news
Review: Fedora 43
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Fedora is a testbed for trying out new technologies and an upstream development environment for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As a result the distribution is regularly using new versions of software. This can make running Fedora a bit unpredictable because, on one hand, we are getting the latest features from upstream projects, but we are also getting the latest versions that have not yet been widely tested. Running Fedora can have some fun high points and some uncomfortable low moments.
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. I like the layout of the Discover software centre. It may have had problems with providing updates, but it was able to fetch and install new packages without any issues. I also like that Discover can enable extra repositories.
While several distributions I have used this year have provided media players that struggled to play videos in a Wayland session, Fedora does not have this problem and was able to play videos right away.
There are some issues though. The slow response on the command line when trying to run a program that isn't installed (or when making a typo) interrupts my workflow. I also found DNF was slower than most other command line package managers.
Asking users to restart the computer to apply non-kernel updates feels about 30 years out of date and a painful return to Windows-style software management. Most other distributions do not do this, unless they are immutable. Fedora 43 "KDE" is not immutable, but it insists on this awkward behaviour with no benefit to the user.
The biggest problem with this release though is definitely the slow, CPU-intensive system installer. It makes the CPU run hot, even when it's idle, it has almost no disk partitioning and swap options, and it is painfully slow. I didn't think it was possible for Fedora to introduce a system installer I would like less than its previous version of Anaconda with its inconsistent menus and strange hub screens, but at least that installer had options. This installer has fewer options, it is slower, and its flat design is less attractive. I think it's nice to see Fedora return to a sequential install experience, but this feels like one step forward and three backwards.
On the whole, Fedora 43 has some good points and some problems. As usual, Fedora feels like an operating system which was assembled by separate committees who were not allowed to talk with each other. It results in some good points and some problems (as one might expect from a cutting-edge project), but it does not seem to have a consistent approach or design. It feels like a collection of beta releases, not an operating system intended to target a specific audience or solve a specific problem.