Looking forward to Fedora 34
Incidentally, your editor has been made aware that we are all supposed to call the distribution "Fedora Linux" now, with the bare name "Fedora" reserved for the project. So this article should properly be talking about "Fedora Linux 34", but old habits die hard.
Like many distributors, Fedora makes it easy to beta-test its upcoming releases so, on a whim, your editor decided to update his system and see what was coming; what could possibly go wrong? The target Thinkpad, which nicely came with Fedora pre-installed by the manufacturer, was just sitting there waiting for this sort of opportunity. As expected, the upgrade went smoothly and the laptop booted up in the new system without any obvious hitches.
Losing the pulse
The Fedora 8 release in 2007 included a notable change: it switched over to the PulseAudio system for all of its sound handling. This transition, it is fair to say, generated a fair amount of noise; PulseAudio did not work well for many users, often as the result of bugs elsewhere in the system. It took a long time for things to settle down (not just on Fedora) and many electrons perished in the resulting discussions, which often managed to be loud even in the absence of working audio. But, in 2021, complaints about PulseAudio are scarce indeed; the quirks have long since been ironed out and, for most people, sound just works.
Obviously, it must be time to rip out the audio infrastructure and start over. That is what Fedora has done in the 34 release; PulseAudio is gone, replaced by PipeWire. The new system has a lot of claimed advantages, including better suitability to current devices, better security, a design that can handle professional-level requirements, and the ability to handle video as well as audio streams. For this Fedora release, PipeWire is only used for audio data.
A new audio subsystem brings back memories of the last change and might rightly be approached with some trepidation. What your editor found, though, is that audio just worked the way it did in previous releases. The only glitch was associated with plugging a television into the HDMI port to watch a movie; that part worked fine, but the system failed to switch back to the built-in microphone and speakers after the TV was unplugged. The audio-settings dialog showed no audio devices selected at all; going back to the built-in devices was a quick matter of picking them from the dropdown menu.
PipeWire also replaces the professional JACK audio system in Fedora 34, but your editor is not set up to test that functionality.
GNOME 40
Fedora 34 includes GNOME 40; this release was preceded by a fair amount of hype describing it as a fundamental change to the desktop system. That, too, is enough to create a certain amount of concern among those of us who have lived through previous transitions. Making peace with GNOME 3 was a long process for many — a process that some users never managed to complete. For most, though, GNOME has stabilized into something that we can work with and even not swear at more than a few times per day. The GNOME 40 material made it sound like that was all about to change.
In truth, the changes in GNOME 40 are minor and not disruptive. That said, the first thing one notices after logging into the system is that the desktop now starts in the "activity" view — not the most exciting thing, since there are no activities to view yet:
![[GNOME activity view]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2021/gnome-activity.png)
The theory behind this behavior, presumably, is that entering that view is the first thing users do to start the application they want to use first, so the system might as well save them the keystroke needed to get there. First-time users might be forgiven for wondering what they are looking at, though.
As can be seen above, the activity view has changed a bit; application icons now appear along the bottom rather than on the left side, for example. That, of course, makes the experience worse if you enter the activity view by moving the pointer into the "hot corner" in the upper left; it is now necessary to move all the way back to the bottom of the screen to select an application to run. This is, perhaps, an acknowledgment by the GNOME developers that the hot corner is normally only activated by accident (and greeted with profanity) while trying to do something else in that part of the screen. For the other paths into this view (including a new trackpad gesture), placing the icons on the bottom works as well as anything else.
The interface around workspaces has changed a bit; they are now arranged horizontally rather than vertically. If your system has a trackpad, dragging three fingers to the side will scroll through the workspaces.
Various applications have been updated, though usually not in huge ways. For example, the GNOME 3.38 weather application looks like this:
![[GNOME Weather 3.38]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2021/gnome-weather-3.38.png)
In GNOME 40, that application looks a little different:
![[GNOME Weather 40]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2021/gnome-weather-40.png)
This change is not necessarily an improvement; one must now switch between the tabs to see both the hourly and daily predictions, for example. The notion that weather information for Colorado comes from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute is amusing, but that's the globalized world we live in, evidently. Your editor had vaguely hoped that the newer version might not insist that it will be snowing for the next week, but that feature was evidently dropped for this release.
In general, though, GNOME 40 just feels like another GNOME 3 release.
Other stuff
Naturally, the Fedora 34 release updates many other components in the system. Changes include a 5.11 kernel (also shipped on Fedora 33), GCC 11, glibc 2.33, Go 1.16, LLVM 12, Ruby 3.0, PostgreSQL 13, Xfce 4.16, and more. On the other hand, any remaining xemacs users out there will be wanting to look for alternatives; that package has been deprecated and will be removed from a future Fedora release.
In other changes: the ability to disable SELinux at run time has been removed in this release, as expected. One change that users will hope they never actually see is the switch to systemd-oomd on all Fedora variants. This change provides a more proactive and configurable response to out-of-memory situations, but having processes killed because of a memory shortfall is never pleasant even if one agrees with the system's choice of victim.
If your system is using Btrfs, it will now use transparent zstd compression by default. If you are using the NTP network time daemon, it will be replaced with NTPsec, which is arguably better maintained and more secure; most configurations should just work but people who have customized things may need to make some changes.
There are many other changes in the system as well, of course, but
users are unlikely to notice most of them. As a general rule,
Fedora 34 Fedora Linux 34 looks a lot
like its predecessors: a solid and functional desktop for those who work in
Linux full-time and want access to recent software releases.