[NEWS] Fedora 43 Beta - please help the community test this release

[tle]

Yet another cycle with Fedora. The Fedora 43 Beta is out but AFAIK it is a bit edgy, that is some applications and games have regressions (for example Xonotic). However there are apps that have been fixed for example GNOME Loupe. Please have a go at it and report all bugs you could find.

The Fedora 43 runs on the new GNOME 49.rc (which is quite polished compared to the GNOME 48) and we all know the Wayland is going to be the de facto in Fedora 44 or GNOME 50. Other changes are:

* Newer version of GCC, LLVM
* Kernel 6.17.0.rc
* DNF5! - please test it thoroughly
* and more rust-toolings... just kidding, Fedora has not joined Ubuntu on the 'rustic' bandwagon yet, in fact the uutils/coreutils is so out-of-date in Fedora and I do not think Fedora will ever replace GNU coreutils with the rust version.

URL to download: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-43-beta/

[tle]

GNOME 49.rc runs perfect! No issue with animation nor functionalities.

I also give KDE Plasma a go too and so far I have not found any issue.

Chromium runs fine (a bit faster than Fedora 42 and does not have memory leak anymore however it is HUNGRY for RAM! Chewing 13GB RAM on average on my box). GNOME Web 49 is getting better, it works with most websites that I usually browser. Firefox is basically the same, stable but hopefully JIT and WASM support will be officially supported one day.

[tle]

Looking good so far.

Xonotic no longer crash, in fact I think the crash was related to Fade Coronas GPU option

0ad was unfortunately disabled for ppc64le, I am trying to get the maintainer to backport some patches to get it build again https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2396311

[tle]

XFCE runs flawlessly as expected.

It's unfortunate that many X11-based WM are not picked up by GDM (Wayland only now) so I have to use SDDM instead.

[migsutu]

I have run F43 KDE Desktop Beta downloaded. The Live CD loaded up the OS and seems to be good. General snappy performance on my Blackbird. I tried installing onto a spare nvme card I had. Install goes through fine, however during boot it crashes out and doesn't load into the GUI startup wizard. I will experiment more shortly on it.

[Kortaffel]

XFCE runs flawlessly as expected.

It's unfortunate that many X11-based WM are not picked up by GDM (Wayland only now) so I have to use SDDM instead.

I wouldn't use Gnome. Gnome is a very political project these days. Their devs pride themselves with hating X11 and "having killed X11". They only support wayland.
These people hate X11 and everyone who uses it.

[tle]

I hold no strong opinion about X11 simply because my usecase does not really care if it is X11 or Wayland. Having said that I think I could understand why they decided so, sometimes it takes lots of guts to ditch the legacy baggage to start fresh. It might lead to the same path all over again.

[DKnoto]

Better is always the enemy of good. I had been using Gnome since 2011, starting with version three. I was very satisfied at the time. Unfortunately, at some point, the creators of Gnome began to abandon quality and good ideas in favor of irrelevant oddities. They didn't fix significant bugs for years. Without plugins from other programmers, the environment became unusable. The final straw was the forced transition from X11 to Wayland. If Wayland were X12 and eliminated the bugs of the old environment with a minimal number of new ones, I wouldn't complain. But for users who rely heavily on X11 features, it's a disaster. After years of development, the Wayland environment is only a source of new problems and total fragmentation with minimal functionality. At the moment, I have already switched to XFCE. And as soon as DRM from FreeBSD works on Talos 2, I think I will abandon Linux.

[MauryG5]

I think the main problem, however, is the software available on this FreeBSD, as is the general problem for us Power users. So I wonder how you could switch to a system that is likely even less widespread than Linux and therefore will have even less software available. Moreover, how can the optimizations, which are already lacking on Linux, be found on FreeBSD...

[MPC7500]

At least tpearson seems to have a soft spot for BSD. He is quite active on ravynOS FreeBSD

[DKnoto]

In the early 1990s, I didn't know what to choose, Linux or FreeBSD. I chose Linux for the reasons you mention. Now the situation is not so clear-cut. Yes, more companies support Linux, but I don't use those companies' products. Everything I use is 100% available in FreeBSD. I've been using FreeBSD on MoreFine M600 for a year now, and I'm happy with this solution.

[tle]

In the early 1990s, I didn't know what to choose, Linux or FreeBSD. I chose Linux for the reasons you mention. Now the situation is not so clear-cut. Yes, more companies support Linux, but I don't use those companies' products. Everything I use is 100% available in FreeBSD. I've been using FreeBSD on MoreFine M600 for a year now, and I'm happy with this solution.

I was taught UNIX with FreeBSD back in school days. Then I actually liked FreeBSD because of its consistency in user space toolings and packaging. I find Linux distribution (as the name suggests) is always a constant battle of mix and match of kernel and softwares in which vendor choose to incorporate their own ideas how an Linux OS should be. That alone has caused so much fragmentation just like the UNIX war in the old days, even though most Linux bistros have adopted standards it does not really help when one want to switch from one distro to other distro.