Fedora 31
Mayank Sharma may have upgraded his workstation to get this as soon as it was released, but did it live up to expectations?
Just because Mayank Sharma upgraded his PC to this release as soon as it was released doesn’t mean he is biased.
With the release of Fedora 31, the distro becomes the latest addition to the list of projects that have officially dropped support for the 32‑bit architecture. The lack of any blowback, unlike Ubuntu’s poorly managed announcement, tells us that a majority of users don’t use 32‑bit machines as their main desktop, and even if they do they empathise with the decision that maintaining 32‑bit is a distraction. The project had relegated the 32‑bit Fedora kernel to the community for maintenance for a couple of years now, where it was stagnating and gathering bugs that no one was interested in fixing. So the team floated the idea of dropping the 32‑bit build once again, and this time there were no objections.
Unlike Canonical’s announcement (and subsequent reversal) to axe all 32‑bit packages, Fedora has made it clear right from the get‑go that it wasn’t dropping all 32‑bit packages. The distro will make sure that the most popular 32‑bit packages, including Multilib, Wine and
Steam, still continue to work. So you can still compile 32‑bit apps on your 64‑bit machines. But if you plan to keep up with the Fedora releases, you’ll have to get yourself a new 64‑bit processor, once the support life cycle for Fedora 30 ends sometime in mid 2020. Otherwise you’ll have to switch to one of the distros that still support 32‑bit rigs.
If you aren’t using Fedora on 32‑bit hardware, this release is the standard fare. It uses Gnome 3.34 and inherits its performance and visual improvements. Gnome 3.34 boasts of many improvements to its Wayland backend to bring its reliability on par with the retiring X.org. A major step in this direction is the newly implemented ability to run Firefox natively on the new display server. Outside of Gnome though, for instance on KDE, Firefox will still need the Xwayland compatibility backend. Talking of KDE, the release also has Qtwayland platform plugin enabled by default so your Qt apps won’t levy a performance penalty anymore.
One change that we were surprised to see is the improvements to the Gnome Classic mode. This mode just uses a set of Gnome 3 extensions to mimic a Gnome 2 desktop and felt like an unnecessary addition to us. But apparently Gnome receives a lot of feedback from users of this mode and has rolled them in this release to present a much truer Gnome 2 experience.
Beyond the desktop
There’s more a Fedora release than just the Workstation. Besides the Fedora Server release, there’s Fedora Coreos,
Fedora IOT and Fedora Silverblue. Coreos, currently labelled as a preview release, is a minimal distro for running containers. The IOT edition, a new addition that’ll soon go through a new name, aims to provide an all‑inclusive platform for working on edge computing use cases. Silverblue is Fedora’s new take on the desktop built around immutable images for the core components and that’s where all the interesting development seems to be focused these days.
Two interesting tools that caught our eye and should be useful for sysadmins are Fedora Toolbox, to ease the creation and management of Pet containers, and Fleet
Commander, for handling large scale Fedora deployments. Fleet Commander works on the concept of profiles that help set any setting across the deployments. In addition to all Gnome settings, the tool now also supports settings from Firefox and Libreoffice and will integrate with an Active Directory server for user management in addition to FREEIPA. Fedora Toolbox comes preinstalled on Silverblue but can also be installed on top of a Workstation installation.