 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1172, 11 May 2026 |
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Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
At the end of April the Fedora project released the latest iteration of its cutting-edge distribution: Fedora 44. The new version of Fedora offers the latest versions of popular desktop environments, improves OpenSSL performance, and increases compatibility with Windows applications and games. We begin this Weekly with a look at Fedora 44 and how the distribution has changed in the past six months. In our News section we continue to talk about Fedora and the project's plans to move ahead with providing AI tools in future versions. We also report on issues with Ubuntu's new coreutils programs along with TrueNAS's new, extended development cycle. Plus we report on improvements to postmarketOS's boot process and Redox's port of the tmux multiplexing tool. Our Questions and Answers column this week talks about fonts, particularly why some distributions ship so many font options and why there aren't more tools to filter out unnecessary fonts. How many fonts are installed on your main distribution? Let us know in the Opinion Poll and leave us a tip with your favourite font manager in the comments section. Below, we are pleased to share a summary of last week's new releases and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a fantastic week and happy reading!
This week's DistroWatch Weekly is presented by TUXEDO Computers.
Content:
- Review: Fedora 44
- News: Fedora plans to provide AI tools, problems with Ubuntu's new coreutils, TrueNAS extends development cycle, postmarketOS improves boot splash screen, Redox ports tmux
- Questions and answers: What to do about all the extra fonts?
- Released last week: OmniOS r151058, Omarchy 3.7.0, Parrot 7.2, PrismLinux 2026.05.05, ZenLake 26.04, TROMjaro 2026.05.08, UBports 24.04-1.3
- Upcoming releases: FreeBSD 15.1-BETA3
- Opinion poll: How many fonts are on your system?
- Reader comments
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| Feature Story (By Jesse Smith) |
Fedora 44
Fedora is a Linux distribution which probably needs no introduction. The Red Hat-sponsored, experimental distribution has a large community and, in recent years, has become the basis for several immutable distributions and gaming-focused projects.
Fedora 44 was published at the end of April, following a few delays to fix critical bugs, and I decided to take the new version for a spin. The list of key new features in Fedora 44 is relatively brief and Fedora Magazine shared the highlights:
For those of you installing fresh Fedora Linux 44 Spins, you may notice a change in how Anaconda handles network devices. Anaconda now only creates network profiles for devices configured during installation (by boot options, Kickstart, or interactively in UI) instead of providing default profiles for all devices.
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Fedora Linux 44 Workstation ships with the latest GNOME release, GNOME 50.
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If you are a KDE user, you should also notice a couple of very obvious changes. Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 is based on the latest Plasma 6.6, which includes the new Plasma Login Manager and Plasma Setup to provide a more cohesive and integrated experience from the moment the computer is powered on for the first time.
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The loading time of OpenSSL has been improved by making use of directory-hash support for ca-certificates.
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The NTSYNC kernel module is enabled for select packages by package recommendation (notably WINE and Steam), which can improve compatibility and performance when running Windows applications (especially games). When packages that recommend the wine-ntsync package are installed, the package recommendation ensures NTSYNC is configured automatically on subsequent boots, so that users don't have to manually enable NTSYNC.
Fedora 44 is available in several editions and spins. The project provides a Workstation edition (featuring the GNOME desktop), a KDE edition (running Plasma), and a Server edition for systems that don't require a desktop. There are also several spins maintained by the community with alternative desktop environments and package sets. Fedora runs on a few CPU architectures, including aarch64 and x86_64
Live session
I decided to try the KDE edition of Fedora for x86_64 machines. The ISO file for this edition is 3.1GB in size. Booting from it loads a Plasma session and places a single icon on the desktop which can be used to launch the system installer. A dark, thick panel is placed across the bottom of the display.
A welcome window appears automatically and offers to launch the project's system installer. If we skip this offer the welcome window then offers to provide a quick overview of the desktop panel's widgets and the Plasma desktop's features. We are also introduced to key KDE components such as encrypted file vaults and the KDE Connect service. The welcome window offers to open the Discover software centre and enable third-party repositories for us. These third-party options include the RPMFusion package repositories, Flathub, and the Chrome browser repository. By default, Fedora does not enable these third-party repositories and has a policy of including open source and patent-free software packages only.
I found the live Plasma session to be oddly slow. I was also surprised to find the Plasma session was taking up an unusually large amount of memory - over 2.5GB. A live Plasma 6 session usually consumes between 1.0GB and 1.5GB, so to see this figure more than double was concerning. What was causing the poor performance though turned out to be one of my least favourite features of several modern Linux distributions: zRAM.
The idea behind zRAM is to take data in memory which is not being used and compress it, storing it in virtual swap space. Unlike regular swap partitions (and swap files) the compressed data remains in memory, and can be decompressed and restored to regular RAM more quickly. It's not a bad idea, in theory, if we occasionally have small amounts of data which we want to compress and retrieve rarely. Unfortunately, if the system is being aggressive in swapping, take up too much space with its zRAM storage, or if the system frequently needs to uncompress data it has swapped out then performance, then quickly goes downhill because the processor spends time compressing, decompressing, and recompressing memory. Again, in theory, this shouldn't be a problem as we can disable zRAM and resume normal operations. However, Fedora versions since at least Fedora 37 will automatically re-enable zRAM if the user turns it off. I was reminded of this fact when I disabled zRAM on the live session and reclaimed some performance, only to have the system start swapping madly in and out of a new zRAM device it had decided to create against my instructions.
To disable zRAM we need to remove a package and then turn off the zRAM device. This can be accomplished by running the following commands from a terminal:
$ sudo dnf remove zram-generator-defaults
$ sudo swapoff /dev/zram0
At this point desktop performance still wasn't up to the usual Plasma standard, but it was usable. I decided to dive into the system installer.
Fedora 44 -- Running the KDE Plasma desktop
(full image size: 1.1MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Installing
When I tried to launch the system installer I was prompted for a password. Leaving the password field blank will allow us to proceed.
Fedora has recently introduced a new installer, which has appeared in the last few releases, and it replaces the previous hub-based Anaconda installer. The new installer takes a linear approach and begins by asking us to select our language and our region from a list. We can also change our keyboard layout.
When we get to disk partitioning we have the option of taking over the entire disk or taking over an existing partition. There does not appear to be any method for changing existing partitions, at first. I found that there is a small, three-dot menu in the upper-right corner of the installer window which, when clicked, offers to "Launch storage editor". "Storage editor" is apparently what Fedora currently calls a partition manager. We then need to click through multiple warnings which tell us the "storage editor" will make changes to our disk. The storage editor window crashed almost immediately, returning me to the system installer.
Fedora 44 -- Running the system installer
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In short, it was not possible for me to create or edit partitions on my system in order to make room for Fedora, at least not with the tools included with the distribution.
Since the system installer was not cooperating and the live Plasma session was unusually heavy and slow, I decided to try another flavour of Fedora to see if these issues were specific to the KDE edition or if there was an underlying problem.
My next step was to download the LXQt spin of Fedora which is 2.3GB in size. Booting from this medium brings up the LXQt desktop and places a light-coloured panel across the bottom of the screen. Icons on the desktop open the file manager and there is an icon for launching the system installer. The LXQt spin does not include a welcome window. Like its KDE counterpart, the LXQt spin does enable zRAM and it can be disabled using the same method discussed earlier in this review.
The live LXQt desktop was performing better than the Plasma session and so I started the system installer once again. I was asked to confirm I wanted to launch the installer and was warned it was an executable file when I clicked its icon. It's a minor thing, asking for confirmation before launching the installer or requesting a password, but these little pauses on the path to installing the distribution give an impression of an unpolished operating system.
The installer screens are the same when we are using the LXQt spin. This time, when I reached the partitioning screen and launched the storage editor, both the storage editor and the system installer immediately crashed, returning me to the desktop. I tried again and once more, the storage editor crashed, taking down the installer with it.
Browsing through the application menu I found a stand alone disk partitioning tool, GNOME Disks. Using GNOME Disks I was able to partition my drive and then launch the installer again. This time I was able to assign mount points to the partitions I had set aside for Fedora. Then I was asked to make up a username and password. The installer copied its packages to my local drive and reported it had finished successfully.
The new web-based installer is much slower and less responsive than the previous, hub-based installer, which itself was slow compared to most installers. In my opinion, Fedora has been going from bad to worse in this aspect. Now the new installer can't even partition disks, which is a serious regression for a tool which mostly handles disk layouts and copies packages.
Early impressions
My new copy of Fedora booted to a graphical login screen. From there I was offered three session options: LXQt Desktop (which runs an X11 session), LXQt Wayland, and Openbox. Signing into either of the LXQt options will present us with a quiet desktop with a panel at the bottom of the screen. On the panel we find an application menu, virtual desktop switching widget, the task manager, and the system tray. Next to the task switcher is an area for placing quick-launch icons. Icons can be dragged from the application menu down to the quick-launch area. We are not able to pin open applications to the launch bar.
LXQt uses a light theme, by default, with blue icons. The X11 session uses Openbox as the window manager while the Wayland session runs Miriway behind the scenes. This use of separate window managers results in some inconsistent behaviour, which I will talk about later in this review.
Fedora 44 -- Exploring the LXQt menu
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Hardware
I tested Fedora in VirtualBox and directly on a laptop. The distribution ran fairly well in the virtual machine. LXQt's performance was smooth and responsive in the virtual environment.
When running the distribution on my laptop the media and screen brightness shortcut keys did not work. Further, in the Wayland session it was not possible to enable the shortcut keys. My touchpad worked, but did not register taps as clicks. Again, it was not possible to fix this behaviour. Audio and networking functioned as expected.
A fresh install of Fedora's LXQt spin consumed 5.5GB of disk space and enabled zRAM by default, rather than use on-disk swap space. I disabled the zRAM virtual device as I had plenty of RAM for the distribution to run. With that said, LXQt was unexpectedly heavy in memory. The usually lightweight desktop used 880MB of RAM just to sign into LXQt's X11 session and used a hefty 1,160MB of RAM to sign into the Wayland session. For the sake of comparison, when I ran the siduction distribution about a year ago with the LXQt desktop, that install also took about five and a half gigabytes of disk space, but required only 550MB of RAM to launch a LXQt desktop session. In other words, Fedora's build of the LXQt desktop uses about twice as much RAM as Debian's build of the same environment.
