
Fedora 29 - walkingolof
https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-29/
======
sandGorgon
Fedora 29 is the most brilliant release of Linux yet. Gnome 3.30 is brilliant
and probably can tempt you away from OSX.

Oh and if that isnt good enough - check out
[https://www.protondb.com/explore?page=0&sort=playerCount](https://www.protondb.com/explore?page=0&sort=playerCount)
to play windows-only Steam games on Linux

~~~
cwyers
So, when my then-girlfriend and I moved in together a long time ago, she
brought with her a bottle of vegan Worchestershire sauce. I tried it at one
point, next to a bottle of Lea and Perrins, and I concluded that the only way
you could possibly consider it a substitute for Worchestershire sauce was if
you had completely forgotten what Worchestershire sauce tastes like, and were
going off of some really hazy memories of it.*

I think of that bottle of ersatz Worchestershire sauce whenever I hear from
Linux advocates who say that some piece of GUI software is as good as a big
commercial project in the GUI realm. My experience with Linux window manager
solutions is that they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use
them, the fit and finish just isn't there.

* I wouldn't say soy sauce tastes all that much like Worchestershire sauce, but it's a far closer substitute than anything I've seen labelled as vegan Worchestershire.

~~~
petecooper
>Worchestershire

Please don't hate me for this, but I'd like to respectfully correct you, with
a bit of info on pronunciation that I hope will assist you in future.

I'm a Brit, and in England there's a town called Worcester (usually pronounced
"wuster" rather than "war-sester"). It's in a county called Worcestershire
(usually pronounced "wuster-shuh", sometimes "wuster-shire", but the "wuster"
bit holds).

This county has a famous sauce, inevitably called Worcestershire sauce, that
often contains anchovy extracts, hence the availability of vegetarian/vegan
versions.

Hope that helps.

~~~
hiram112
We have the same problem.

Until you hear a Massachusetts native tell you they're from Wahstur(??) -
Worcester, you wouldn't have realized that US English still has a lot of
varying accents, even after we've been thoroughly homogenized by mass media.

------
jarcane
_This release is particularly exciting because it’s the first to include the
Fedora Modularity feature across all our different variants. Modularity lets
us ship different versions of packages on the same Fedora base. This means you
no longer need to make your whole OS upgrade decisions based on individual
package versions. For example, you can choose Node.js version 8 or version 10,
on either Fedora 28 or Fedora 29. Or you can choose between a version of
Kubernetes which matches OpenShift Origin, and a module stream which follows
the upstream._

I continue to be bewildered by the idea that this should be a foreign concept,
that individual third-party software versions should not be tied directly to
OS update releases. Literally no operating system works like this except
Linux.

At least Fedora is more prompt about keeping up to day than other distros.

~~~
elcomet
This is because packages relie on each other to work. They don't just bundle
all their dependencies. So maintainers have to update package based on the
dependancies version that are in the repositories.

Every package updating alone (or updating all its dependancies) might make
everything break on the system.

So there is a compromise here to get smaller packages, that don't bundle
everything but reuse other packages.

If you want packages that bundle everything, then you can use snap / flatpack,
they are exactly designed for this.

~~~
jarcane
The only reason this is even an issue is because Linux distros insist on
clinging to dynamic linking absolutely everything, out of some outdated
90s-era assumptions about disk conservation, and package availability. Because
often in those days downloading new packages wasn't an option because you
might not even have internet at home, distros just bundled every known bit of
software they could think of on the CD (Remember Walnut Creek?).

But it's 2018. Even cell phone 3G is fast enough to deal with Linux deps.
Disks are huge outside embedded spaces where the last thing you want to do is
install a zillion random Linux deps anyway. Literally every programming
language on the planet has tools to manage dependencies per-project, and it's
best practice to lock a known good version of any libraries for a program
anyway.

Which means the only remaining concern is system-level compatibility issues,
which shouldn't be a problem for normal userland software anyway, and if
anything should allow for and expect failure. It's not something you should be
tying the entire OS release and update cycle to for your entire software
ecosystem.

And yet, despite years of Linus screaming "DON'T BREAK USERLAND", distros
still are built, and almost have to be built, on the assumption that
everything is an interdependent house of cards that could break at any time.
And the disk space arguments that consumed Usenet for years on end have become
meaningless anyway, because software winds up having to link to specific
versions of libs anyway, so most distros have to maintain a bunch of separate
version packages anyway.

Like I said: no other OS has this problem to this degree. OS X, Windows, hell
even FreeBSD keeps pkg/ports distinct from the core system. I have never on
any of these had to wait six months or side load just to get an up-to-date
version of my tools. And we all know this: why do you think every damn
language has its own package manager now? Why everyone has to maintain a
~/.local/bin, and indeed: why snap/flatpack ever had to exist in the first
place.

tl;dr: I know damn well why it is this way, but it's dumb, and while I'm glad
someone's finally fixing it, that doesn't make it any less baffling it took
this many years to do so.

