to learn linux tv in today's video i am going to review fedora 34 and this review is very interesting to me because with the previous release fedora 33 i recommended that you guys skip that release actually and the reason for that is because during that release cycle i felt like both ubuntu and papa s offered a much better experience in every possible category so fedora in my opinion just lagged behind in third place so it was only natural for me to recommend both popos and ubuntu over fedora 33 and some of you out there that really love fedora you didn't really like that very much but i have to give you guys an unbiased opinion when i do my reviews which is exactly what i did and i just didn't really feel any need to recommend fedora when both ubuntu and pop os well they were doing it better and the reason why i feel like this particular review was especially interesting for me is because i'm about to do a complete 360 and recommend fedora 34. that's right i'm not even going to make you guys wait until the end of the video to get my overall opinion of fedora 34. i'm telling you right now fedora 34 is great and i highly recommend you check it out now i hope that you'll watch the remaining parts of the video to understand why i feel that way but it's just an interesting thing to go from you know fedora 33 not really liking it so much not seeing any reason for you guys to use it over ubuntu and pop os and now here i am with fedora 34 complete opposite you should definitely check it out and what i'm going to do in this video is tell you what i like about fedora 34 there are a few things here and there that i think they can improve on but i'm going to let you guys know my thoughts about fedora 34 right now so let's dive in just like with previous releases fedora 34 for the desktop is released as a live image that you can write to a flash drive and boot from once it starts up it'll give you the option to demo the distribution or go right to the installation as always it's a good idea to test the installation first before you commit to wiping out your current operating system on my end i made sure that i was able to connect to my wireless network which worked just fine and as an aside i think the live installation media concept is largely underrated i mean being able to test out a distribution before you install it it's an amazing thing now on my end i've tested quite a few linux distributions on this particular computer which is actually a thinkpad x1 extreme gen1 and i kind of knew that fedora 34 would detect all of the hardware on this particular unit because well it always has in the past but it's always a good idea to test it out before you install it and just like with previous releases you have a dedicated app in the panel for launching the fedora installer after the fact if you chose to demo the distribution first now with the fedora installer it's pretty much the same as it's been for several releases now i've been wanting to see some additional features added i think that would be great but all things considered the installer does exactly what it's supposed to do it installs fedora on your computer it has one job and it gets that job done now it does seem to take longer to install than ubuntu by comparison but considering that you should only have to install the distribution once and then you just upgrade from that point forward it doesn't really matter so much to me that it takes a little bit longer to get it installed maybe i'll just go grab a cup of coffee or something i think overall the installer is fine and if you've installed any of the previous fedora releases recently then you know exactly what to expect here after the installation process is finished and you reboot you'll see a setup screen appear that welcomes you to the new release it'll ask you some questions about location services and problem reporting and then it'll give you an opportunity to sign into any online accounts that you might have after that you'll fill in some information for your user account and then you'll be offered to view a tour of gnome 40 which is the version of gnome that we get in this release more on that later and that tour of the desktop is especially useful if you're not already familiar with how to use gnome the new user tour itself is decent and it walks you through some of the new features of gnome for example it makes it a point to let you know that you can rearrange application icons in the app grid it also makes it a point to mention workspaces and dynamic workspaces is one of my favorite features of gnome and it even goes over touchpad gestures as well which actually worked for me and i'll go more into detail about the touchpad gestures in just a moment after all the introductions are over you'll be set free to use the desktop and the big highlight here is gnome 40. and one of the problems that i had with the most recent version of ubuntu this time around ubutu 2104 is that they don't give you gnome 40. they don't give you the latest and greatest gnome experience they give you the previous version again and the fact that gnome 40 is included in fedora 34 that by itself is a great reason to check out this distribution now with gnome 40 there's a bit of controversy and no big surprise right gnome and controversy that never happens actually it happens quite a bit but this time around the big controversy is how the workspaces are presented to the user in the past workspaces in gnome have been vertical meaning you go up and down between the different desktops now however dynamic workspaces are horizontal so if i hit the super key you can see right away that the workspaces here are horizontal like i mentioned and in my opinion although my muscle memory is going to be more used to the vertical style because it's just been that