Next-gen distro tech
Shiny and easy-to-use distributions are one thing, but which distros ship the latest Linux tech? Keep reading to find out…
Fedora is Red Hat’s community distro, where new technologies are honed before they make it into their business, meaning Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Fedora was the first distribution to see systemd, Pulseaudio and SELinux
(the NSA-contributed access control mechanism). Those titles might send shivers down the spines of some readers, but like them or not they’re here to stay. It’s historically been the best way to experience unadulterated Gnome 3 (stop shuddering you lot). That desktop offers the best Wayland experience, and Fedora was the first to offer Wayland by default (still with the shuddering?). So it’s nothing if not a trailblazer distro.
The latest Fedora 32 even enables Firefox’s new Wayland backend. Indeed VA-API acceleration, which appeared in Chromium, debuted in Fedora’s build over a year ago. So if Fedora receives new features, smoother browsers, why on earth aren’t you using it?
Occasionally Fedora is sidestepped because of its philosophy on software freedom. If you want proprietary software (including the Nvidia driver), or patentencumbered multimedia codecs, these have to be added through a third-party repo such as RPMFusion or Negativo 17. The codecs issue is much less of a big deal nowadays. Popular streaming sites all use open formats (or at least, in the case of h.264, ones where an open source codec is available) and MP3 became a patent free format in 2017. A free AAC codec was made available shortly afterward, so you can play all your ripped CDs from yesteryear out of the box. Or you could rip them again in a lossless, free format such as FLAC.
Make it easy on yourself
Setting up a traditional third-party Fedora repo requires a certain amount of effort. More so than setting up a PPA for Ubuntu, which is perhaps why it used to be a bit harder to find certain niche software for Fedora. Bear in mind that PPA overload was definitely responsible for the demise of many an Ubuntu install, and third-party builds should always be treated with caution. Nowadays, a new technology Copr, takes all the hassle out of building unofficial Fedora packages. Fedora even offers a Copr build service that will provide you with your own Dnf/Yum repository. Just upload a source RPM file, select your build targets, and you’re done. Read more at https:// developer. fedoraproject.org/ deployment/copr/ about.html. And, of course, more and more developers are turning to Flatpaks and Snaps (although the latter is disabled in Fedora’s build of Gnome Software). So Fedora’s comparatively small, but carefully curated repos are no reason to shun it.
Fedora made the news recently with the announcement that Lenovo will be shipping laptops powered by Fedora Workstation. Writing on his blog Christian Schaller, senior manager for desktop at Red Hat, says “Our engineering team here at Red Hat has also been hard at work ensuring we can support these models very well, be that by bugfixes to kernel drivers or by polishing up things like the Linux fingerprint support”. We often have queries about Linux on laptops from readers, and without a particular model to hand it’s difficult to give solid advice on compatibility. Now, with laptop offerings from both Dell and Lenovo, we can direct users who want a rock-solid Linux offering out of the box there with confidence.
Christian has been adamant about “draining the swamp” over the course of his past six years at Red Hat. He’s not talking about rogue politicians, either. Rather he’s addressing desktop issues that for too long have been hastily patched over, where ground-up rewrites were required. He original credits the phrase in this context to a talk by Jim Gettys, whose thoughts you can read at https://mail.gnome. org/archives/foundationlist/2002-May/msg00005.html. The latest Fedora includes Gnome 3.36 (the same as Ubuntu 20.04) and we’re impressed with the distinct lack of swamps. You may have run into PulseAudio issues in the past, or you may not see any reason to use Wayland over X11, but these technologies were invented to solve problems. And solve them they do. You might also be interested that PipeWire, Wim Tayman’s offering to unify media handling, is included by default in Fedora. PipeWire can now do pretty much everything Jack (the rather complicated interface for pro-audio set ups) can, and the next step is to have it take on the duties of PulseAudio too.
If you’ve ever run Linux on a machine with not enough memory,
Linux hits the mainstream “With laptop offerings from both Dell and Lenovo, we can direct users who want a rock-solid Linux offering out of the box there with confidence.”
you’ll know that things can get very unpleasant very quickly. Apart from the slowness of using spinning-rust based swap space (which is not an option on some systems), you might find yourself at the hands of the OOM (out of memory) killer. Applications will be slain more or less arbitrarily. Even worse though, is when OOM can’t react quickly enough and your desktop grinds to a halt. You can’t move the mouse pointer, you can’t switch to a virtual terminal, you probably can’t even SSH in to kill things manually.
We’ve run into this memorypressure situation a few times when running one too many virtual machines. Like when you’re writing a big feature about lots of distros and then it makes it late. Anyhoo… Fedora 32 includes the EarlyOOM daemon, which should step in before it’s too late.
Fedora goes much further than the desktop. Naturally it has a server offering, and we’ve already mentioned its Flatpak- and container-focused Silverblue desktop effort. But since Red Hat purchased CoreOS in 2018, it’s now in charge of the distro formerly known as CoreOS Container Linux, now dubbed Fedora CoreOS. This will very likely be the future for managing container-based workflows securely, and in particular massive server deployments. And from the very big to the very small, in the form of Fedora IoT, its offering for the tiny things that will be running our cities and lives in the coming years.
A Clear winner
One distro we haven’t covered much, but perhaps should, is Intel’s Clear Linux. This is aimed at professionals using Intel hardware to do advanced things with container and cloud technologies. In its own words it’s “not intended to be a general-purpose Linux distribution”. Be that as it may, it consistently scores favourably in Phoronix’s tireless benchmark comparisons and a desktop edition is available so you may want to have a gander. Clear Linux abstracts application packages into the concept of Bundles, which enable a bunch of related programs to be installed at once. Since Clear Linux has its own repository you might not find your favourite applications, but this is exactly part of the problem Flatpaks aim to solve, and installing the Flatpak bundle is easy.
Clear Linux bundles use compiler optimisations, enabling AVX512 vector instructions on suitable endowed hardware. So, for example, if you’re running TensorFlow, you’ll benefit from kernel tuning, AVX routines in Glibc, AVX optimisations in Python, tweaked Numpy/Pandas modules and finally optimisation at the very top of the stack in Tensorflow’s Eigen component. Clear Linux uses a stateless design concept so the whole OS can be effectively factory reset by clearing /etc and /var. This doesn’t work on other distributions so please don’t try it. But do try all of the distros we’ve mentioned here, and feel free to shout at/email us for not mentioning your favourite next-generation offering.