Yesterday, November 15, 2022, Fedora 37 was released, so I’m giving it a test drive. Everything about the installation went smoothly, it’s basically 3 steps. It doesn’t get much simpler. The crazy thing is there have been 30 releases since the first time I called Fedora home. It has been about 11 years since I’ve used Fedora regularly, give or take. I started using it around Fedora 7 and stopped using it shortly after they moved to Gnome 3, which I believe was Fedora 15. I did revisit it a few times, including using it for a couple of months in 2020, before finally moving to openSUSE Tumbleweed permanently, and I used Fedora 36 on my laptop for a couple of months. I claimed Fedora as my favorite distro for a very long time, I just didn’t like Gnome 3 when it first came out. Now, I think, it’s safe to say Tumbleweed has overtaken it as the favorite, but it’s definitely still a favorite.
Fedora 37 is running nicely on my desktop PC. I haven’t changed a lot: updated my background, set dark mode, enabled/added some keyboard shortcuts, installed updates, enabled Grub boot menu. Gnome 43 is nice, seems stable, both on Wayland and X11. I really only miss KDE when I’m looking for a setting, otherwise I tend to have a fairly minimal desktop. I like my keyboard shortcuts. Resource usage may be a little higher than past Fedora experiences, but Gnome tends to use a little more, so I may be mistaken. It’s negligible if anything.
I’m not a fan of the default wallpapers or the way the default setting is zoom (?). I don’t see a way to change the setting. A couple of them aren’t bad, but I have widescreen monitors and they just don’t look as well in-use. This is all, of course, easily fixed by just downloading a different Fedora wallpaper. If you set a wallpaper from a browser you can also choose the display format setting.
So far so good. My plan is to set up all of my developer stuff in Fedora and use it for a while. I have considered using it exclusively for development (my day job) and just using Tumbleweed for games and everything else. Normally I drift back to Tumbleweed (see past history with Arch), but I’m feeling pretty good about Fedora at the moment. If nothing else, I like to dual boot for a change of scenery once in a while and Fedora with Gnome may be good for that.