Included software
The spin of Fedora 44 I was running shipped with version 2.3.0 of the LXQt desktop, the Falkon web browser, and the Transmission bittorrent client. The distribution also provided a PDF viewer, an image viewer, the QTerminal application, and a process monitor. The desktop includes the PCManFM-Qt file manager.
Fedora 44 -- Running the Falkon web browser
(full image size: 745kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
That was almost all of the desktop applications, apart from a few configuration tools. I found utilities for managing the firewall and user accounts. There were also desktop settings tools for adjusting the desktop's appearance, screen brightness, and icons.
I did not find any office suite, media players, or other desktop applications on the system. In the background I found manual pages, GNU command line utilities, and the systemd service manager. Fedora 44 ships with version 6.19 of the Linux kernel.
Software management
When software updates become available, a notification appears with an icon in system tray. Right-clicking this package icon gives us the option to launch the dnfdragora package manager. I found 253 updates were available on launch day with a download size totalling 2.2GB. The initial ISO download for the LXQt spin was 2.3GB, meaning I was basically redownloading the size of the distribution over again, on release day.
The dnfdragora application prompted for my password when I attempted to fetch updates and then paused to ask if I wanted to accept the project's repository key. This is one of those quirks which is not technically wrong, but it doesn't look good. A fresh out of the box operating system shouldn't need to ask the user if they are sure they want to trust the official distribution security repositories. We are already trusting the packages from those repositories by installing the operating system.
Perhaps, in hindsight, I shouldn't have been so trusting. Once the first wave of updates had been downloaded and applied to the system, I was no longer able to logout of the LXQt desktop, restart the system, or poweroff the computer from within the graphical interface. To reboot, I had to open a terminal and run "sudo reboot".
After the first wave of updates, the dnfdragora package manager no longer worked. I was able to open the simple, low-level package manager, but it was unable to fetch future updates or install new packages. Any attempt to use it would result in the package manager reporting it was applying changes and then locking up at 0% completion, never to progress. The command line DNF package manager, on the other hand, worked properly. I was able to fetch new software, apply updates, and remove unwanted items using DNF without any problems.
Fedora 44 -- The package manager stops working after the first update
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Fedora ships with the command line Flatpak package manager too. Unlike most other distributions, Fedora does not automatically connect to the Flathub repository. Instead, Fedora has its own, free software only repository which is enabled by default. I was able to find most of what I wanted within Fedora's curated repository and we can enable Flathub if we want more software.
Fedora 44 -- Running the DNF command line package manager
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Other observations
One significant aspect of the LXQt desktop, which stood out during my trial, is that several of the included configuration modules do not work when run in the Wayland session. All of the LXQt settings tools work in the X11 session, but some (such as the tools for working with virtual desktops, window placement, and display management) do not run in the Wayland session. For some reason the developers did not include Wayland-equivalent alternatives with the LXQt spin to run in the Wayland session. For a distribution which has been moving toward a Wayland-only stance, it feels odd that the X11 session has working configuration tools, but the Wayland session does not.
On the topic of session-specific quirks, the X11 session of LXQt enables four virtual desktops by default. We can change the number of virtual desktops using a configuration module. When running the Wayland session there is just one desktop and there is no option to add more.
Fedora 44 -- The PCManFM-Qt file manager
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Conclusions
Normally, when I am reviewing an operating system I try to focus on the technical aspects and what I've got directly in front of me. In other words, I'm interested in what works for me and what doesn't work for me; I'm typically not worried about past releases, developer squabbles, other community spins, or what other reviewers thought of the same release. When I'm taking notes for a review, I'm working with a type of tunnel vision: "How well does this software work for me on my hardware?"
Going into this review though I couldn't help but think about something outside of my usual field of vision. Originally, it looked as though Fedora and Ubuntu would both publish their latest versions on the same week in April, just two days apart. Since I didn't think I would be able to properly review both distributions at the same time, I reached out to a few reviewers who regularly contribute content to DistroWatch Weekly and asked if they'd be willing to help. Specifically, I asked if any of them would be interested in reviewing Fedora while I took the new Ubuntu LTS version for a spin. They all declined, indicating they'd be happy to write something for the Weekly, just as long as they didn't need to install Fedora and deal with its problems.
In other words, recent Fedora releases have been bad enough I literally can no longer pay my colleagues to run the distribution.
Certainly, in the past, I've mentioned having issues with aspects of Fedora releases. Sometimes a new desktop version is unstable or the package manager has been slow or a new installer has had a weird design. Sometimes Fedora's open-and-patent-free-only policy with regards to packages has been cumbersome. But these issues were usually, if annoying, either one-off issues or growing pains or possible to work around fairly easily. Put another way, Fedora's experimental nature means problems come and go with each release, but there are usually positive elements too and fixes for the issues. I can't say that about Fedora 44.
Unfortunately, I found virtually every aspect of Fedora 44 to be a mess. The Plasma session is massive, with Plasma being 100% heavier in RAM than the same desktop running on other distributions, and unusually slow. The zRAM virtual swap space continues to be buggy. There are reports against zRAM and how it automatically re-enables itself against the user's instructions going back three years and the project still refuses to address the issue. The new system installer can't partition disks, something which Fedora releases going back to Fedora Core 1 were able to accomplish properly, and I had to use a third-party tool to create my disk layout.
Once installed, Fedora's initial flood of updates broke the LXQt desktop session and prevented the package manager from ever working again. Around a third of the desktop configuration tools work on X11 only and fail to run in Wayland and (this feels more significant) there aren't Wayland alternatives included to handle this gap in functionality. The LXQt session is twice as resource hungry on Fedora as it is in the Debian family, despite not having as much functionality.
I'm willing to put down Fedora's insistence on providing patent-free and libre software only as a pleasant quirk - inconvenient, but praiseworthy for its idealism. However, what I can't excuse is prompting the user to accept trust of Fedora's own repository keys and asking for a password to launch the installer from the live ISO. These are features of first-attempt hobby projects, not suitable for a long-running, corporate-backed distribution with dozens of developers.
Usually Fedora has good hardware support, with past releases typically working well with this laptop. This time around the distribution mostly worked - it could boot, wireless networking functioned, but my shortcut keys didn't work. This feels like a (small) step backward, though it may be desktop specific.
Some people may legitimately point out that, for the majority of this trial, I was running a community spin, not a proper full edition of Fedora. Which is true, and it may be the source of some of the observed problems, but I only ended up running the LXQt spin because the KDE spin (which I used successfully six months ago) was too slow and buggy, sending me looking for alternatives. In fact, six months ago, when using the same edition on the same laptop, I had this to say about the KDE experience:
On the positive side of things, the Plasma desktop was faster and its Wayland session was more polished on Fedora than when running Kubuntu on the same hardware. I didn't run into the issue of duplicate mouse pointers, for example, with Fedora.
Now, just six months later, the Plasma session runs like a maple syrup through a straw on the same laptop.
What boggles my mind is that virtually every aspect of the distribution has problems (the LXQt Wayland session, the configuration tools, the Plasma desktop, the system installer, the partition manager, and the package manager all had glaring issues) and this was after Fedora 44 was delayed multiple times to give the developers a chance to fix bugs. There are still several remaining; too many, in my opinion.
Fedora 43 provided relatively positive experience, in my opinion, with the experimental distribution, but Fedora 44 feels like an unfinished mess. I'd skip this release and either stick with Fedora 43 or wait to try your luck with Fedora 45.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was an HP DY2048CA laptop with the following
specifications:
- Processor: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
- Display: Intel integrated video
- Storage: Western Digital 512GB solid state drive
- Memory: 8GB of RAM
- Wireless network device: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 + BT Wireless network card
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Visitor supplied rating
Fedora has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.3/10 from 476 review(s).
Have you used Fedora? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Fedora plans to provide AI tools, problems with Ubuntu's new coreutils, TrueNAS extends development cycle, postmarketOS improves boot splash screen, Redox ports tmux
The Fedora project is planning to provide more AI tools and utilities for AI developers. Gordon Messmer provided an overview of the goal in a discussion thread: "The Fedora AI Developer Desktop Initiative aims to build a thriving community around AI technologies by focusing on three key areas: equipping developers with the necessary platforms, libraries, and frameworks; ensuring users experience painless deployment and usage of AI applications; and establishing a space to showcase the work being done on Fedora, connecting developers with a wider audience."
The proposal, which has been accepted, was met with some concern and objections in the Fedora developer community, but Fedora's Project Leader, Jef Spaleta, is not concerned: "As the Fedora Project Leader, I am absolutely not concerned about the reputational damage to this project that comes with setting up an entirely new output attractive to developers who want to make use of AI tools. "
It is possible Spaleta should be worried, at least one Fedora developer (Fernando Mancera) has already left the project in protest.
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When Canonical launched Ubuntu 25.10 and, more recently, 26.04, the company shipped an alternative to the GNU coreutils package. The GNU coreutils package includes low-level userland utilities such as mv (move) and cp (copy). These GNU utilities are written in the C programming language. Canonical has replace these programs with alternatives written in the Rust language. The idea behind the replacements is Rust is a "memory safe" language, which avoids common security issues. The problem, as some people have pointed out, is that the GNU coreutils programs have been around for decades and probably don't include any memory-related bugs at this stage in their development. What they do include, as Collin Funk has pointed out, is hard-won wisdom which has removed a lot of potential bugs that are not related to memory issues. Collin points out that many of the new Rust utilities include race conditions, logic errors, or permission problems which can be exploited, but which have long been addressed in the GNU versions of the programs.
"Canonical posted an update about their decision to switch to uutils reimplementation of GNU coreutils. In it, they detail the audit performed by Zellic, which found 113 issues, 44 of which were assigned CVEs. They go on to explain that as a result of TOCTOU races, they have decided to continue using GNU 'cp', 'mv', and 'rm' in Ubuntu 26.04.
Canonical highlights in bold text that 'the vast majority of issues have been addressed and resolved'. Sadly, they do not go into any more detail about which issues still remain unsolved. From my quick skim over them, the CVEs affected version fields do not seem 100% accurate.
I did not get a chance to check all of them, but here are three that I was surprised to notice in a fully up-to-date Ubuntu 26.04 install...."
An overview of the problems and a comparison between the new Rust tools and their GNU equivalents can be found in this mailing list post.
