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Review: Fedora 44
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Normally, when I am reviewing an operating system I try to focus on the technical aspects and what I've got directly in front of me. In other words, I'm interested in what works for me and what doesn't work for me; I'm typically not worried about past releases, developer squabbles, other community spins, or what other reviewers thought of the same release. When I'm taking notes for a review, I'm working with a type of tunnel vision: "How well does this software work for me on my hardware?"
Going into this review though I couldn't help but think about something outside of my usual field of vision. Originally, it looked as though Fedora and Ubuntu would both publish their latest versions on the same week in April, just two days apart. Since I didn't think I would be able to properly review both distributions at the same time, I reached out to a few reviewers who regularly contribute content to DistroWatch Weekly and asked if they'd be willing to help. Specifically, I asked if any of them would be interested in reviewing Fedora while I took the new Ubuntu LTS version for a spin. They all declined, indicating they'd be happy to write something for the Weekly, just as long as they didn't need to install Fedora and deal with its problems.
In other words, recent Fedora releases have been bad enough I literally can no longer pay my colleagues to run the distribution.
Certainly, in the past, I've mentioned having issues with aspects of Fedora releases. Sometimes a new desktop version is unstable or the package manager has been slow or a new installer has had a weird design. Sometimes Fedora's open-and-patent-free-only policy with regards to packages has been cumbersome. But these issues were usually, if annoying, either one-off issues or growing pains or possible to work around fairly easily. Put another way, Fedora's experimental nature means problems come and go with each release, but there are usually positive elements too and fixes for the issues. I can't say that about Fedora 44.
Unfortunately, I found virtually every aspect of Fedora 44 to be a mess. The Plasma session is massive, with Plasma being 100% heavier in RAM than the same desktop running on other distributions, and unusually slow. The zRAM virtual swap space continues to be buggy. There are reports against zRAM and how it automatically re-enables itself against the user's instructions going back three years and the project still refuses to address the issue. The new system installer can't partition disks, something which Fedora releases going back to Fedora Core 1 were able to accomplish properly, and I had to use a third-party tool to create my disk layout.
Once installed, Fedora's initial flood of updates broke the LXQt desktop session and prevented the package manager from ever working again. Around a third of the desktop configuration tools work on X11 only and fail to run in Wayland and (this feels more significant) there aren't Wayland alternatives included to handle this gap in functionality. The LXQt session is twice as resource hungry on Fedora as it is in the Debian family, despite not having as much functionality.
I'm willing to put down Fedora's insistence on providing patent-free and libre software only as a pleasant quirk - inconvenient, but praiseworthy for its idealism. However, what I can't excuse is prompting the user to accept trust of Fedora's own repository keys and asking for a password to launch the installer from the live ISO. These are features of first-attempt hobby projects, not suitable for a long-running, corporate-backed distribution with dozens of developers.
Usually Fedora has good hardware support, with past releases typically working well with this laptop. This time around the distribution mostly worked - it could boot, wireless networking functioned, but my shortcut keys didn't work. This feels like a (small) step backward, though it may be desktop specific.
Some people may legitimately point out that, for the majority of this trial, I was running a community spin, not a proper full edition of Fedora. Which is true, and it may be the source of some of the observed problems, but I only ended up running the LXQt spin because the KDE spin (which I used successfully six months ago) was too slow and buggy, sending me looking for alternatives. In fact, six months ago, when using the same edition on the same laptop, I had this to say about the KDE experience:
On the positive side of things, the Plasma desktop was faster and its Wayland session was more polished on Fedora than when running Kubuntu on the same hardware. I didn't run into the issue of duplicate mouse pointers, for example, with Fedora.
Now, just six months later, the Plasma session runs like a maple syrup through a straw on the same laptop.
What boggles my mind is that virtually every aspect of the distribution has problems (the LXQt Wayland session, the configuration tools, the Plasma desktop, the system installer, the partition manager, and the package manager all had glaring issues) and this was after Fedora 44 was delayed multiple times to give the developers a chance to fix bugs. There are still several remaining; too many, in my opinion.
Fedora 43 provided relatively positive experience, in my opinion, with the experimental distribution, but Fedora 44 feels like an unfinished mess. I'd skip this release and either stick with Fedora 43 or wait to try your luck with Fedora 45.
Update
Arindam on F44:
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DebugPoint ☛ 10 Things to do After Installing Fedora 44 (Workstation)
Here’s a quick rundown of the 10 quick tips after you finish installing a brand new Fedora 44 workstation edition. In this article, we will talk about a few post-install tips for Fedora 44 workstation edition.