way for a long time i really like this a lot better i think it makes a lot more sense other than that i mean workspaces generally work the same way here as they did in previous gnome releases so that's why i don't really feel like gnome 40 is as big of a change as everyone is making it out to be so for example if i open up a file manager here i can go over here to this workspace i can open up something like you know firefox and then now i have a third desktop created and you can see them also here at the top as well i can open up another application such as gnome software and then of course i can scroll through each of these horizontally i can also see them in the activities overview as well so other than being displayed horizontally workspaces in gnome 40 work the same way as they have in past releases so i want to take a moment to talk about touch pad gestures in fedora 34. specifically the fact that they work and i know some of you out there are probably thinking what's the big deal you know mouse gestures and touchpad gestures that's not a new technology many operating systems have had that for quite some time and if that's what you're thinking you're right touchpad gestures are not new at all but when it comes to linux things are a bit more complicated here though now the thing is in the linux community we're in a bit of a state of transition right now between x-work to weyland both xor and weyland are protocols for drawing things on the screen to put it simply x-work has been the default protocol for this for quite some time now and weyland is the up-and-coming replacement and the thing is fedora has had weyland by default since i think version 25 so it's had it for quite a while now and by comparison ubuntu 2104 the latest release is only just now enabled weyland by default and the reason why i bring up weyland is because when it comes to gnome the default desktop environment in fedora and many other distributions they actually limit touchpad gestures to those of you that are running on wayland and the thing is there's no technical reason why xor can't have touchpad gestures now of course there's going to be quirks in xorg it's in practically maintenance mode right now because wayland is its replacement and i don't think the gnome developers are really too keen on putting too much work into xor considering that it's going away so i could kind of understand why that is but since we have weyland by default in fedora and we've had that for a while now and now ubuntu also has that by default both of these distributions this release cycle they have touchpad gestures now when i reviewed ubuntu 2104 recently it did a very helpful thing it installed the proprietary nvidia gpu driver for me which was nice of it because if i want to play games on steam for example i'm probably going to need that driver but unfortunately when you enable the proprietary nvidia driver you are disabling weyland and going back to xorg and that means that since you know ubuntu set up the proprietary driver for me that disabled weyland that also disabled touchpad gestures as well now when it comes to fedora 34 it did not set up the proprietary nvidia driver for me so i started off on weyland and i got a chance to test out the weyland touchpad gestures and they're great this isn't the first time that i've tested this out i've tested this out before it's just a really fun thing because i i feel like touch pad gestures in me we get along pretty well i like it quite a bit so it's kind of like a hard thing that i have to you know choose between having really good video game performance when i'm playing games versus having or not having the touchpad gestures but it's still a pretty cool thing to have and it's not fedora's fault that we can't have both it's just there's some edge cases with xorg and especially nvidia because they're not always so keen to work with the linux community so it is what it is but i'm happy to report that touchpad gestures work just great in fedora 34. and it's not just the mouse gestures that i like when it comes to weyland there's other benefits of it as well but since i've been stuck on xorg for so long having support for gestures just seems like a major thing to me but i'm sure that those of you that have been using fedora as your daily driver since version 25 or earlier you're probably thinking that i'm excited about something that's not all that exciting but it's still great to see it working but i would be doing a disservice to weyland if i led you to believe that touchpad gestures are the only benefit the thing is you should notice a pretty decent improvement when it comes to performance while running under wayland it's just a smoother experience overall so in my opinion whenever possible weyland is definitely the way to go it's just that if you factor in pc games for example then things get a little complicated because you may not be able to run under wayland in that regard now you can actually install the proprietary nvidia driver and also use weyland but it's a bit experimental and your experience may not be all that great it's something that i hope gets better in the short term now in regards to the proprietary nvidia driver i did test that as well unfortunately as soon as i did install that proprietary driver like i mentioned earlier i lost touchpad gestures because i was no longer running under wayland at that point but i did want to install the nvidia driver to get a feel for what the process was like the process starts by enabling rpm fusion which is an additional repository that's almost essential to fedora users because it gives them a lot of packages that wouldn't normally be available in the first place enabling rpm fusion is just a matter of installing two packages first i installed the free version and that