Announcing Fedora Linux 39 Beta

» I’ve got a kid that always wants to get 100% (or higher!) in every class.
» I keep telling her, “Really, you learn best when you’re right 80% of the time. Otherwise, you’re not getting enough of a challenge.”

Besides: “There’s only one way to give 110%.” (quote: Bobblehead – Luck; Fallout 3)

» To keep up with Fedora’s commitment to innovation, we also need to take risks. If everything went according to plan, that would mean we’re not trying hard enough.

… or you are absolutely stunning in planning.

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That being said: I understand that certain users/admins will likely be dissuaded when “promised features” are suddenly held back, but personally I find this a sane decision. It is why I prefer and promote Fedora Linux over any other distributions. It is stable, yet ships out leading-edge package versions mostly on-par with their maintainers’ version.

While I am slightly disappointed that the DNF5 isn’t quite ship shape yet, as I know development is never quite as easy as it looks to outsiders, it would have been so sweet to pull the upgrade with DNF5 and watch everything fly by.

Also, it was a little frustrating to watch some of the lesser but still dependent on DNF utilities send this to a screeching halt. Such as DNFdragora doing a whole lot of nothing on their repository.

And generally, I know that not everyone is on the same page in terms of skill or toolkit, but I would have thought this sort of thing would have been a General Quarters/All Hands sort of thing where anyone even remotely possible to assist would be called to arms; especially when #258 was called in January, and it looked like they mostly just spun their wheels about reinventing the wheel for seven months.

When I think it would have been more prudent to ask from the approach of “How does Zypper implement upgradability”or “Does Synaptic/(YaST) fit the purpose of a system upgrade?”

The system upgrade process is important enough that it should be completely agnostic of any desktop, rather than bending over backwards to kiss GNOME on the cheek. (Especially on the non-zero chance of GNOME pulling a Twitter/X/Unity.)

If dnf5 system-upgrade were an invoker, I’d have it present as Athena Widgets/Wayland’s equal, for as little desktop reliance as possible; seeing as it is a critical process, and something going wrong is the last thing that needs to happen.

1) “This will guide you though the System Upgrade Process. First it will automatically check for updates if possible, then download the system upgrade.”
2) “This will upgrade [X] amount of packages, Downgrade [Y], and require [foo] amount of space. C)onfirm, A)bort or M)ore…” (With more displaying all the packages for inspection.)
3) Confirm the fingerprints of the new RPM sources accordingly.
4) “Downloading. Why not go stretch out and take a good drink of water while you wait?”
5) “Download complete. C)ontinue, R)eboot D)elete …” With delete explaining it is the chicken exit and will prevent the upgrade from happening. Continue will drop the user back to normal operations (but mark the next startup/reboot for upgrade) and Reboot will proceed as the typical System Upgrade process does.

I read somewhere that there are improvements to GNOME’s screen reader, but I can’t find any details. I noticed that trying to navigate through Quick Settings (by pressing Tab and the arrow keys) with Orca and the magnifier enabled caused the system to freeze. Also, when trying to Tab through Settings with Orca, the screen reader does not announce information in sync with the user pressing Tab. There is a delay, because Orca tries to finish what it was saying instead of moving on to the next item (as it should like in every other application).

The Fedora 39 is pretty stable for a normal user. I had serious laptop heating issues and super slow bootup issues in F38 , when compared to other distros. Seems, that is not here in F39. I broke my system after installing F39 and upgrading through terminal. The system stuck at BOOTUP SCREEN, i had to reinstall using usb and upgrade through gnome-software, this time the update was suceessful without problem.

> I’ve got a kid that always wants to get 100% (or higher!) in every class.
> I keep telling her, “Really, you learn best when you’re right 80% of the time.
> Otherwise, you’re not getting enough of a challenge.”

My father, a high school Math teacher, used to toss out any exam where someone got 100% on it. His argument, usually to the kid with the 100%, was that because the test did not detect that person’s limits, the scores were inflated and the difference between the best student and the worse student was not being measured. Obviously, he scaled the scores at the end of the grading period, but it was a useful way to keep the smart kids engaged and insure those that struggled had their challenges identified so that they could be helped. Not sure 15yo bought that argument, but his students were very supportive of him and they learned a lot of Math from him.

Fedora 39 after update, this day all work fine

Fedora 39 is really good. I use it with Gnome + Wayland.

The top-left activities button has changed and now I understand it shows where you are if you have multiple workspaces, which is very clever, you can click it or scroll it, I only found out from the documentation, but really like the innovation.