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The TrueNAS project is preparing to launch a new version of its network attached storage distribution. The upcoming release, TrueNAS 26, will be featuring a longer development cycle than past versions of the distribution. "TrueNAS is taking a major leap forward with the first beta of TrueNAS 26, our initial version of a new series of annual software releases. Moving beyond the previous twice-yearly schedule, this change is a direct response to Community preference for annual releases. The shift to an annual release cadence is driven by a commitment to quality and a better customer experience. This new annual release cycle, with point releases like 26.1 and 26.2, promises improved TrueNAS quality, easier communications, and increased development productivity." Additional information on the upcoming TrueNAS 26 release can be found in the project's announcement.
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The postmarketOS project is making a change to the mobile distribution's boot process which should make displaying the splash screen more flexible while also reducing the maintenance work involved. "We've been working on improving the boot splash screen experience in postmarketOS for a while now, and we're happy to share that we've switched from pbsplash to Plymouth. Plymouth is widely used across many Linux distributions and is a big improvement over pbsplash.
pbsplash didn't use DRM, so display rotation wasn't supported. It also had to be killed and restarted every time the displayed message changed, which was messy to handle in the initramfs and caused graphical flickering. On top of that, we had to maintain custom systemd units and workarounds that still had rough edges. Plymouth solves all of this and integrates cleanly with systemd and OpenRC out of the box, reducing our maintenance burden significantly.
A nice new feature is the ability to toggle the splash at runtime by pressing Esc on devices with a keyboard, or the power button on phones and tablets. With pbsplash, seeing the console required modifying the kernel cmdline and rebooting, which on some devices meant reflashing a boot image." Additional details on this change can be found in the project's blog post.
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The Redox project published its April newsletter and it mentions improvements to the Rust-based operating system's boot process. "This month, we have made system boot more resilient and better able to avoid getting stuck. Wildan Mubarok provided fixes and addressed some long-time regressions after the 0.9.0 release, allowing boot to continue even if certain important drivers exited or became blocked. A summary of his changes are: Updated and rebased against the upstream Rust-OSDev acpi crate to improve support for many computers, and VirtualBox; fixed the boot stuck by driver exits; reduced the boot time of computers with multiple CPU cores." The newsletter also mentions improved RISC-V processor compatibility and announces the tmux terminal multiplexing program has been ported to Redox OS.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
What to do about all the extra fonts?
Font-tsunami asks: What is the reason behind distributing fonts that will be used by almost nobody? Is there an app for choosing wanted fonts and/or eliminating unwanted fonts? I know of font management tools and use them regularly, but that is a time consuming remedy (afterwards).
Do so many distributors think they are helpful by including 89 useless fonts: ancient inscription fonts, and languages used by very few people or scientists? And if used by many, e.g. the several fonts in India, why do I need them to be installed on my PC? I have no option during the installation process. I can uninstall unwanted applications, but getting rid of unwanted fonts is more difficult and possibly risky.
That's why I request a user friendly solution. Am I the first one to ask this? I didn't find useful information on the Internet.
DistroWatch answers: I'm going to start by moving backward through your questions, and take the last one first. "Am I the first one to ask this?" Yes, actually. I've been a system administrator and developer for over 25 years and, in all my years of handling bug reports, reading help desk tickets, and responding to DistroWatch Q&As, I believe this is the first time anyone has asked me about removing unnecessary fonts from their operating system. So, I suppose congratulations are in order, it's not often I receive a unique question.
Continuing to move backward through your questions: "Why do I need them to be installed on my PC?" Technically, you (personally) don't need all of those fonts installed on your computer. There are probably several, maybe hundreds, of fonts you will never need to use. Why are they then installed by default on many distributions? There are three reasons:
- Someone wants or needs them and it is a lot easier to simply provide all commonly used or popular fonts by default than to make people hunt down and install them manually. Especially since...
- When a font that is required by a tool or application is not available it makes life quite difficult. Applications will give odd errors, or try to display errors which are invisible because the font is missing. If you've ever tried to troubleshoot an application which was attempting to display an error in a font that wasn't installed, you will understand what a strange experience it is. It's better to provide all fonts and let experienced users remove fonts they know they will not require.
- Installing every possible font has virtually no drawback. On a modern desktop Linux distribution I checked the size all the fonts available (there are over 1,700 on the default install) and, combined, they totaled 128MB*. This means having every font available automatically installed takes up less than 2% of your average desktop distribution, but greatly improves accessibility around the world.
Finally, to your question: "What is the reason behind distributing fonts that will be used by almost nobody?" Basically, there is no downside to having every font imaginable installed. The fonts take up a small amount of space and make functionality and accessibility much more simple. Most people will never give a minute's thought to their system's fonts. The ones they need are automatically used by the system and their applications while the rest are ignored. If you need a specific font, typically you can search through the list of available fonts alphabetically, or use a font manager, so having dozens of fonts on the system won't get in the way.
* - On another, more lightweight distribution, I checked the list of installed fonts. I found just 70 installed, which came to a combined size of 26MB. This was less than 1% of the total size of the distribution.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
OmniOS r151058
The OmniOSce Association has announced the release of a new version of OmniOS, an open-source operating system for servers, with support for many popular Solaris and OpenSolaris technologies. The new release is labelled as version r151058 and comes with tool updates, new features and additional hardware support: "On the 4th of May 2026, the OmniOSce Association released a new stable version of OmniOS - the open-source enterprise server OS. The release comes with many tool updates, brand-new features and additional hardware support. New features since r151056: IPv6 networking has gained a fast path implementation, similar to that already present for IPv4 - this bypasses the data link services (DLS) layer for suitable traffic and improves throughput; the kernel MAC framework's softring polling code now correctly enforces its configured byte limit, and various accounting issues with fanout statistics and dual-stack TCP softrings have been corrected; disabling hardware checksum offload via dohwcksum now also disables Large Segment Offload (LSO), preventing transmission failures on certain interfaces; the Intel IOMMU code is now more informative when it encounters unknown remapping structures, and the immu-dmar-print debug option works again." See the brief release announcement and the comprehensive release notes for further information.
Omarchy 3.7.0
David Heinemeier Hansson has announced the release of Omarchy 3.7.0, the latest stable version of the project's Arch-based Linux distribution featuring the Hyprland Wayland compositor. This version comes with a "Gaming Edition" tag as it ships with the Steam client installer and menus populated with links to popular remote game servers: "Add streamlined Steam installer that doesn't need user input; add fully preconfigured RetroArch that no longer depends on AUR; add streamlined Bluetooth Xbox controller compatibility without needing to restart; add Lutris Launcher to Install, Gaming for running Battle.net games (Diablo, Starcraft, WoW); add Heroic Launcher to Install, Gaming for running Epic Games (sadly no Fortnite or Rocket League); add Moonlight GameStream client to Install, Gaming for remote play of PC games from Sunshine server; add Xbox Cloud Gaming web app to Install, Gaming for remote Xbox Game Pass play; add Install, Gaming, Remove for removing any of the game setups; fix obstructive SDL_VIDEODRIVER env causing problems with many Steam games." The detailed release notes also lists new features, improvements in aesthetics and control, and bug fixes.
Parrot 7.2
The Parrot project has announced the availability of Parrot 7.2. The new version includes a fix for the Copy Fail Linux exploit, automated handling of Flatpak updates, and applies updates from the upstream Debian branch. "Significant updates have also been implemented for parrot-menu, as the migration to the new Go codebase continues and new desktop entries have been added. Other core components, including parrot-themes and parrot-tools have received improvements. Specifically, parrot-core now includes a built-in check for packages installed via Flatpak, automatically handling updates for them as needed. Furthermore, we have refined the post installation logic to improve system stability during home directory synchronization from Parrot 6 'Lory'. Additionally, this release synchronizes Parrot with the latest Debian upstream updates. By aligning with the Debian project, we ensure that all core packages benefit from the most recent security fixes and stability patches." The project's release announcement offers additional information.
PrismLinux 2026.05.05
The PrismLinux team has announced the release of PrismLinux 2026.05.05, a significant update of the project's Arch-based Linux distribution that boots into a KDE Plasma desktop and provides a custom system installer: "We are pleased to announce PrismLinux 2026.05.05, a substantial stable release, bringing a fully redesigned installer, a refreshed live experience, GNOME 50 support, Linux kernel 7.0, and a broad set of improvements across packages and the core system. The installer has been significantly redesigned and refined: improved navigation - steps now retain their state, allowing free movement between modules throughout the installation process; native localisation - localisation is now handled natively, replacing the previous JSON-based approach; low-end hardware support - weak hardware is detected automatically, animations and resource-intensive features are disabled accordingly; shell selection - choose your default shell during setup from Bash, Fish or Zsh; new fonts - Cascadia Code, JetBrains Mono and Maple Mono are now available as font choices; gaming section - gaming applications (Bottles, Steam) have been moved to the dedicated Extra, Gaming section." Read the complete release announcement for further information.
PrismLinux 2026.05.05 -- Running the Plasma desktop
(full image size: 3.5MB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
ZenLake OS 26.04
A new addition to DistroWatch, ZenLake OS is a user-friendly Linux distribution featuring a customised GNOME desktop and a built-in ability to restore the system to a previous state in case of a boot or system failure. The just-released ZenLake OS 26.04 is based on Ubuntu 26.04: "ZenLake OS 26.04 is now available, based on Ubuntu 26.04 'Resolute Raccoon'. ZenLake is a remix of Debian/Ubuntu LTS with GNOME desktop that is configured to be user-friendly. It is minimal and lightweight, and suitable for users who prefer a modern GNOME desktop with Wayland display server. Highlights: GNOME 50 desktop; Linux kernel 7.0. The ZenLake Settings app was updated with a better look and more features: Wallpapers - new Wallpapers tab for browsing and changing the desktop background; Change Kernels - show version numbers of available kernels for Liquorix and XanMod kernels; Remove Kernel - show free space in boot partition and size of each installed kernel; Software Support - new tab to install/remove Software Center apps like GNOME Software, Bazaar and Ubuntu Snap Store; Web Browsers - add support to install/remove Tor, Zen, LibreWolf and Thorium web browsers; System Restore - reduce number of snapshots to reduce disk usage...." See the release announcement and the release notes for more details.
