First impressions of Fedora 32. A recommended distribution

This week compulsive distribution testers couldn't cope. We started with Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa, we continued with 3 editions of Manjaro and we finished with Fedora. And this only with the general purpose ones. We must also add Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 and Cent OS 8.2. And of course, let's not forget Voyager Live 20.04.

Fedora 32 First Impressions

In his web page, Fedora clearly defines which audience you are targeting

It is functional for a wide range of developers, from hobbyists and students to professionals in business environments.

Even in the description it talks about programming languages, containers, virtual machines and repository hosting.

However, this shouldn't put off common users. I had previous attempts with Fedora and it did not convince me. With Fedora 32 everything went smoothly. Truth be told, I think starting this year it's going to be difficult to tell one GNOME-based distro from another.

I have to confess something to you. Just as there are people who hate cats or spinach, I detest the GNOME desktop with all my soul. At this point a serious blogger would tell you that GNOME 3.36 runs smoothly and with reasonable memory consumption. After all Fedora is the standard meter for distributions with this desktop.

They're going to have to settle for me telling them that version 3.36 doesn't suck any more than 3.34

Installing Fedora

IF you are going to install Fedora I strongly recommend that you use Fedora Media Writer. Available for Windows and Mac and installable on Linux distributions using FlatPak, it greatly facilitates downloading the latest versions. Fedora Media Writer even makes it easy to reuse pen drives previously recorded with Etcher, which generally requires several steps.

Note: It is possible that when you start the program it will show you an older version. Updates right away.

On Windows you can download Fedora Media Writer from here.

The Mac version is available here

On Linux you install it with

flatpak install flathub org.fedoraproject.MediaWriter

If you don't have Flatpak repositories enabled in your distribution. You can follow the instructions to do it here

One of lime and one of sand. Just as I think Fedora has the best tool for creating an installation media, its installer is much less intuitive than that of other general-purpose distributions. I suppose it will be so that we pay attention and not do something that we later regret.

Beyond the complexity of the installer, the installation process is really fast.

The post installation

Unlike Ubuntu, Fedora asks us to configure the user account when we first start the system. Then we can configure the connection with external services and decide if we want our location to be detected.

Once done with this it is convenient to update the system. We do it from the terminal with:

sudo dnf update

There are programs that for various reasons are not included in the official repositories. LYou can get them through the RPM Fusion repositories.

These repositories come in two variants:

The one that contains free software.

sudo rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

And the one that allows you to download non-free software.

sudo rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

One of the things that made Fedora never last on my computer was how slow the updates were. LThe developers are aware of this problem and incorporated two modules that significantly speed up downloads; DeltaRPM and Fastest Mirror.

• DeltaRPM analyzes the differences between the programs installed on the computer and compares them with those available in the updates. Once done, just install the mods. In this way, download times are significantly reduced.
• What Fastest mirror does is find the closest update server to the user's location and use it to download them.

To activate these modules we write in the terminal

sudo gedit /etc/dnf/dnf.conf

In the window that opens we add these two lines and save

fastestmirror=true
deltarpm=true


We save the file.

Fedy is a tool that includes wizards that help us install additional applications, install drivers and customize the desktop.

We install it (after incorporating the RMPFusion repositories as mentioned above) with these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable kwizart/fedy
sudo dnf install fedy –y

My final recommendation is that if you like GNOME, be sure to check out Fedora 32