~~~
elcomet
That's very interesting, thanks for the insight!

Do you know any Linux distros that try to solve this issue, outside fedora
here?

~~~
pfranz
I'm not sure if it would address his needs, but NixOS takes a different
approach. The package manager, Nix, can run in a Linux environment or even
macOS. GNU Guix is another variant of it.

I've played around with it and really liked it, but it's mostly been false
starts when trying to do anything serious. I understand why there's a DSL, but
I had trouble groking it enough to build my own stuff.

------
MickerNews
Anyone remember when IBM was really keen on Linux around fifteen years ago? If
they'd only followed through they would have had their own flavour and
business to run into the ground.

~~~
wmf
IBM's strategy (until now) has been to encourage a competitive ecosystem of
multiple Linux distros. That's why they propped up SLES, Yellow Dog, and
Ubuntu at various times.

~~~
mprev
How did IBM prop up Ubuntu?

~~~
wmf
It seems like Ubuntu supported ppc64le long before Red Hat; I assume that was
sponsored by IBM.

~~~
mprev
I don’t remember the detail but if that were sponsored then I suspect the
revenue wouldn’t have covered a month of sending out free CDs, let alone doing
any propping up.

------
classichasclass
Looking forward to F29 on my Talos II (currently a very satisfied F28 user
except for the problems with the provided Firefox package which I must build
from source currently), but I'll wait a bit for all the mirrors to catch up.

~~~
GautamGoel
What do you think of the Talos?

~~~
classichasclass
I really like it. It runs fairly cool and quiet, the hardware works great and
the software support is now at the point it can be a daily driver. Plus, it
builds Firefox at -j24 in a half hour (I have an 8-core SMT-4 system). If the
sticker price on the big T2 makes you shiver, wait for the Blackbird, but
Power ISA on the desktop is totally viable again as a workstation.

------
gnanesh
Will Red Hat's acquisition hurt fedora?

~~~
jhall1468
Ubuntu already put Fedora on life support so at this point if it dies, it
certainly won't be because of IBM.

~~~
ekianjo
I hardly see Fedora in most places (Western and Eastern Europe is mainly
Ubuntu), but Fedora seems to be quite strong in the US, relatively speaking.
If it has a strong following there, it's probably sustainable.

~~~
jhall1468
I'm not so sure it's strong anymore. Ubuntu all but owns the set it and forget
it desktop market and Arch is effectively the standard for power users.
Fedora's market share is just dwindling, because there's no where that it
outperforms the competition.

~~~
eropple
_> I'm not so sure it's strong anymore. Ubuntu all but owns the set it and
forget it desktop market and Arch is effectively the standard for power
users._

In my neck of the woods, neither of these is true. Ubuntu was the standard for
a long time and is almost certainly a strong majority of new desktop installs,
but I've seen Fedora make something of a resurgence over the last couple years
to the point where "all but owns" is too strong a phrase.

I know one person who uses Arch. (I will say this: unlike the Gentoo folks,
you can't tell an Arch user.) And it seems...fine. But I think calling it a
"standard" for power users is a stretch.

