Some thoughts about Fedora 39

[Schwarzer Kater]

I briefly tested the new Fedora 39 release and here are some quick thoughts and observations:

• Fedora 39 changed the default file system from Btrfs to ext4 Fedora's default file system is still Btrfs - you can change this to whatever you like in the Anaconda installer, of course
• F39 still uses BFQ as an I/O scheduler for SATA SSDs - in my experience this reduces their performance unnecessarily in 99% of the use cases and I had to manually change it to mq-deadline again (like in the previous Fedora release)
• the Flathub Flatpak repository is now available from the start as an addition to Fedora's own Flatpak repository
• if I am not mistaken the Fedora 39 KDE Plasma Spin still installs the Akonadi server and KDE PIM by default (like Debian does)
• Wayland seems to be the default session for Plasma (and has been for some time)

I don't use the Fedora KDE Plasma Spin - (only) one of the reasons being that Red Hat (Fedora) is no KDE Patron, unlike Canonical (Kubuntu) and SUSE (openSUSE).
But I always install Fedora Workstation somewhere to keep up-to-date with the current state of GNOME (and as a means to be able to help people who use Fedora - I don't know anyone anymore who does, though).
And again I came to the conclusion that I still cannot understand why one would like to use vanilla GNOME… And the file manager is still horrible, and (I could go on and on )…

[kc1di]

I gave Fedora 39 KDE spin a try when it was still in beta, Didn't care for it too much. Will stick with Kubuntu I always give Fedora a try, but always come back to Kubuntu in the end. The LTS version is just solid. And does what I need to do.

[Snowhog]

And does what I need to do.

Which in the end, is really the only thing that matters!

[Montmorency]

I like the six month release schedule/12 month support, coupled with the internal updater. One can update only at a given version EOL, that way the new version will have 6 months updates (just when the newer version is being released) time enough to iron out bugs.
The only question is if the internal updater is reliable; I hear it is.

[Schwarzer Kater]

I think this concept for the release schedule is a bit better than Canonical's for the *Ubuntu interim (non-LTS) releases (6 months/9 months) - but on the other hand Fedora has no LTS releases at all and its target user base is quite different from *Ubuntu's.

I have had mixed experiences with the "internal updater" from one Fedora release to the next one. Sometimes it has worked flawlessly, sometimes it has not worked at all for me…

[oshunluvr]

[*]F39 still uses BFQ as an I/O scheduler for SATA SSDs - in my experience this reduces their performance unnecessarily in 99% of the use cases and I had to manually change it to mq-deadline again (like in the previous Fedora release)

Worth noting here, from Ubuntu documentation:

Best I/O scheduler to use
Different I/O requirements may benefit from changing from the Ubuntu distro default. A quick start guide to select a suitable I/O scheduler is below. The results are based on running 25 different synthetic I/O patterns generated using fio on ext4, xfs and btrfs with the various I/O schedulers using the 5.3 kernel.

SSD or NVME drives
It is worth noting that there is little difference in throughput between the mq-deadline/none/bfq I/O schedulers when using fast multi-queue SSD configurations or fast NVME devices. In these cases it may be preferable to use the 'none' I/O scheduler to reduce CPU overhead.

[Schwarzer Kater]

For (M.2) NVMe drives Fedora uses none, like e.g. *Ubuntu does.
The (IMHO disadvantageous) choice to use BFQ as an I/O scheduler only concerns SATA SSDs (and spinning SATA and IDE drives - where it is better suited I guess).

Differences (minor and major ones) when choosing different I/O schedulers for bus interfaces/drives can be seen e.g. with the test suite from Phoronix.


PS: I had to switch from Wayland to X11 in Fedora Workstation (GNOME) - otherwise the Guake drop-down terminal would (still) not work.