ZenLake OS 26.04 -- Running the GNOME desktop
(full image size: 6.7MB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
TROMjaro 2026.05.08
The TROMjaro project has announced the availability of the latest update of TROMjaro, a Manjaro-based Linux distribution with a customised Xfce desktop. Version 2026.05.08 updates the Linux kernel to the latest long-term supported version (6.18.26) which fixes the Copy Fail kernel vulnerability. It also ships with a new video player. "TROMjaro 2026.05.08. The usual Manjaro 'Stable' updates, that also fix for that nasty Linux security issue. And a few changes. Linux kernel 6.18 - we moved to the new LTS kernel. If you want to do that open the Kernel app on your sytem and install it. Reboot the system. You can press Shift multiple times while rebooting to access the GRUB menu and from there select Advanced boot options and make sure you are running the 6.18 one. New default video player - we are using the Clapper video player now. Simply because it does a much better job at playing any video. It is simple and yet powerful. I recommend installing the clapper-enhancers package too. You can also play YouTube videos or videos from other sources. Overall it is a much better player than the previous one, Celluloid. And that's all. We keep it stable and working." Here is the brief release announcement as published on the distribution's user forum.
UBports 24.04-1.3
The UBports developers have announced the latest version of their project's continuation of the Ubuntu Touch operating system. Version 24.04-1.3 introduces a number of fixes and improves the handling of X11 desktop applications. "Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 is a maintenance release of the 24.04-1.x series. This release contains mostly bug fixes and small improvements. The notable ones are: Improved handling of desktop apps, including: Allow launching X11 apps outside of Lomiri (e.g. from OpenStore/Snapz0r). Fixed dangling placeholder windows and launcher entry when launching X11 apps. Fixed launching applications written using GTK4. Improved handling of docks with input devices such as NexDock. Fixed playing back AMR voice message sent via MMS. Fixed scaling factor being slightly off in certain applications (in particular apps which use Qt auto scaling or embedded webview). Fixed shutdown hanging on some devices. General bug fixes and security updates." Additional infromation is provided in the project's release announcement. A list of support devices and install instructions can be found on the project's devices page.
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
How many fonts are on your system?
In this week's Questions and Answers column we talked about fonts, specifically why there are so many fonts installed by default and why distributions typically do not provide a way to filter out fonts at install time. We would like to hear how many fonts are installed on the computer you are using at the moment.
To find out how many fonts are installed on your Linux system you can run the command: "find /usr/share/fonts -type f | wc -l". To discover the size of these fonts, run the command "du -ch /usr/share/fonts".
You can see the results of our previous poll on video card types in our previous edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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| Website News |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 18 May 2026. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Weekly Archive and Article Search pages. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Fonts (by DaveW on 2026-05-11 00:46:55 GMT from United States)
990 fonts came with my Linux Mint Mate distro, but I have managed to add 7385 additional fonts.
2 • Too many fonts (by Dave on 2026-05-11 01:24:03 GMT from Australia)
I agree, there are way too many fonts that will never be used. The reason it matters is if you open LibreOffice to choose a font, you have hundreds listed (Noto*x10^100), but effectively only 15 or so. It would be cool if you could hide whatever isn't your primary language. Surely this could be tired in with your keyboard language?
3 • Fedora (by G3557 on 2026-05-11 01:27:39 GMT from United States)
Recently installed Fedora 44's KDE edition like you did, however I encountered none of these issues. Live CD was pretty responsive and the installer worked fine. Maybe it's just a low level system configuration - I was using an HP AIO with an i5-7400T and 12 gigs of DDR4.
4 • SolydXK (by InvisibleInk on 2026-05-11 01:53:34 GMT from United States)
Looking forward to the next SolydXK. Please review it for us. TIA.
5 • Fonts (by Safri on 2026-05-11 01:57:45 GMT from Indonesia)
I believe that this approach to font management is one of the primary reasons—if not the main reason—why modern Linux distribution ISOs have grown from 700mb to 3GB or 4GB in size. The mindset seems to be, 'Just include everything; it only takes up a small amount of space.'
I live in Southeast Asia, a region that utilizes many of those Noto fonts. However, I personally don't think it's fair for users who don't need the entire library to be forced to have every font on their machine. While they are currently installed by default, there should be an easier way to remove the unnecessary ones.
Whether a user sees 'tofu' squares (ironically, since Noto stands for 'No Tofu') in their anime OST lyrics or chooses to have the fonts installed should be a matter of personal preference. I'm using Ubuntu and Debian, and while Debian achieves its goal of 'universality' by installing these by default, the same logic should apply to making the uninstallation of Noto fonts just as simple.
6 • Fonts (by Vinfall on 2026-05-11 02:06:00 GMT from Hong Kong)
This is an interesting point. I guess Jesse never met such question because fonts are usually not an issue for English speaking countries and said font size only applies to Latin/Greek/Cyrillic scripts.
For CJK languages, font issues are quite common and their size is significantly larger due to variables and weights. Even if I use SuperTTC, Sarasa-Gothic alone could take up 791MB. Noto-Fonts-CJK with variables is nearly 2GB.
PS: As it's possible (albeit rare) to "install" fonts locally to /usr/local/share/fonts and TTC fonts can have multiple TrueType fonts inside, to count them correctly, it's better to use "fc-list | wc -l". With this, I have 3663 fonts totalling 3.4GB in /usr (excluding 36 fonts shipped with R packages installed elsewhere).
7 • Fonts: types, numbers, versatility (by Greg Zeng on 2026-05-11 02:31:23 GMT from Australia)
Fonts have evolved over many decades. The main publishers have some favorites that have endured enough to have both open-source and commercial equivalents.
Please check with some of the many AI tools to find the differences between specific fonts. Grok told me that some of the later versions better fit the hardware and software complexities that are now possible. With better foundations for the user, these improvements are visible.
All fonts should have simpler workable equivalents. Often this is not possible, so blank and complex figures appear where the expected font is missing. Sometimes the files can be recovered or saved without the expected font.
Any font can be uniquely created by almost anyone. There are many such easy-to-use programs, especially in Windows. Each person's unique writing style can often be used to create a "font".
8 • ther is nothing wrong with fedora (by richardm on 2026-05-11 03:14:28 GMT from Netherlands)
i use (i still do) fedora workstation for a long time, i have no idear where of your problems with fedora came from, maybe its your computer behaving badly or its just you dont like the distro, i have never encounter such problems myself.
9 • Fedora, fonts, and other Fs (by A bread loving hobbit on 2026-05-11 04:27:47 GMT from Chile)
@8 while anecdotal evidence is just that, you "I've never had a problem" falls into the same category. Zram has never caused issues for me but the newer installer is slow, buggy and fails to recognize wifi drivers on my desktop pc, and completely crashes without fail on my old acer aspire laptop.
Beyond personal experiences, new pieces of software having teething issues is no surprise. What's wrong is how often nowadays those issues are treated as "well solve it along the way" and then getting ignored. Fedora is the face of redhat to non -corporate users and looks bad how often they are making changes that just make the user experience worse for developer reasons. Same as snaps when first implemented.
On the matter of fonts, I'll install nerd fonts to use starship on my terminal in every new os install, so I've never really cared too much about it since meeting my needs has been easy and straightforward for me.
10 • "Unknown"? (by ?!? on 2026-05-11 05:21:04 GMT from Italy)
"To find out how many fonts are installed on your Linux system you can run the command: "find /usr/share/fonts -type f | wc -l". To discover the size of these fonts, run the command "du -ch /usr/share/fonts"."
Why should so many people answer "Unknown" if procedure for counting them is well detailed?
11 • Fonts (by FeelingLikeGarfield on 2026-05-11 05:33:45 GMT from France)
That was a great Q/A.
I missed the part where you mentioned what system you were using but I really did enjoy answering the concern about space and how much it takes up on an average lightweight distro.
Memory manufacturers doing what they are right now, I'm not surprised people are looking to maximize their space. I am surprised though that, standards being the way they are, troubleshooting could become a problem because of unavailable fonts.
While I have questions about the cost (in loss storage) of fonts, I am not there yet when it comes to slimming down my system, these default installs are just soo bloated I end up regretting them. An Emoji selector ? yup, never knew I really needed one KDE.
12 • @10 (by QuestionExclamationQuestion on 2026-05-11 05:40:58 GMT from France)
Simple. Comes down to caring. Most don't see it as an issue, thus don't care. Some read the article, saw that the potential problem was measured in double digit mb and decided that it wasn't a problem. The time spent trying to lighted a few mb this way is a lot more time consuming than most other cleaning up procedures most of us engage in. And frankly, if my drive's full, those mb won't matter.
13 • So don't they wanna know? (by ?!? on 2026-05-11 06:17:50 GMT from Italy)
@12 Provided that you're right, I can understand people who _can't_ discover that, not the ones which could easily do but don't even care to. It's just a couple of Bash commands, and that's just a copy and paste away - which I did, by the way - from the solution...
Linux users should be a little more evoluted than that, IMHO. Knowledge is always power.
14 • @14, So don't they wanna know? (by El Cacho on 2026-05-11 06:46:34 GMT from United States)
Awww, come on! In 20 years running Linux, it's never occurred to me that I need to have a count of fonts installed on my system. What does it accomplish? How does it help me? I also don't count how many packages are installed on my system at any given time. So what? I will not be very "evoluted", whatever that means?
15 • Fonts... Not that many (by Mario on 2026-05-11 06:50:26 GMT from Portugal)
Running debian or ubuntu I still end up installing a couple more of fonts on my home dir: .fonts/
So I've answered 1000 (on system folder)... But now I checked on my home and have more 6999...
16 • @13 (by Terryn Serge on 2026-05-11 06:55:22 GMT from Belgium)
And what if Linus decided to forbid the use of Linux in the US ?
17 • And would it be that too difficult to do that now? (by ?!? on 2026-05-11 06:56:55 GMT from Italy)
@15 What's the problem in knowing that now? Would it crash your computer? I definitely doubt it.
You may not be interested in getting to know that, right. But if that's the case, you won't even answer "Unknown": simply, you'll do nothing. Answering you don't know even if you could know with no hassle proves at least some sort of laziness.
If you ignored the poll, fine. If you tested the answer, fine. But giving an answer which is not an answer is not really evoluted, yes. We're thinking persons, not stupid ones.
18 • Too Many Fonts Installed by Default (by Rahul Singh on 2026-05-11 07:20:17 GMT from India)
The issue is not the amount of storage occupied by installed fonts. They become annoying when you have to scroll through so many of them in dropdown lists to reach the one you actually need.