~~~
jhall1468
Maybe power users wasn't the right term. It's the standard for perfectionists
or the detail-obsessed? Interesting that you're seeing a resurgence of Fedora
since I can't think of the last time I talked to a Fedora user. I suppose
that's the nature of anecdata.

~~~
eropple
You are right now. ;) I went to Fedora (28 on my work laptop, Rawhide on my
desktop) largely because it mostly resembles my RHEL/CentOS production
environments--dnf rather than yum, but that's a performance improvement more
than anything--and is roughly as supported as Debian/Ubuntu for third-party
software.

------
jamesfmilne
Fedora 29 Release Notes

[https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f29/release-
note...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f29/release-notes/)

Unfortunately they are half-empty!

~~~
mattdm
Yeah, help wanted on the docs team :)

------
adevx
I am at this very moment switching from Fedora 29 ( I was on the early Beta)
to Ubuntu because of the acquisition by IBM. It just doesn't sit right with
me. Just made the last backup before plugging in the USB with Ubuntu 18.10.

~~~
mprev
I find these knee jerk reactions fascinating. What about IBM do you know that
makes you feel this way? What about Red Hat made you happy to continue using
Fedora? What about Canonical makes you consider Ubuntu to be better for your
purposes?

This feels like the equivalent of switching from cow's milk to almond milk for
ethical reasons. There's not an improvement, you're just making a different
set of compromises.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Yeah, have no dog in the race, but was surprised by all the negativity toward
IBM yesterday. I don't have nearly the bad feelings towards them that I do say
MS or Oracle. Also they've supported Linux a lot, at least ten years ago,
unsure if that continues.

Basically they exited from all the markets I cared about in recent years and
became a non-entity, meh.

~~~
izacus
I guess there's just a lot of us around who had exceedingly terrible
experience with anything IBM.

~~~
mixmastamyk
After a bit of thought remembered the recent episode where they fired their
old-timers, that's a negative.

------
awaisraad
I am always excited to spend 1,2 hours of my life updating Fedora every six
month, so I could get its new wallpapers.

------
reacharavindh
Anyone else getting 403 Forbidden when trying to download Fedora 29?

[https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/fedora/linux/releases/29/Workstat...](https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/fedora/linux/releases/29/Workstation/x86_64/iso/Fedora-
Workstation-Live-x86_64-29-1.2.iso)

------
ryanmccullagh
Maybe I should switch, but I like apt too much. Problems I'm having with
Ubuntu 16.04.5 on my laptop now:

\- Keyboard will stop working sometimes after waking up from sleep

\- Shut down randomly turns into a restart

~~~
sandov
I'm staying on 16.04 because I prefer Unity over any other DE. No problems so
far, but after it becomes too much of a burden I'll have to switch to Mint
with Cinnamon.

------
Tepix
RHEL 8 is overdue, i guess it will use this as its base?

~~~
bubblethink
rhel uses several fedora versions as base. A closed alpha of rhel 8 is already
in circulation. So they've used at least a few prior versions already.

------
lucas_membrane
The page for updating 28 -> 29 is not updated, although it is linked to the
article.

------
gepi79
I switched from Fedora 28 to Ubuntu because I could not make my IDE (IntelliJ,
Netbeans, maybe Eclipse too) recognize the installed Fedora JDK (no valid JDK
found). It seems that this has been a common problem for years.

~~~
eropple
If it couldn't find a JDK, it usually means you didn't install the appropriate
`-devel` package. (This is consistent across RHEL derivatives.)

~~~
gepi79
It is a problem if the default JDK is useless and the solution requires
research on the internet. I had even enough patience to search for more than
15 minutes AFAIR.

I have been using Windows and other Linux distributions including Arch Linux
for years and never had problems with the JDK.

~~~
eropple
You didn't install a JDK, though. You installed a _JRE_. (Ubuntu does this
too, BTW - openjdk-N-jre versus openjdk-N-jdk.) If you Google "fedora jdk
install" I get this page:

[https://openjdk.java.net/install/](https://openjdk.java.net/install/)

Which says pretty clearly: "The java-1.8.0-openjdk package contains just the
Java Runtime Environment. If you want to develop Java programs then install
the java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel package."