was pretty easy i just went to the official rpm fusion website and i was actually happy to see that on release day they already had a build for fedora 34 available so i clicked on the download link i clicked on the button to install it and that was pretty much it after i installed the free version of the repository i went ahead and installed the non-free version as well and that's the actual ingredient that makes the nvidia driver available once that was done and the repository for rpm fusion was installed i went ahead and installed the required package that you installed to get the proprietary nvidia driver running and after i installed that package i just ran a command to make sure that the kernel module was compiled and ready to go and at first it wasn't but according to the instructions sometimes you have to wait a few minutes so i checked in again then i saw that the kernel module was available and per the instructions i went ahead and restarted my computer once i did that i was running with the proprietary nvidia driver now when you compare fedora against other leading gnome distributions such as ubuntu and pop os i generally find that those other distributions handle the user experience better when it comes to installing proprietary drivers and i get it i hate proprietary drivers and i'm willing to bet most of you guys watching this video you hate proprietary drivers as well but the thing is they're an unfortunate reality nowadays because if you play games like i'm sure many of you do your only option is to either a install the proprietary driver and play your games or b don't play your games so it is what it is sometimes we have to do that and fedora they don't really facilitate that at all they basically have a hands-off uh mentality about that and i don't like that ubuntu and popos they just do a better job when it comes to hardware support but i get it there's some licensing restrictions here and as an aside installing the nvidia driver isn't really all that hard that's always been my main complaint about fedora is that the hardware experience is always better in ubuntu and popos and with fedora 34 that hasn't changed unfortunately but once i installed the nvidia drivers manually the rest of the fedora 34 experience has been awesome and one of the first things that i did after installing fedora 34 was the same thing i always do when i install a new distribution i installed all available updates and even though fedora 34 is less than 24 hours old there were a few updated packages to install when you do install updates the distribution reboots into a special mode that facilitates the installation of those updates and the overall process of installing updates was tightly integrated with the rest of the distribution in fact fedora has probably the best gnome software and update integration of all the gnome distributions that i've tried it's baked in so well that you'd swear that gnome software and fedora were actually built for each other in addition and probably because i have impulse control issues i decided to allow fedora to install firmware updates on my laptop as well the way i see it if my laptop breaks during the process it's better that my laptop bricks rather than yours so i guess i could say that i'm a glorified guinea pig by having a youtube channel but the thing is my laptop didn't break it was fine totally fine firmware updates are presented to the user in the same area of gnome software as other updates are also listed i actually had two firmware updates available on my end so i actually installed them both each firmware update is done one at a time and requires its own reboot and the process integrated so well with lenovo's firmware update system that you'd almost think that fedora and lenovo work together and maybe they have considering that fedora is offered on some lenovo computers now by default and both firmware updates completed without issue to be fair i wasn't expecting there to be any issues because i've been allowing other linux distributions to update my firmware on this laptop as well as others so it's been a pretty solid experience for me for a few years now so we have gnome 40 and we have an update system that is tightly integrated with the rest of the distribution so what else do we have to look forward to in this release and there's actually quite a bit there's various internal system tweaks that benefit users that some people may or may not notice one improvement is transparent compression in butter fs fedora 34 uses butter fs by default which isn't really news in and of itself fedora 33 also used butterfs by default as well but transparent compression with butterfs is actually new this time around it aims to save disk space by compressing files behind the scenes and the claim has been made that this technology does that without any performance downsides at all according to fedora magazine this feature will use additional cpu cycles but when combined with the z standard one algorithm everything should balance out and it's possible that this may even increase the lifespan of ssds and this is a feature that many people probably won't even notice i mean if the performance is about the same as it would be without transparent compression and you weren't even in danger of losing disk space anyway you may not even notice that anything has changed but if your disk space stretches further and the life of your ssd also stretches further then that's a win but it's kind of hard to quantify because this kind of benefit really depends on the user and their hardware another change this time around is that pipe wire handles all the audio in fedora 34 and a lot of people are excited about this as for me you know when pulse audio first hit the scene it was pretty problematic and i had a lot of problems