Just install a basic selection of fonts - one/two each of serif, sans serif, monospace, UI and special characters - covering the character set and encoding required by the installation language. Make it easy for users to install more from the vast library of libre fonts already available in linux repositories.
19 • And would it be that too difficult to do that now? (by El Cacho on 2026-05-11 07:22:45 GMT from United States)
"But giving an answer which is not an answer is not really evoluted, yes. We're thinking persons, not stupid ones." My computer won't crash if I know how many fonts it has, and it won't crash if I do. And there is no such word as "evoluted", which can be easily found out by thinking persons who are not possessed by laziness.
20 • You're right, El Cacho (by ?!? on 2026-05-11 07:24:15 GMT from Italy)
You're not lazy. You're something else.
Best regards.
21 • To font or not to font (by El Cacho on 2026-05-11 07:36:25 GMT from United States)
@21, Yes, I am something else. I'm someone who does not think that others who don't do as I think they should are lazy stupid persons. I don't care how many fonts are in my computer, along with 47% of those who answered the question. Maybe all those others don't care either. Their right. Their choice. But I do care and appreciate the English language and do not like to see it mangled. "Evoluted" indeed.
22 • Fonts (by Rob on 2026-05-11 07:53:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
I rarely use Egyptian hieroglyphs or Sumerian cuneiform which both come in the Noto fonts package installed by default on many distributions and like most ignorant Englishmen am largely mono-lingual.
So where some programs, such as Libreoffice mentioned above, display a single long list of fonts there are vast numbers I'll never use slowing down finding what I do want - a drawback for me at least and possibly off putting for new users.
Having an option to reduce the numbers to a starting point of just the languages I commonly use would be a big help but the distributions I've used don't have an easy way of doing that.
There is though a script at ernstki/fc-reject.pl on GitHub that will disable Noto fonts that don't support your language(s). I've used it successfully on Manjaro recently and Kubuntu in the past.
23 • Fonts (by tomas on 2026-05-11 07:58:26 GMT from Czechia)
Such a heated discussion if it is good to know the number and size of fonts on the system.
To lazy me it is not important.
What counts here, as Mr.Singh said, is whether they make my work on PC complicated or not.
I am not too lazy to remove those that make the list of fonts in my applications too large and I do not need them.
24 • All The Fonts (by Wading Through Treacle on 2026-05-11 08:25:48 GMT from United Kingdom)
I had to vote 3000+ Eek! :^O
Debian. KDE. Lots of installed software.
Lots and lots and LOTS of Asian fonts. By default.
find /usr/share/fonts -type f | wc -l ;
4471
du -sh /usr/share/fonts ;
994M
The real "Ouch!" occurs in creative-software situations. Kdenlive, Krita, GIMP, etc.
When you're trying to select a suitable typeface from a drop-down menu.
Very slow and awkward to navigate. Awful for quick A/B comparisons.
Is there an easy way to quickly disable and hide whatever you don't use day-to-day?
25 • Fedora reputation (by Guyzs on 2026-05-11 08:38:10 GMT from France)
> I am absolutely not concerned about the reputational damage to this project
And you're right Jef Spaleta since there not much you can do to salvage Fedora's reputation. Just let Red Hat having fun with it to see what not to add into RHEL.
26 • fedora (by jippy on 2026-05-11 09:11:08 GMT from United Kingdom)
Fedora 44 is an excellent platform. If a distro gets a bad review on DW i usually experience the opposite.
27 • How many fonts are on your system? (by Jake on 2026-05-11 10:08:06 GMT from United States)
How many fonts are on your system? Don't know, don't care, more than enough, more than I will ever use.
28 • Fonts (by Jesse on 2026-05-11 10:13:05 GMT from Canada)
@10: "Why should so many people answer "Unknown" if procedure for counting them is well detailed?"
Not everyone runs Linux.
29 • Fedora (by Keith S on 2026-05-11 05:59:58 GMT from United States)
I said it last week about Ubuntu, I'll say it again this week about Fedora: why do these projects with corporate resources have such a hard time shipping a distro with a working installer? I get that there might be bugs here and there in Fedora since they are basically the testing branch for Red Hat. But lots of distros with little to no monetary support ship with excellent installers: MX Linux, Void, EndeavourOS, Artix, Devuan, Puppy and EasyOS, et al. It's kind of embarrassing that Canonical and Red Hat are not embarrassed by this.
30 • Fedora (by MattE on 2026-05-11 11:08:13 GMT from United States)
My Fedora Gnome 43 to 44 upgrade was 100% error free. I simply assume the big distros Fedora and Ubuntu will receive bad reviews. People love to hate big business. Let's be a little more specific, "oddly slow" and "poor performance" are relative terms. I hope this bad review doesn't ruin the reputation of DistroWatch.
31 • Fedora 44 (by Microlinux on 2026-05-11 11:25:38 GMT from France)
As a long-time Linux user with two and a half decades of experience, I've learned to avoid distributions and software components that have to be potty-trained all over again every now and then.
32 • Fedora 44 (by kc1di on 2026-05-11 11:44:43 GMT from United States)
I must say that I have not encountered the problems Jesse encountered. But when I install Fedora 44 it runs fine on my hardware. Everyone's Hardware maybe different that they may have to do some work themselves to get things going the way they like. But Fedora 44 was solid here (KDE) Version by the way.
33 • Fornts (by Kc1di on 2026-05-11 11:47:15 GMT from United States)
I must say since so many answered the poll unknown. Would say that to many it's a irrelevant thing. :)
34 • Fonts: (by dragonmouth on 2026-05-11 12:11:54 GMT from United States)
It is faulty logic to say ¨Let´s include 1000´s of fonts. They do not take up THAT much space." In addition to thousands of fonts, distros also install by default hundreds language packs and thousands of hardware drivers. An MB here, an MB there and before you know it you are talking a serious amount of storage. Following that logic, distro developers might as well install by default all the popular Desktop Environments and have the users waste their time uninstalling the ones they don´t want.
The last time I went through the exercise of uninstalling unwanted fonts, languages and hardware drivers, it took me over an hour and freed up 1.5 GB. I know that with today´s HDs reaching 20+ TB, all that stuff is just a drop in the storage bucket. However, each unnecessary/unneeded/unwanted file is a potential attack vector for malware.
BTW - what software does OmarchyOS contain to blow it up to almost 7.5 GB? Any day now Linux distros will reach Windows in install size (30GB-40 GB)
35 • Fedora 44 Review(s) (by Slappy McGee on 2026-05-11 12:12:13 GMT from United States)
Once again we're seeing those who have no issues with a reviewed distro declare that the reviewer was pre-judging that disro and that it is actually golden. And vice versa.
I've found that Fedora, for what ever reasons may be inherent in being "bleeding edge," seems to uncork a good release about every other time, or perhaps every third release. I have not tried 44 yet but did run 43 for a while and found it perfect for the machine I had it on and stated so in a review in that section here at DW.
I've since switched to a faster distro, much faster, that also runs very well so I'll not be trying 44 unless I am gifted another laptop as a holiday gift or whatever. I'll drop hints and use other strategies in an effort to make that come about.. but meanwhile I'm thinking that we need to remind ourselves that the reviewers here only test a distro on one machine and then they report their findings after several days or perhaps a week of doing their work and exploring that distro on that one machine. They tell us what that machine is, so we should honestly keep that in mind as we judge the review itself, to state the obvious.. with apologies.
36 • Fonts (by john on 2026-05-11 12:45:22 GMT from Canada)
I did
% fc-list | wc -l
755
To me that is a better method since I one font class can have a many files. For example terminus font contains about 500 files but xfontsel(1) reports 1 terminus font.
37 • Too many fonts (by I see the point on 2026-05-11 12:55:35 GMT from Canada)
I agree with the person who asked the question in this week's Q&A. @Jesse is missing the point. It's not about how much space fonts use on my disk - it's about the usability of programs that offer lists of fonts to use when writing. I do not need or want to see hundreds of irrelevant fonts that I have to scroll through, or remember the name of a font so I can search for it. What if I'm in the mood to creative and try a new font? Having so many fonts in the list makes experimenting way more difficult as most of them are meant for different regions/languages and simply don't display properly for my language & region settings. I agree that we should have default font packages available and only have to install the ones we need/want.
38 • Fedora 44.1? (by Andy Prough on 2026-05-11 12:59:57 GMT from United States)
>"I found 253 updates were available on launch day with a download size totalling 2.2GB. The initial ISO download for the LXQt spin was 2.3GB, meaning I was basically redownloading the size of the distribution over again, on release day."
At least you don't have to wait a few weeks for the 44.1 bugfix release - RedHat just gives it to you as the first update on launch day! Brilliant!
39 • Fonts and such (by Friar Tux on 2026-05-11 13:41:25 GMT from Canada)
I didn't actually take the poll. I'm one of those Jesse hasn't heard about. I used to go through and eliminate all the fonts I didn't think were relevant for me. It didn't really change much. And, yes, it took me an hour. (I also eliminated all language packages that weren't relevant to me.) The trouble is, i would have to do it all over again at each new version up grade. So, eventually, I said "Screw it" and left it alone. My preferred font isn't even part of the default install. (Shantell_Sans.) I use it as my default. Anyway, now I just go with what's there and leave well enough alone.
As for Fedora 44 (or otherwise) I gave up on it a long time ago. It's on my "Do Not Bother" list. I have never been able to get it to work properly. As soon as I fix one issue, two more show up. My primary "must have" with any distro, is that it installs, and I can go to work. Fedora has never done that for me. (Fedora was one of the first distros I tried, years ago. It scared me back to Window XP.)
40 • Font (disk) size (by lavender6 on 2026-05-11 14:33:08 GMT from United States)
Just recently I had to clear out 10 gigabytes worth of font files that were eating up a third of my root partition. They must've been installed by my window manager for one thing or another; I can't think of any reason I'd have so damn many otherwise. Even now my font folder takes up a few gigs.
That's why I don't understand the notion that you should include every font because they're negligibly small. When you install THOUSANDS it can add up to quite a hefty sum.
41 • The fonts of my discontent (by Caliban McGee on 2026-05-11 14:51:43 GMT from United States)
@39 considering that my distro of choice, MXLinux, has a one-button uninstall for unused languages, it wouldn't be an impossible mission to make a tool that could uninstall all but the basic system fonts. I think where the problems would arise (and the reason the tool doesn't exist) is when user-installed packages needed a font that the dev picked out of the basic distro install, but which would be considered not-basic by the removal tool. Then you get the readability problem. So the real issue is devs not including required fonts with their packages, and/or not alerting the end user that additional fonts are required for function.