The standard package is to run software, not to compile software. Because most
people who manage systems--hi--want to know what can be _built_ on a system
(and, more importantly, what can't be). You might not like that, and that's
totally fine, but it's consistent and in my experience distros that have
trouble with that (CentOS never, Ubuntu rarely, Arch rather often) quickly
become ones I don't consider reliable.

~~~
mamon
I think the issue here is the stupid name "OpenJDK" \- everyone who has
anything to do with Java development understands JDK to mean "Java Development
Kit", and here those sneaky bastards give you a package named "jdk" but
containing jre.

Would it hurt them to name the project "OpenJVM" instead?

~~~
eropple
When I wrote that post I was thinking exactly that.

Honestly, were I running Debian/Ubuntu I probably would have at least called
it `openjdk-N` and `openjdk-N-dev`, to match the other `-dev` packages,
but...yeah. In this way I think CentOS/Fedora are a little more
straightforward.

~~~
gepi79
In Ubuntu it is called openjdk-11-jre and openjdk-11-jdk. With headless
variants.

I am no system admin and the -dev or -devel convention suits the Unix and C
world but maybe not the JVM or .net or nodejs worlds with their own standards
and package managers.

~~~
eropple
How so? `java` is the JRE. `javac` is the JDK. `mono` (I forget the .NET Core
executable name) is the runtime, `mcs` is the development tool. Node or Ruby
or Python all have similar splits, too. Yes, they're interpreters, but you
generally need the `-dev`/`-devel` package to compile things against your
runtime there, too. Their package managers are orthogonal to this (but a
failed Ruby build, as an example, will often tell you you need development
packages for a library).

It's not about being a system administrator, it's about understanding what the
things you're installing actually do. You need development packages to develop
against, rather than consume, a package. I don't understand the criticism
you're making here.

~~~
gepi79
Yes you are right.

But as a Java developer I know and I care about the terms JRE and JDK that are
used officially and on Windows and many Linux systems and MacOS. I was not
aware of the Fedora package conventions.

And as I already wrote, I had most likely installed jdk-devel because, I
guess, it is listed in yum and DNF-dragora. Maybe it was a bug in some Fedora
related package tool. DNF-dragora had double entries for Java. Unfortunately I
do not remember anymore the details.

Someone replied this to me: "This is a fairly trivial problem to work around,
although maybe this should be one of those "sane default" kind of things. Set
the environment variable JAVA_HOME=/etc/alternatives/jre or point it at the
specific OpenJDK version you want. That's what /etc/alternatives is for."

I guess that is way I tried "alternatives --config java" at the time.

------
rhexs
And, just as Fedora's mind share was really starting to take off, specifically
with the HN crowd, IBM goes and buys the company.

~~~
jhall1468
Fedora has been around a _long_ time, so I'm not sure why you think it added
mind share. Ubuntu and Arch laser focused on certain audiences and Fedora
really couldn't find a home between the two.

~~~
rdtsc
Fedora is a proving ground for new features in RHEL usually.

~~~
astrodust
It's a proving ground for new features in Linux in general. systemd, unified
/usr and /bin, ip vs. ifconfig were all things that Fedora was quick to apply,
consequences be damned, in the name of staying cutting edge.

It's annoying as all hell sometimes but if you use Fedora you're already used
to things that suddenly land in other distributions and cause strife.

Now if only they could switch to ufw from firewalld...

------
hiram112
Please tell me the fonts have been fixed.

We've waited years for the 1998 Linux font tendering to have caught up with,
at least, Win 2000.

There was dozens of X Font Server patches that never worked.

Then illegal downloads of MS TeueType fonts that were a _little_ better*, but
still infuriating.

Then fontconfig examples from hundreds of blogs and forums.

Then forks of forks of some dude's Arch Infinality tweaks that kind of worked,
but not really.

Then Google released a bunch of professional Android and Web fonts which got
us closer...

Then a bunch of patents expired - finally we'd be on par with Win XP or OSX
Tiger.... In 2016.

Last I heard, a bunch of Microsoft 's Open Initiative patents would allow Win
7 level rendering (though MacOS and Win10 have gotten even better).

I gave up a whole ago and just bought a Mac.

~~~
dman
If they are fixed will you really switch platforms?