with it but after a year or two it kind of just you know stabilized and i never had any problems ever again but in the linux community when a technology gets a bad rap it's really hard to lose that bad rap so the reputation with pulse audio and people's opinions of it pretty much stayed the same throughout the years but even though i haven't had any issues with pulse audio people are excited about pipe wire and if it brings some new audio stability or you know maybe it's a better back end it's bringing new things to the table then i'm all for it i think it's a great thing and a lot of people are excited about it now i haven't had any issues with audio but i think it's one of those things that i would only really know what my overall opinion of pipewire is after i've used it for an extended period of time and fedora 34 hasn't even been out for 24 hours but so far so good and there's quite a lot of new changes under the hood mentioned in the release notes that i won't bore you with but basically nearly every aspect of the distribution was improved in some way and i feel like the performance is really good now it could be a little bit better in this case because i'm currently running under xorg it was a little bit faster when i was running in weyland at least in my opinion but i'm not really hurting for any performance here i think everything is pretty snappy and responsive so when i'm launching applications i mean everything just seems to happen fairly fast so i don't really have any complaints whatsoever when it comes to the speed and overall stability of the system i think everything works pretty well in fact i would say that fedora 34 is actually one of the more responsive gnome desktops that i've used recently it just doesn't seem to stutter no matter what i do it just keeps up with me and granted yeah i'm not running like a huge workload or anything like that i'm just randomly switching through applications here but the thing is it's working great and i have no complaints about the performance at all and i could be wrong but it almost seems like it could even be running faster than ubuntu 2104. it's at least not any slower so there's that now overall i think fedora 34 is great in fact i think it's so far the best gnome distribution in this particular release cycle that's saying a lot i mean that's a very different opinion than i had when i reviewed fedora 33. and part of that is due to my opinion that ubuntu 2104 is one of if not the worst releases of ubuntu in the history of that distribution because it offers pretty much nothing for users and i still recommend if you are going to be running ubuntu to run ubuntu 2004 but if you are looking for a good gnome distribution then fedora is the way to go this time around there's no comparison fedora 34 knocks it out of the park they give you gnome 40 which is great because you know canonical couldn't even be bothered to give you gnome 40. and the fact that fedora is able to give you gnome 40 means that there's really no reason for ubuntu not to have given you gnome 40. so that's a big win for gnome fans right there even if we forget about gnome 40 for just a moment fedora 34 is a solid gnome experience and is currently the best gnome experience you can get in my opinion during this release cycle now it's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out because we have a new version of debian coming we have a new version of opensuse coming as well and then we also have a new version of papa west so this is going to be a very interesting release cycle but at this stage fedora you know the developers of fedora have created a very awesome gnome release and i think the developers should be proud of themselves they've literally created the gnome distribution to beat at this point in the year and if you are a fan of gnome and you want to try out a gnome distribution fedora 34 is the way to go it's a win in every regard the only complaint i can muster right now is that installing the nvidia driver it's just not very you know user friendly but honestly a quick google search and you'll see the instructions for how to do that i'll even link to the instructions in the description below this video to save you some time it's a pretty quick process we have a tightly integrated gnome experience we have the latest version of gnome we have all kinds of tweaks underneath the hood we have pipe wire by you know default there's just all kinds of things here that are you know something to get excited about and fedora 34 is a great distribution i highly recommend that you check it out so overall i definitely approve of fedora 34 is to the point where i feel like i might even be a little harsher on fedora 35 because i feel like they've really set the bar high on this one so as long as they continue to go this direction i think they'll be fine but i'm just really excited for this release i think it's awesome and i highly recommend that you guys check it out let me know what you think of this release this review in the comments down below this video if you like this video please click that like button that lets youtube know that you want to see more linux content just like this subscribe if you haven't already done so and i'll see you again very soon thanks for watching [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 64,963

Keywords: Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, LearnLinux.tv, fedora, fedora linux, fedora review, 34, fedora 34, gnome 40, linux distro, gnome desktop, gnome 40 review, fedora workstation 34, gnome 40 fedora, distro reviews, fedora 34 review, fedora 34 features, fedora 34 pipewire, fedora linux 34, fedora workstation, fedora os review, gnome desktop environment, fedora 34 gnome

Id: uDBA35dVKJs

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021