But in the end, like you, I don't care either. Bigger fish to fry, yada yada yada.
And for @10, I answered "unknown" because I'm nowhere near my devices in order to get a correct tally and...I just don't care either so I used the provided answer.
Fedora is on my no-go list also for the reasons @39 listed plus the fact that they've gone in directions that I don't agree with. I doubt at this point that it will ever be something I'd look at again.
42 • Fonts on system (by Elvis Beethoven on 2026-05-11 15:43:35 GMT from United States)
Oh good, 43% said "unknown." I though I was the only one.
43 • Fonts (by Jesse on 2026-05-11 16:03:54 GMT from Canada)
@37: "I agree with the person who asked the question in this week's Q&A. @Jesse is missing the point. It's not about how much space fonts use on my disk - it's about the usability of programs that offer lists of fonts to use when writing. "
That seems like an application usability issue rather than a font problem, don't you think? I've never had to hunt for a font in any of the applications I've used. Most people can just use the default their app or desktop selects for them.
> What if I'm in the mood to creative and try a new font? Having so many fonts in the list makes experimenting way more difficult
This seems like a contradiction to me. First you're complaining about too many fonts, but then you're saying that you want to experiment with new fonts. If you only had a few fonts you couldn't experiment. If you have more fonts you can experiment, but you'll need to browse them. This is why we have font managers which can preview fonts, so people can just scroll through them and pick what they like.
44 • Fonts (by David on 2026-05-11 16:15:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
What do we mean by a font? Do we want to count bit-mapped fonts only used when X isn't running? Do we count variants like italic, bold, bold italic, small capitals, small capitals italic, display? The code suggested by @10 says I have 1400 fonts but the Gnome character map says 23 and Writer 21. @2 has the point — 21 is close to the maximum that I want to scroll through. Most of the vector fonts were installed or created by me — the only survivors from the purge of distro fonts are members of the Dejavu family.
45 • ram usage (by discontent on 2026-05-11 16:58:31 GMT from Germany)
My biggest joy when starting with linux was that I truly was able to use it on low resource systems. I used to be able to download a linux distro in under 700 MB and have everything I'd ever need to get things done, but nowadays a distro might be several GB but without even an office suite.
A full DE used to start up with 200-400MB of RAM, but nowadays even XFCE requires close to 1GB of RAM, and no, I'm not even talking about having a browser with a single Gmail tab open with 400-600MB.
Where are the good old days of low resource usage? I'm no longer proud of my linux resource usage :(
46 • ram usage (by kernelpanic on 2026-05-11 17:26:38 GMT from Germany)
@ discontent ... I agree, and I strongly suggest you take a look at antiX ... you will be surprised! ;-)
47 • More about Fonts! (by Mr. Peabody on 2026-05-11 17:56:17 GMT from United States)
All these fonts, and I've still to run across one which has BOTH a zero with a slash through it AND a crossed-seven.
48 • I'm so slow some times (by Mr. Peabody on 2026-05-11 18:00:15 GMT from United States)
And I guess I should have said such a font usable by English writers. If you know of one, let me know, please.
49 • (by We all float down on 2026-05-11 18:34:14 GMT from Netherlands)
@45 I have been reading old Minix threads, so my answer would be 1989, when the Minix 1.3d patches by Bruce Evans (his 16-bit 286 patches, not his later 386 patches that were used to pave the way for 32-bit Linux) resulted in protected mode Minix 1.5. No unsafe paging yet, 64K (or less!) segments, good enough for Wordstar and Turbo Pascal. What else do you need?
Oh wait, Linux. Well, on this site there's still Tinycore, Slitaz and Alpine to be found, if you want to start small again.
50 • How many fonts are on your system ? (by eb on 2026-05-11 19:10:21 GMT from France)
5271 / 322M ; too much / Slackware15.
I added "Dancing Script", useful for filling certain forms.
51 • Fonts (by KeithP on 2026-05-11 19:34:43 GMT from United Kingdom)
$ fc-list | wc -l
767
$ du -ch /usr/share/fonts
...
354M total
$ find /usr/share/fonts/ -type f | wc -l
5319
Storage not so much of an issue on this old Thinkpad T60 with a 320Gb mechanical hard drive. As others have said it is the font list scrolling. In LibreOffice and Abiword I work round this by using named styles in document templates so I rarely use the font selection menu itself. Annoying in Inkscape and similar programs though.
52 • kill Noto (by Neddy the Great on 2026-05-11 21:35:33 GMT from New Zealand)
I absolutely HATE the Noto cluster that infests Linux distros, and is BOUND as a dependency so you cannot really remove it. I am not going to create documents in cuneiform, ancient assyrian, runes, medieval hungarian or any of the 10,000 asian scripts and writing systems... EVER!
I work with fonts for graphics and layout all the time. I want to have the font I want - already a massive collection of FREE ones - and NOT see the Noto clutter. At this point, not even their 'western' fonts.
Can we please have distros that are free of this horror? When you pick your location / language is Calamares, maybe a subset get flagged as install and skip the rest? This is almost at a point to abandon Linux and go Mac or something (Windows being an abomination).
53 • On fonts numbering in the Tribbles (by Ted H in Minnesota on 2026-05-11 23:08:09 GMT from United States)
I have too damn many of them that I have no use for. I have been wondering for a LONG LONG time how to get rid of them! While I don't know much about deleting them, I do know that some fonts are needed as system fonts, but also don't know how to determine which fonts those are! - so that stopped me from trying to remove them!
I would like to find and install some decorative fonts such as could be used on greeting cards, but don't know where to look for them or how to install them.
I used to do Newsletters and could have used decorative fonts. I've had my own personal computer since 1985 (It was an Atari ST, which I called "The poor man's Macintosh"). I never saw much on where to find decorative fonts and how to install them, and how to get rid of the ones I don't want or need. I find it incredulous that only 1 person has ever asked Jesse how to cleanse their system of unwanted fonts, but then much as I wanted to know, I didn't ask anyone anywhere either!
Since the Atari, I have used Windows but not ever now, and now it's a number of Linux OS's since about 2009 or so.
Ted H in Minnesota
54 • Fonts from the minty side (by Noddy from Aus. on 2026-05-12 01:33:26 GMT from Australia)
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/clean-mint.html
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/clean-mint.html#ID8
sudo apt-get remove "fonts-noto*"
sudo apt-get install fonts-noto-mono fonts-noto-unhinted fonts-noto-color-emoji
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
Reboot
This is done from Linux Mint Mate, have used it, and it works. Don't really care about quantity of fonts, as my hard-drive is large enough.
55 • Font Forestry (by Carl Commenter on 2026-05-12 02:39:17 GMT from United States)
Large font collections are trouble. The full NerdFonts.com suite consumes 7-8 GB on disk. I keep it with Noto Fonts on a partition off my OS root. I do not use $HOME/.local/... either, partly because all users should share the font pool, and partly because I don't want $HOME bloat.
Why not use distro packages? Internet speed and/or package staleness. OS upgrades get unbearably large when occasional font collection updates happen. Missing a font update won't hurt, but I need OS upgrades. Void I configure in /etc/xbps.d like this:
ignorepkg=nerd-fonts-symbols-ttf
ignorepkg=nerd-fonts-ttf
ignorepkg=nerd-fonts-otf
ignorepkg=nerd-fonts
ignorepkg=noto-fonts-ttf
ignorepkg=noto-fonts-ttf-extra
ignorepkg=noto-fonts-cjk
No distro packages every font anyway. So one needs a manual pool for even one font. I just throw big collections in the same pool.
The distro may lag upstream releases even if it does package. So in several single-font cases, I do my own thing, as with certain apps when I see the distro fails to keep them fresh.
I agree with comments that font selection dialogs can improve for large collections.
Fontconfig's XML is for geeks. Users need a GUI with flowcharts showing fallbacks, assigned generics ("Sans" and "Serif"), local.conf overrides, etc. Of course, XML for the backend is fine.
I've reached a conclusion that fonts and themes deserve their own package manager, independent of distro packaging. It must know where to source fonts and themes outside any distro repository. OS packaging is too generic. Individual users have infinitely various tastes and creative needs.
56 • Fonts (by Keith S on 2026-05-12 04:33:15 GMT from United States)
I have wondered in the past about deleting fonts, especially the CJK, and for the same reasons others have mentioned. I could be wrong, but it seems like many of these fonts are installed with Firefox. I usually delete Firefox and Thunderbird first thing with a new install, but the font packages still show up in updates. It would be nice to be rid of those as well.
Almost as an aside, OpenBSD is the only OS I am familiar with that has a minimal set of fonts with the base install. I have a list of 12 fonts that I usually install after first setting it up. (I have a dedicated list of notes that I use to keep track of these things for OpenBSD.) Terminus and inconsolata are on that list, as an example of the minimal list in base.
57 • I also had... (by xyen on 2026-05-12 05:24:07 GMT from Colombia)
I also had issues trying Fedora 44, I actually gave up, perhaps my laptop is not for this distro and I don't want to expend time and energy setting up my bluetooth devices every time I start on my laptop.
58 • Light weight linux (by Hank on 2026-05-12 07:07:25 GMT from Germany)
Where are the good old days of low resource usage? I'm no longer proud of my linux resource usage :(
antiX is one of the few distros that provide the answer despite the fact that the download is
now impossible to keep as small as op is wishing for.
59 • Fedora 44 review (by Gabel on 2026-05-12 08:49:36 GMT from Netherlands)
Related to the fedora 44 review above: I'm currently daily driving fedora kde on my desktop and kinoite on my laptop. Didn't face any issues as mentioned in the article. Both systems work like a charm, just like 43 worked on both before the upgrade. Can't say anything about the other versions/spins, but what I'm using the systems for, everything is butter smooth and rock solid.
60 • Fedora 44 review (by Bob on 2026-05-12 09:05:00 GMT from Guam)
Yeah, I haven't had ANY of the issues mentioned in the Fedora 44 review above. I think he said he "had issues" with KDE so went looking for something else. Well, he should've picked one of the "other official releases"... but that's what he does... picks something weird so he can gripe about it. Apparently people don't read nice articles anymore, so you have to spice it up with some carnage before they'll read.
