Meh. As a KDE F38 user, this is a super boring release. Nothing really new for us to look forward to, except LibreOffice 7.6 (which you can get via Flatpak). I was hoping the new DNF 5 would make the cut, but guess it’s still not ready yet. :(
Guess will have to hold out my excitement until F40 for Plasma 6 and DNF 5 (hopefully).
I’m not the most knowledgeable on this subject, but I’m curious to learn more.
Why do various toolkits have major releases that seem to reset the features of the last one?
GTK 3 seems like GTK 2 but slower to me, and before the transition was even complete GTK 4 showed up, which just seems like GTK 3 but a bit different. Qt 5 works really well and is efficient on resources, so why are we switching to Qt 6? It seems like reinventing the desktop over and over again.
I understand updates for the kernel for compatibility, small to medium updates to all software for bug fixes and new features, and major updates to toolkits when there are big problems with the current release (X vs Wayland for example). Or if the current release was unreliable and bloated, which I heard was what happened with Qt 4 and why they switched to 5. But I also heard Qt 3 was really stable and lightweight, so why did they switch away from it?
Usually there’s big new features that accomodate more modern hardware better. As an example, Qt6 revamps support for Wayland, HDR, and scaling. Even these things on their own don’t seem like much, but if you go back to KDE 5 in 10 years time you’ll definitely feel like something is plain/dated (or completely not working if you’re on new hardware)
Gtk 3->4 made a lot of internal changes, and at least some were related to making wayland work. Wayland “worked” in gtk3, however it was very much an afterthought, and half the toolkit was useless under wayland. Other changes are usually required for changes related to rendering, gtk4 had vulcan rendering which may require some breaking changes. Another thing is just general breaking changes that are good, sometimes you realise some decision was bad, and a new major release is just a way to make these.
From the end users perspective nothing much changes, it maybe looks a bit different, but not much besides that. But a vulcan renderer and being fully wayland compatible are major improvements that also improve the user experience, even if you don’t notice directly.
Usually the problem isn’t that the changes are big, but that the new way simply isn’t compatible with the old way to do things, and you can’t just make a change that will break existing applications in minor versions (well, there’s nothing technically stopping you, and unintentional compatibility breaking bugs have definitely happened in the past, but people are gonna get real mad at you if you do that). Even if you break that change up into thousand tiny changes over many minor versions, the end result is that at some point, you break old apps.
The solution is to take note of all the things that are either badly designed or became obsolete and once in a while go “hey, let’s make a new major version and fix all of this crap”. With a new major version, you don’t have to worry about old applications and are free to improve your library in any way you wish, and you also get the option to keep updating the old major version with some maintenance bugfixes so that the old apps keep working well enough.
I still have my HP Mini311, it has a 11.6" screen, 1366x768, discrete GPU, can decode 1080p in hardware and output on tv via HDMI. In 2009 it was a beast!
I changed the 2.4bg with a 2.4/5n wifi, upgraded to 3GB of ddr3 ram, SSD, overclocked to 2GHz, and installed MX Linux on it, works perfect.
Gnome with Wayland: I am just too used to the touchpad gestures and sleek looking apps to go back. Even windows looks and behaves janky in comparison
Firefox: plain better than the alternatives, the scrolling is so much better under Wayland too
The auto dark mode GNOME extention: it between dark and light mode depending on the time of day
Rounded window corners GNOME extension: forces all 4 corners of applications to have rounded corners
Separate /home partition, very useful for distro hopping or in case just going the nuclear option and reinstalling everything is the easiest way to deal with a breakage
No such issues here with my XM5, been using mine for over an year. Are your devices on at least Bluetooth v5.2? All of mine are either 5.2 or 5.3 and I’ve not experienced any issues. I use my headphones with Android, Linux, Windows 10 and macOS. Even multipoint works fine.
As for the head comfort, you could get a headband cover/cushion, such as the ones made by Geekria.
I still have my white 701 that I put a black keyboard on and soldered in a Bluetooth module. Some of the most fun I’ve had using a computer and I wish the form factor was still a thing.
I decided I wanted to self host an app like this just a few weeks ago. I started with Focalboard but just could not get it running as a personal server instance on Docker. (This could entirely be on me as I am very much still learning) I got confused in the whole what’s Mattermost / what’s still part of Focalboard talk, and I wanted to use a Docker compost file but they don’t have one on this page. I got an instance running anyway, but the site wasn’t responding when I tried to load it in my browser. I’ve made this work now for about 8 other apps but just could not find the root cause with this one.
I ended up installing and loving Planka though. For my extremely simple use case, it’s just right. The docker installation was dead simple and it ‘just works’ for me.
For every major Fedora update I’ll try to perform the upgrade from the Gnome Software app just to see if it works, and every time it breaks and I fall back to good ol’ dnf system-upgrade. This is the first time upgrading from Software worked for me, and it was fast too. Nice to see all the Software improvements finally paying off.
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