Sponsored by Red Hat, the Fedora Linux distribution has today released Fedora 33 which brings in numerous improvements for desktop users.

For desktop users, Fedora Workstation is what you're looking for if you want what they claim is a "just works" Linux experience. Fedora 33 pulls in GNOME 3.38 'Orbis' which by itself is a pretty big upgrade, see our previous overview on that here . They're also now using the BTRFS filesystem as the default, which is again quite a major change that includes lots of advanced features for those who want it but for desktop users it shouldn't be a noticeable change. The Fedora team mention that the switch to BTRFS is laying the foundation to build upon in future releases.

Pictured - a fresh test install of Fedora 33.

This release also brings in an animated background (based on the time of day) by default which is pretty slick looking. As part of Fedora's "First" mission they try to include all the latest and greatest software and with Fedora 33 you get the likes of Python 3.9, Ruby on Rails 6.0, and Perl 5.32 as default. In their KDE edition, they've also enabled the EarlyOOM service by default to improve the user experience in low-memory situations.

If you make use of the Wine compatibility layer, this release should also now use the Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer DXVK as the default instead of wined3d which should give much better performance in Windows games run through it. As after we covered the proposal , it was approved . Fedora 33 ships with Wine 5.20 and DXVK 1.7.2.

You can see the release announcement here , release notes here and download from here .

While users who want a properly stable base to game with should probably stick to Ubuntu 20.04 which is the long-term support release, the Ubuntu 20.10 'Groovy Gorilla' update is out today.

For a while there has been a few special Ubuntu flavours that have offered images to install on the Raspberry Pi like Ubuntu MATE, however, that's now becoming official directly within Ubuntu as of the 20.10 release. This is actually awesome, as Ubuntu is one of the easiest Linux distributions to get going with.

From the press release:

“In this release, we celebrate the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s commitment to put open computing in the hands of people all over the world,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO at Canonical. “We are honoured to support that initiative by optimising Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi, whether for personal use, educational purposes or as a foundation for their next business venture.”

“From the classic Raspberry Pi board to the industrial grade Compute Module, this first step to an Ubuntu LTS on Raspberry Pi with long term support and security updates matches our commitment to widen access to the very best computing and open source capabilities” said Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading.

If you do want to learn more about it, Martin Wimpress the Desktop Engineering Director and Rhys Davies, Raspberry Pi Product Manager will be live in a YouTube video. You can watch it here below on October 23rd, 5PM BST / 4PM UTC:

Watch video on YouTube.com

As for the rest of the Ubuntu 20.10 release, we're of course most interested in the normal desktop Linux variety. The Ubuntu 20.10 release comes with GNOME 3.38 from September and all then advancements that came with that like an improved applications grid, better multi-monitor support, QR codes to give other devices access to your WiFI easily, battery percentage display toggle has been exposed in power settings and more. It's quite a big refresh that continues seeing GNOME get smoother each release.

On top of that, Ubuntu 20.10 will also be certified on more devices overall. Canonical stated that more Ubuntu workstations now receive biometric identification support out of the box, 2-in-1 devices with on-screen keyboards are now fully supported enabling an improved Ubuntu experience on devices including the Dell XPS 2-in-1 and Lenovo Yoga.

You can download from Ubuntu.com . The special Ubuntu version for the RPi will be available here .

Pop!_OS is the Linux distribution based on Ubuntu from hardware vendor System76, and they continue making the experience super-slick with new features.

Following on from the seriously cool auto-tiling stacks , they've now added in another major post-release feature. Something that users of 4K screens will enjoy, which is fractional display scaling. If you're on Pop!_OS, all you need to do is check for upgrades your usual way and you will get it. This enables you to scale up your desktop display to a few different points if you find things a little too small.

You will find the new options in the Displays menu in the settings as shown below (click to enlarge):

As the screenshot above notes, doing so may cause a little extra power use and possibly be less clear due to the way scaling is done. Hopefully over time such things can be improved upon.

You can learn more about the Pop!_OS Linux distribution on the official site .

Want to learn more about Arch Linux? In October they've confirmed Arch Conf 2020 is happened and there's going to be plenty of interesting talks. All of which will be online of course, especially with COVID19 still raging on.

The dates set for it are between October 10-11 and the talks will be quite varied starting with a talk about the past, present and future of Arch Linux as the first which starts on October 10, 10:00am UTC.

For Linux gaming enthusiasts, a lot of this won't be all that interesting unless you really want to know the ins and outs of Arch Linux and the ecosystem surrounding it. However, one talk in particular did manage to catch my eye and it could prove to be interesting. On October 11, 15:00 UTC there's a talk from Alesh Slovak , the founder of the Arch-based and SteamOS-like distribution GamerOS which we've written about a few times . This talk will cover:

An overview of GamerOS, an Arch Linux based distro that provides an out of the box couch gaming experience. Find out what GamerOS is, how it came to be, and what makes it unique.