61 • @58 AntiX no display rotation (by Jan on 2026-05-12 09:28:21 GMT from Netherlands)
I want to beleave that AntiX is the perfect distro for old hardware.
But alas, AntiX has no option ro rotate the display to portrait (or choose my external monitor).
62 • @57 - incompatibility (by Brad on 2026-05-12 10:52:35 GMT from United States)
I have had trouble with some distros that were well-received by others, and yet did not work well when I tested them, so I think you have a point.
There are so many different laptops/desktops - it may be nearly impossible to create a distro that will work well with most of them. I guess it's just better to find the distro that best suits your hardware.
I (don't) look forward to distro-hopping once I get a new laptop in the future, but I'm guessing many folks have similar experiences.
63 • Fedora (by Jesse on 2026-05-12 11:43:43 GMT from Canada)
@60: "I think he said he "had issues" with KDE so went looking for something else. Well, he should've picked one of the "other official releases"... but that's what he does... picks something weird so he can gripe about it."
I'm afraid you have it backwards. On release day the only other Edition-status desktop flavour from Fedora would have been the GNOME/Workstation edition. GNOME on Fedora is horrible (it always is). Knowing it is a terrible experience, I went with what I hoped would be the _best_ chance for a spin of Fedora to give a good experience.
I had the choice of going with what I knew would be bad or taking something which had the potential to be good. The LXQt spin still failed, but I gave the distro every chance possible. With GNOME it would have been a predetermined outcome.
Also, I kind it strange you think a long-running spin of LXQt should be considered "weird". LXQt is a well established, solid desktop that has a minimal number of moving parts, and has been available with Fedora for years. It's often considered the "stable" or "predictable" option for other distributions. There isn't any exotic about it. It's not like I picked a new desktop like COSMIC to test drive on Fedora.
64 • @61 Screen Rotation and Selecting External Monitor in AntiX (by Rahul Singh on 2026-05-12 12:07:53 GMT from India)
look for RandR in Preferences or Settings
65 • nvidia distribution upgrade experience (by vytautas on 2026-05-12 12:18:01 GMT from Lithuania)
Linux 7 dumped proprietary drivers for Nvidia GTX 650.
So I removed my NVIDIA drivers, 7 Nouveau blacklists, hundreds of megabytes of packages I no longer need for that, and found AI useful to help figure out all that is going on and uninstall all properly before the upgrade.
So the upgrade is done, and Nouveau is in active use after all those years of blacklisting it.
66 • @59, @60 - Fedora review (by Andy Prough on 2026-05-12 12:29:43 GMT from United States)
Both @59 and @60 sound like they are regular Fedora users who upgraded from 43 to 44 and then claimed they did not see the problems that Jesse wrote about in his review. But Jesse did not attempt an upgrade, he attempted a fresh install, including using the installer partitioner.
Also, in open source development we do not discard the bug reports from some users because they are not experienced by some other group of users. This idea of saying "Jesse is wrong because it didn't happen to my machine" goes against everything we do. Reviewers are tasked with reporting exactly what happened, and Fedora developers would do well to take his review experiences seriously.
The problem that I see is that Fedora development is not focused on the home desktop user's experiences - its whole purpose is to be an experimental testing ground for code that will eventually wind up in RHEL. Which means the purpose is to uncover bugs, so a user should expect bugs. The same is true for users of Debian Testing and Debian Sid - they are not using a polished distro, instead they are using a testing ground designed to find bugs. Some users love the Debian Testing or Sid experience and swear by it, which is fine, as long as they acknowledge that the purpose is to find bugs, not to deliver a polished, integrated desktop experience.
67 • Fedora KDE 44 Workarounds (by JD on 2026-05-12 12:41:46 GMT from Italy)
Fedora 44 certainly has several sharp corners to work around.
The "Everything Netinstaller ISO" still has the old installer working well: it still allows you to choose which desktop environment to install (without resorting to Live ISOs).
Dnfdragora hasn't worked since the introduction of dnf5, and the only solution is to rely on Discover, but installing RPMfusion and its non-free codecs from the Terminal with:
sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf config-manager setopt fedora-cisco-openh264.enabled=1
sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing
sudo dnf update @multimedia --setopt="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin
sudo dnf install rpmfusion-free-release-tainted
sudo dnf install rpmfusion-nonfree-release-tainted
sudo dnf install libdvdcss
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
P.S.
Plasma 6.6 on Kubuntu 26.04 requires 1.9 GB without any applications running, and it reaches 2.5 GB with only Chromium running. I believe Plasma 6.6 is quite resource-hungry, not just on Fedora.
68 • Fedora: The "Fine Wine" of Linux (by Anis on 2026-05-12 13:48:20 GMT from Germany)
I’ve been in the Linux world for 20 years, starting with Mandrake, moving through the Ubuntu glory days, and eventually settling with Debian. I love Debian, but as I’ve aged, I’ve realized I want an OS that works for me, not a hobby that requires me to work on it.
Why Fedora?
While some are busy bashing Red Hat, I look at the product. The release schedule is clearly defined, and more importantly, they aren't afraid to delay a release to ensure quality—a delay in Fedora-land usually means a better final product. It’s also one of the best for security; with SELinux enforced by default and a focus on modern technologies like Wayland and Pipewire, you get a hardened, cutting-edge system without having to be a security expert yourself.
I also appreciate the respect for privacy. Even with the corporate backing, the OS politely asks for your consent regarding telemetry. Furthermore, like Debian, it can be surprisingly barebones, you can strip away most packages without the whole system breaking, which is rare for a "feature-rich" distro.
Pro-tip: I usually wait 4-5 months after a new release before upgrading to skip the early adopter bugs. The result is a smooth, professional environment. Their GNOME implementation is exactly what it should be: simple, distraction-free, and out of the way. It’s built for work, not for solving the 'problem of the day'.
Room for Improvement:
No distro is perfect but here are some things I wish for. It would be great to have a truly minimal package selection to start even lighter so only necessary applications. I also find the "Windows-style" forced reboots for GUI updates annoying. Speaking of updates, it's frustrating that there isn't a simple toggle in the settings for auto-updates; having to dive into the terminal to configure dnf-automatic feels outdated for a distro this modern.
Lastly, I wish they offered two official channels: a "Stable" and an "Old Stable" for those who want to stick to a specific channel longer.
Would I recommend it to a total beginner? Maybe not as their first stop, let them try Mint as a playground and later settle with the Fine Wine. But after a lifetime of distro-hopping, I just want a product that is reliable today, tomorrow and next 10+ years.
P.S. I still prefer Debian for my Servers just not as a Desktop, so please not hate.
69 • Fonts and Fedora (by Jerome on 2026-05-12 14:31:10 GMT from United States)
I get the inclusion of lots of fonts to make sure weird things don't happen with various applications. But I do wish - as others have noted - that I could disable fonts that are in a language that I haven't selected. I won't use a solid third of the fonts on my system because they're not in English, but I have to sort through them when using LibreOffice or a graphics program.
Like others, I don't hop on new Fedora releases due to potential bugs. While I'm a fan of Fedora and run it on most of my desktops and laptops, I would argue that this is *not good* that their product is generally not considered ready by many users on release day. That's not a good look for a corporate-backed product.
Fedora 43 with KDE has been worlds better than Kubuntu. I wish I hadn't waited so long to switch over from the Ubuntu/Kubuntu world. I've got 44 Kinoite on my two laptops (Dell Latitude and Lenovo IdeaPad) and that's been smooth and painless (other than AppImage files no longer working). But I waited a couple of weeks to install F44 after its release.
70 • Fonts and OS usage (by AndyVGR on 2026-05-12 14:32:38 GMT from United States)
I have never even thought about the number of fonts, the workstation I'm typing this on is using the default ones, the only time I even think of fonts is to add one needed for a design other than that nope! Also I too was once a huge fan of Ubuntu for desktop and server usage, at my job I'm forced to use RHEL, Cent and Rocky and have grown fond of them and have switched to using Fedora for personal and workstation stuff. It's mature, it "just works". The longer I am in the IT field the less I like to tinker or mess with stuff and Fedora for me personally has been the go to for that. This is coming from someone who thought Mint was it and Manjaro / arch was it or wanted to try BSD on the desktop. Fedora's gnome is snappy.
71 • Fedora review (by frank on 2026-05-12 14:33:54 GMT from Netherlands)
> On release day the only other Edition-status desktop flavour from Fedora would have been the GNOME/Workstation edition. GNOME on Fedora is horrible (it always is). Knowing it is a terrible experience, I went with what I hoped would be the _best_ chance for a spin of Fedora to give a good experience.
What has become clear to me over the years is that Distrowatch/Jesse, while providing excellent coverage of Linux distributions, isn't liking Fedora.
I have never experienced the problems that Distrowatch/Jesse has with Fedora. In fact I have never had serious problems with Fedora. When the same reviewer consistently and repeatedly fails to find compelling reasons to like a specific distribution and my, and many others, experiences is nowhere near the same I get a bit skeptical.
This has made me reconsider Distrowatch/Jesse, at least partially. For a long time I saw Distrowatch/Jesse as a beacon of objective Linux knowledge. I no longer have that view.
There's nothing wrong with having a subjective opinion. But Distrowatch should at the very least try to be fair and objective or otherwise clearly acknowledge that there exists preferences that have non neglible effects on the reviews.
My suggestion is that Distrowatch/Jesse should work with attracting additional reviewers with different backgrounds/ preferences. I know that this is something that Distrowatch/Jesse is aware of and probably working on. I presume it's not easy to find people willing to contribute.
I still find Distrowatch to be a good source of knowledge. But at the same time there exists areas that need improvement.
72 • Fedora's Mission (by Huckleberry Hiroshima on 2026-05-12 15:26:12 GMT from United States)
@66 Mr. Prough..here is what the Fedora website states about their product: "Fedora Workstation is a polished, easy to use operating system for laptop and desktop computers, featuring GNOME Desktop and a complete set of tools for developers and makers of all kinds."
There's more, but nothing about their releases being a "testing ground for bug reports to help us build RedHat Enterprise," to paraphrase your stated point.
Alright I'll quote you: "Fedora development is not focused on the home desktop user's experiences - its whole purpose is to be an experimental testing ground for code that will eventually wind up in RHEL."
Honestly, if that is the case then that phraseology should be used each time we see a link to download a Fedora full release iso. The fact(?) that what you're saying is something that is "understood" by the Linux community, if that is the case, is not enough, imo.
