Flavours, spins, upgrades
Fedora and Ubuntu have all kinds of alternate editions, and both can easily be customised beyond recognition.
Besides the flagship desktop offerings, there are a number of other official editions of Fedora and Ubuntu that you might be interested in. For fun and games (although it actually wasn’t fun at all) we tried installing both OSes on an old machine that, with its 2GB RAM and ancient (but still 64-bit) Celeron processor, fell well below the recommended specifications.
Once the installs were complete (which took ages because cheap laptop hard drives of the early 2010s are not fast), both OSes were surprisingly useable. But what turned out to be much more useable was working with the LXQt-powered flavour of each. Gnome had a fairly large, but not surprising given its reputation as the fattest desktop environment, 700MB memory footprint. LXQt had a much more slimline 450MB.
Even if you’re not on old hardware, you might not like the Gnome desktop. And if you are, you might like that there’s still a Fedora Spin that uses LXDE, the lightweight desktop built on the venerable GTK2. For a different kind of nostalgia check out the MATE-compiz spin, which brings back Gnome 2 aesthetics with a wobbly windows twist. Kubuntu and the KDE Plasma Fedora spin are among the most popular alternative offerings, but you’ll find there’s a spin/flavour for any desktop you could care to name. There’s also Fedora Kinoite, an atomically updating (like the official Silverblue release) Plasma spin. Similar to the desktop spins are Fedora Labs. These are special editions that cater to a particular area of interest with bespoke software bundles. If you’re into computational neuroscience, for example, try the Comp Neuro Lab. It has all of the best open source neural network simulation software (is that too niche a genre for a future Roundup? – Ed).
So come up to the Lab…
Most of the Labs are of a scientific theme, but there’s also the Design Suite (for art and creativity) and Jam (for music and audio). There’s also a Games Lab, which bundles some quite entertaining (though some very old) FOSS titles. It doesn’t include any tweaks or drivers, but we’ll look at how both distros fair at modern gaming in a moment. Fedora also has Special Interest Groups (SIGs) which aren’t necessarily tied to a particular spin or Lab, but whose mission it is to get the software that’s the subject of its Special Interest Group packaged and working nicely on Fedora. We were glad to see that i3 (the lightweight tiling window manager that’s favoured by developers and fans of keyboard shortcuts) has its own SIG now.
The Ubuntu Flavours are easier to enumerate. There are seven of them, and six of those are desktop flavours. That leaves Ubuntu Studio, which is very much like a union of Fedora’s Jam and Visual Design spins. As such
it’s a rather large 4.1GB download, which is beginning to push what can physically fit on a DVD (oh dear–Ed).
Ubuntu Studio used to offer a patched real-time kernel, but since those patches can now be activated in the official kernel sources, and generally cause problems for desktop systems, it’s no longer needed. Instead, the low-latency kernel from the Ubuntu repository is used, which should be of a low-enough latency for all but the most fastidious of audiophiles.
On the subject of multimedia, one thing which we haven’t mentioned yet is that Pipewire is now installed in both distros. Pipewire was once described as “Pulseaudio
for video”, which may not have been the best way to advertise it (given many users didn’t appreciate Pulseaudio when it went mainstream), and certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. Instead, one should see Pipewire as the key to taming multimedia in an age of Wayland, streaming and screen recording. It’s actually the default audio subsystem in Fedora, but unless you went looking you’d never notice anything had changed. That part of it should be a complete drop in replacement for Pulseaudio, except in the most edgiest of edge cases. It runs as a Systemd user daemon, so to check it’s running just enter
$ systemctl –user status pipewire-pulse
You can get some more information by running pactl info (this requires the pulseaudio-utils package). If you want to see how it fares in Ubuntu, see the box (left). Besides managing PulseAudio, PipeWire can also handle audio from JACK, ALSA and Gstreamer. It’s also designed with sandboxing in mind, so (unlike our webbrowser experiments on the previous pages) it works with Snaps and Flatpaks Wayland.
Upgrading your distro of choice
With relatively short lifecycles, you’d expect upgrading to the next release to be nice and easy on both distros. And indeed it is, or at least it should be. We realised that Fedora 35 would be out by the time you were reading this, even though at the time of writing the beta had only just been released. Upgrading to the next release, beta or no, on Fedora involves just a few steps. First, ensure the system is fully updated with:
$ sudo dnf –refresh update
The next step is to download the new version, and you’ll be reminded that you really ought to have done the previous step before doing this one:
$ sudo dnf system-upgrade download – releasever=35
Once the new package lists are downloaded you’ll have one last chance to bail out of the upgrade. Otherwise it’s a case of waiting for a couple of thousand packages to download. In short, a fine time to prepare a cup of tea. When you return, you’ll have to confirm importing of the package signing key to the new release and then you’re ready to reboot:
$ sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot
As with regular Fedora updates, the new packages will be installed post-reboot, outside of any GUI. When that’s done, which might necessitate another cup of tea, you will be one reboot away from your new version of Fedora. Once you’ve booted the latest edition, you can easily tidy up any cruft from its predecessor with:
$ sudo dnf system-upgrade clean
If you’ve used any of the popular desktop Ubuntu derivatives, you’ll be familiar with the friendly alert from the Software application telling you that a new version is available. If, for some reason, you don’t see this, and you’re fully upgraded and rebooted, then there’s a new command line incantation to force the upgrade:
$ sudo apt full-upgrade $ update-manager -c
And that is largely it for this month’s dive into the latest and greatest editions of Ubuntu and Fedora. But over the page you can see what the ever-reliable, straight-talking Mayank Sharma has to say in his head-to-head comparison.