Since currently GamerOS is probably the best out of the box experience for a big-screen console-like setup, especially as Valve aren't currently doing anything with SteamOS (they may return to it though ), GamerOS a Linux distribution that's certainly worth keeping an eye on.

We'll be watching it and highlighting anything interesting.

You can find the full event info here . The first revision of the talk schedule can be found here .

Manjaro Linux, the semi-rolling distribution based on Arch Linux has a new stable build release out with Manjaro  20.1 'Mikah'. If you already have Manjaro installed, you will already be up to date as all updates just continually roll in but these stable releases mean they put out new up to date iso files for fresh installs.

Manjaro 20.1 Mikah upgrades pretty much everything. They're shipping the Xfce 4.14 desktop as their "flagship", which is their most tested and supported version. They claim only "a few can claim to offer such a polished, integrated and leading-edge Xfce experience". Things beings a new theme called 'Matcha', profile for display configuration and they implemented "auto-application of profiles when new displays are connected".

Their KDE Plasma edition brings the flashiness with Plasma 5.19. This includes their theme refresh from back in the Spring along with light and dark versions of Breath2-themes. It also includes the latest KDE-Apps 20.08. Additionally their GNOME edition is based on the 3.36 series, which includes some visual refreshes as well to areas like the login and unlock screens. There's also a new GNOME Extensions appliocation, a do not disturb button for notifications, they added in a dynamic wallpaper, improved their GNOME layout-switching application and more.

Pamac, the Manjaro made package managing application went through the usual update rounds too. It should be more optimized and perform better, have better error handling, improved searching and bug fixes aplenty. Finally, it comes with Linux Kernel 5.8 as the standard package for all versions of Manjaro.

Manjaro is a good middle-ground distribution that mixes a reasonably stable experience with up to date packages. You can download here .

Merging together a solid Ubuntu 20.04 LTS foundation and the latest KDE Plasma packages, KDE neon has a fresh rebase out for you to try out.

So what exactly is it? Is it another Linux distribution? Well, sort of. Not quite. It's just the long-term supported versions of Ubuntu with the freshest releases of the KDE Plasma desktop environment (plus Qt and other KDE software) stuck on top of it. They said it's for people who want "the latest and greatest from the KDE community but the safety and stability of a Long Term Support release". So unlike Kubuntu, the official Ubuntu KDE distribution variant, you're not stuck to the main version of Plasma it launches with.

They announced recently that a fresh upgrade is available for existing users, plus a new ISO spin is up with KDE neon now being based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It should look and feel the same but have much newer internals like the Kernel, Mesa drivers and much more.

If I wasn't so rooted in Manjaro KDE, I think KDE neon would be what I would go for if I needed to do a fresh install. The customization possible with KDE is just wonderful, as is the fresh and modern presentation it offers.

See more and download on the KDE neon website .

Are you an Ubuntu Linux user on either Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy - unreleased, in testing) or 20.04 LTS (Focal - the current release)? The Ubuntu Foundations Team needs feedback on some possible major WiFi changes.

They're looking at replacing the currently widely used wpa_supplicant for iwd (iNet Wireless Daemon) a more modern upcoming solution which was written by Intel. According to Lukas Märdian, a software engineer for the Ubuntu Foundations Team it would give these benefits:

• Simplification of network management
• Faster network discovery
• Fast and reliable roaming
• Using less system resources
• Using features offered by the Linux kernel
• Support for enterprise security methods like EAP
• Support for kernel asymmetric key rings and trusted platform modules (TPM)
• Support for multiple clients

In the most recent updates to iwd it's apparently reaching feature parity with wpa_supplicant but it needs more testing. Something as major as messing with WiFI can have a lot of unintended side-effects, so getting plenty of testing done on a possible switch over is a good idea. From watching your favourite streaming services, to downloading and playing games online which is obviously important to us here.

Want to help? Find out how to test it from this linked post .

Tags: NVIDIA, Distro News, GNOME

Developer Bastien Nocera has written a blog post talking about improvements coming to GNOME 3.36 and Fedora Linux, to help those of you switching between GPUs.

While the GNOME desktop has had the ability to launch items with a dedicated GPU for some time, it was quite limited. Thankfully, SwitcherooControl and the API used has been extended to improve it and add support for the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

This is all fantastic, since NVIDIA added PRIME support back in the 435.17 driver release this Summer. So this means relatively soon, once more distributions update GNOME and any other parts needed, GPU switching with GNOME is going to become even easier out of the box.

In the blog post, they said this about KDE support:

(As a side note, commenters asked me about the KDE support, and how it would integrate, and it turns out that KDE's code just checks for the presence of a file in /sys, which is only present when vga_switcheroo is used. So I would encourage KDE to adopt the switcheroo-control D-Bus API for this)

Bastien Nocera

Hat tip to @flukejones .