Fedora 42

The T14 G1 is my current favorite machine. I’ve been using Ubuntu for decades now but I got a little annoyed by snaps and since I was moving to a new machine I decided to try a new distribution, and picked Fedora.

Summary

1. The free/non-free ideology gets in the way of a smooth user experience.
2. The install obfuscates setting up partitions
3. Touchpad bug
4. Otherwise uneventful (which is exactly what we want)
5. Ubuntu’s out-of-the-box experience is miles ahead, and if you don’t care about the snaps debate just use Ubuntu.

The bad bits

Sub-optimal drivers and codecs

All my issues with multimedia went away with a few lines found in the Fedora docs. I suspect that if I paid more attention during the install I would have checked the “Non-free repositories” option and not have had the issue at all.

(link to fedora docs here)

The problem was that the multimedia codecs didn’t all take at once (and I didn’t reboot right away) so with some of the issues (like stuttering videos) I wasn’t sure for a while if it was a Firefox issue, a power management issue or a system drivers issue.

It all settled down in the end.

Trickier are the drivers for the laptop. I’m still not sure if I have the best drivers installed for everything because the free stuff got there first. There might be a way to figure this out, but that’s more research.

Bondage by btrfs

Traditionally, we’ve put the /home directory on its own partition (separate from system partitions like /, /root etc.) so we can reinstall the OS while keeping user data intact.

The Fedora installer obfuscates the partitioning step and nudges us into adopting btrfs as our file system where /home is a “subvolume”.

The argument for this, put forward elsewhere, is that subvolumes are better than hard partitions because subvolume sizes can be changed while you are stuck if your root or home partition turns out to be too small.

It also made it the first time in a while I had to look up documentation on the internet when installing Linux on a machine and I wasn’t happy about being locked into btrfs like this.

The good bits

The great news is that Fedora installed (mostly) painlessly on the machine and the hardware (mostly) worked. And even the touchpad bug is something that Windows users seem to run into, so it might be somewhat close to the hardware.

SELinux

Ubuntu comes from Debian while Fedora comes from Red Hat Linux. This results in some inconsequential differences (like package managers), some more serious differences (default software repositories, package release schedules etc.) and some fundamental things.

SELinux is one of these fundamental things. I don’t know anything about security but I gathered that securing Linux went in two directions: AppArmor and SELinux.

This process security stuff is mostly transparent to end users - a typical Ubuntu user isn’t wrestling with AppArmor scripts and a typical Fedora user, I assume, isn’t wrestling with SELinux either. Just recently, however, I was burned by AppArmor on Ubuntu.

I usually install Ubuntu with AppArmor off but I enabled it on install and had the devil of a time figuring out why my home directory and my networked directories weren’t accessible from Firefox.

It turned out to be the AppArmor profiles, and because of the confusion between snaps and apt installed Firefox versions I couldn’t figure out if I my attempts at writing a permissive profile for Firefox were wrong, or just pointing to the wrong Firefox.

So, now I’m a little wary of such things “just working”: Most likely I’ll have to fiddle with something because I’m such a special snowflake.

I have no knowledge of either SELinux or AppArmor and the internet summaries that I found said that AppArmor was more user friendly and less powerful while SELinux was more powerful and harder to learn.

This was my big hesitation with Fedora: I found AppArmor hard enough and SELinux sounded miles harder.

On Fedora 42, out of the gate, SELinux is enabled on my install and Firefox does what I am used to (accesses home and mounted network drives) and I didn’t run into an other strangeness so I think the default SELinux rules on Fedora are sensible and I can learn SELinux at my own pace.

Sleep etc.

There were no problems at all with sleep and waking from sleep.

Fingerprint reader

GNOME settings shows this as disabled, however we can enable this from the command line.

Packages that might need to be installed

sudo dnf install fprintd fprintd-pam

Enable fingerprint authentication

sudo authselect enable-feature with-fingerprint

Enroll

fprintd-enroll -f [finger]

Once enabled and enrolled, GNOME login starts giving fingerprint as a login option.

The feature turned out to be more useful than I expected because it also works to authenticate things on the command line. So where I would enter the root password for sudo the system now asks for a finger scan which is at least a novel thing, if not faster than typing in the password.

(Possibly) driver issues

1. Touchpad: This is what is driving me nuts currently. There are two issues:

2. Tap-to-click is flaky. It will work, then go into a 4-5 second refactory period then work again. It may have something to do with wake from sleep. It seems that every alternate wake from sleep tap to click works fine.
3. Two finger scroll will sometimes zoom on Firefox. This is intermittent depending on wake from sleep and seems to be linked to the tap-to-click issue.

Now, the key question: is this a libinput issue or is it some configuration issue that wouldn’t happen, say, on Ubuntu. Might be worth trying out by Ubuntu live USB …

Fedora 42 issues

1. Default terminal (ptyxis) is buggy: starting a new terminal with a particular profile doesn’t work from the UI. Basically profiles is broken. ~TODO: Find a better terminal.~ Good old GNOME terminal it is.

2. Pin-to-dash doesn’t work for simple-scan when it is in the dash. Oddly, I was able to pin it directly from the launcher folder.

3. Media codecs. YouTube om Firefox will sometimes stutter and some mpv videos can be choppy. This is probably free/non-free codec related. It’s an annoyance but probbaly easily fixed. Like I just have to find what SuSE uses …