73 • Fedora (by EH2 on 2026-05-12 15:39:02 GMT from Mexico)
I'm also part of the readerbase that has never had the kinds of issues Jesse has with multiple of the reviewed distros. I'm most of the time amazed at how hard a time he has with many common distros that I daily drive with no problems at all, in less powerful hardware.
My actual concern with Fedora is the AI evangelism that's taking hold. I'm not omniscient, so I'm unable to know just what percentage of the "AI is here to stay" cries are a stress response to IBM's internal pressuring, but it's still concerning, and it still is a bad look. Like @25 stated, I do feel it's accurate from Jef Spaleta to think there'll be no reputational damage for this stance merely because the reputational damage has already been inflicted, there's no point in pretending Fedora is still a community project so much as it's the sandbox for what Red Hat and IBM want to push towards RHEL, much like the fate of CentOS years ago. It's also funny to see him later losing himself in semantics about "reputational impact" and insisting that the impact will be positive. Jef, are you sure you want to have good reputation among vibe coders? Will you be as proud of that in, say, 2028? (Crossing my fingers and knocking on wood...)
74 • fonts / zRam (by Qiki on 2026-05-12 17:12:31 GMT from Canada)
How many fonts? Optimally, as few as possible. (I rarely install additional fonts.) :)
As to zRam, I've found it rarely functions 'as advertised' when it comes to larger-RAM machines.
As is, I'd not normally use zRam 'as is' in a larger-than-8G situation. IIRC, zRam uses fully half the system's RAM by default and I tend to reduce things to half that default value in larger-than-8G machines.
On 8G machines, I'd normally be using a quarter of available RAM on a light load and I've dropped zRam to an eighth of available RAM in situations where RAM was tight in 8G boxes.
Adjust the zRam configuration to your load/tasks or "maple syrup through straw" (a great mental picture) is an apt description of the end result. :)
IIRC, the configuration file is at /usr/bin/init-zram-swapping.
75 • Wich distribution chose? (by avelinus on 2026-05-12 18:48:19 GMT from Portugal)
I am a Fedora (Mate Spin) user and a guitar teacher.
To support my students, I use Musecore 3.6, my favorite version.
Since Fedora 39, I haven't been able to use it without Wine.
However, it runs very slowly.
I have a desktop with Fedora 43, but I keep a Fedora 38 disk to use it without bugs. Musescore 4 also doesn't offer all the possibilities of 3.6, and in Fedora 43 it wouldn't even open the files.
At school, I installed Mageia 10 where, for now, everything runs perfectly. I say for now because I've had bad experiences with this beautiful distribution that allows us to install all the desktops right during installation. I usually install Gnome, Mate, and Plasma.
I would like to suggest that occasionally, perhaps once a year, in the opinion section, Jesse ask which review readers would give the most points or stars. This would help make choices not only based on daily visits and coments.
Dedication, love and peace.
76 • fedora lxqt (by thesisko on 2026-05-12 22:23:45 GMT from United States)
I tried fedora LXQT in a virtual machine and experienced many of problems in the review. I think part of the problem is fedora is using miriway and its not one of the officially supported compositors in LXQT. I tried labwc, wayfire, and kwin and I had some troubles with each of them. Kwin was the most stable, but wayfire was closest to the X11 experience and I could change the number of virtual desktops. LXQT on wayland is no longer considered experimental by the developers but is still very much early days.
77 • Fedora 44 (by Toran on 2026-05-13 00:18:10 GMT from Belgium)
Well, I did not use Fedora 44, but I used Fedora Kinoite. Nice, but lots of flatpak software did not work, like Vidcutter, OBS Studio.
Fedara 44 needs still to mature, and I'm sure the team wil fix it.
But I returned to the best distro of all time, being Centos 10 KDE.
Concearning Kinoite, I suggest to wait for Aurora 44, which I consider one of the best immutable distros with KDE.
I do not say that Kinoite is bad, but there is work to be done.
I just wonder why testers did not see this coming because it is not a small problem at all.
78 • @72 - Fedora testing ground for RHEL (by Andy Prough on 2026-05-13 00:22:17 GMT from United States)
>"@66 Mr. Prough..here is what the Fedora website states about their product: "Fedora Workstation is a polished, easy to use operating system for laptop and desktop computers, featuring GNOME Desktop and a complete set of tools for developers and makers of all kinds."
Well, you may want to read what RedHat has to say about Fedora then, on their "What's the difference between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux?" page from Jan 3, 2023:
>"The Fedora project is the upstream, community distro of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux. Red Hat is the project’s primary sponsor, but thousands of independent developers also contribute to the Fedora project. Each of these contributors, including Red Hat, bring their own new ideas to be tested and debated for inclusion by the larger community into Fedora Linux. This also makes Fedora an ideal place for Red Hat to put features through its own distinct set of tests and quality assurance processes, and those features eventually get incorporated into a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux."
Fedora is the testing ground for RHEL, like it or not. That's what it's there for, that's why RedHat and IBM pay for Fedora's development. Not to make end users happy about a free desktop experience, but to test code for inclusion in their paid enterprise software. If you know the purpose of the project, and you are still happy with the experience, that's great, you should definitely continue using it. But you should stay aware of the purpose, as uncovering bugs is going to be a big part of it.
79 • Fedora 44 (by himay on 2026-05-13 00:29:38 GMT from United States)
That was a very confusing review of Fedora 44. Just review the default experience onto a clean drive as most users will experience it. I've had mixed results in the past with the spins but this review said "fedora 44" so most users assume you meant the workstation you get by going to the fedoraproject website and downloading the iso. I've been running fedora on one machine for over five years with a few blips on upgrades now and then. But always the most up to date, best driver support, etc. Before that, had an old core 2 duo box running for ten years or so with regular updates and upgrades and minimal fuss. A few times I just used the installer and left the home directory and did a clean install. Recently took a soon to be obsolete Win10 box, threw 42 on it and have upgraded regularly with no glitches.
80 • Fedora/RedHat (by Huckleberry Hiroshima on 2026-05-13 01:14:48 GMT from United States)
@78 It appears we've had a bit of a conflict of PR 'tween the two projects, and for many many years. Frankly I feel that both of those views can be quite true; the view that Fedora says on its website, that it is "polished..easy to use..for laptop (etc) users," and the RedHat shade of Fedora being a sort of "pre-mature RedHat Enterprise," given Fedora's on again off again reliability from release to release.
Or are we seeing Fedora's noticed and reported quirks as more/worse than other distros which get mixed reviews?
I don't know. I still see Fedora as a fine distro, very much ready for all who want that "bleeding edge" OS that often matures before our eyes instead of for sale as a finished product down steam with another name, and often with its own instabilities and less than perfect reviews.
81 • Fedora, DW reviews, AI (by El Cacho on 2026-05-13 01:15:00 GMT from United States)
Amazing how many people equate differing experiences and aims with cheating, evil intentions or just plain stupidity. Last week I installed Xubuntu and it was docile as a lamb. This week I installed Fedora 44, and minus the inferior installer and high RAM/CPU use, it was pretty well-behaved. Which does not mean that Jesse hates Fedora (Although by his own admission he's no fan of Gnome.) or that Jeff Siegel is on a vendetta against Xubuntu, although last week I did wonder if Jeff had just opened a bottle of corked wine and was peeved.:) If the distro is important or loved by you, why not check other reviews, and experience it yourself? Then maybe voice your own opinion sans insults to others. As I said last week: YMMV.
I don't use Fedora, but not for religious or sectarian reasons. It works well enough, but 20 years ago I began with Debian derivatives and I grew fond of apt. Still am, and I've found nothing that replaces Synaptic for my use. For the last few years I've been using that other much maligned distro: Ubuntu, although these days I'm on it's Plasma progeny. Red Hat is not the Great Satan and Canonical is not some lesser Devil. People tend to forget or dismiss the fact that without the Linux Foundation, Linux would likely not be nearly as widespread and might just be begging for scraps like many other open source projects. And the Linux Foundation is funded by multiple Satans of differing sizes.
AI is dangerous. So is nuclear energy and molecular and synthetic biology, along with other 'ologies whose danger matches possible benefits. Who knows? Maybe one of these days the fusion 'ologists will manage to create a black hole that will swallow the Earth. But we'll still have Void with no SystemD.
82 • Fedora 44 (by anony on 2026-05-13 03:48:53 GMT from United States)
I was under the impression that Fedora itself was primarily a sandbox to test new features for upcoming releases of RHEL and CENTOS Stream. It's unstable by default, and they even warn you about it. I've never understood the insistence of using it as a daily driver when it changes so much and each release goes EOL so quickly. I would think ALMA, ROCKY, or even CENTOS Stream would be a better option. I would understand installing it to test it and play around with it, but daily driving it seems like an inconvenience waiting to happen. Nothing but respect to those who do it and enjoy it. I would personally be afraid of encountering some major regression in the next major release.
83 • Font Mayhem (by AdrienM on 2026-05-13 05:08:55 GMT from United States)
While DistroWatch may have never been asked the question, I've pondered it for 20 years.
I see no *good* reason why a distro's installer can't scope the needed fonts tied to locale selection. (and optionally offer to install all of them should the user want the whole shebang)
Saying an app *might* need one and break without it is a non-argument. The developer can simply make it a dependency—problem solved.
On that note, I can't recall the exact app, but I once encountered a case when I was trimming cruft and uninstalling fonts and an app was scheduled to be removed along with one of them. There was no reason for it as a dependency. I filed a bug. I think it was eventually fixed. (possibly a hold over from a previous version which did indeed use it, but that was just a guess.)
I'll add a 10,000th 'me too' on the time wasted scrolling through never-needed or used fonts in an app. That is a hangnail that needs pulling decades ago. I answered 101–500 because my current system (MacOS) has 389, probably at least 250 of which I installed from an old CD-ROM for some special projects and just haven't trimmed yet. But I see 50+ that appear to be Apple special fonts for foreign languages I'll never use and can't uninstall. (at least not easily) And even when I *do* decide to try one to see what they look like, they just get substituted by some plain looking thing I already use. Thus, they are pointless and in my way. I recall having the same issue in Ubuntu years ago. (not sure if this is still the case, but based on the question and the responses, probably so...)
Finally, I'm glad to hear at least one BSD takes the frugal approach. I'm shopping for a MacOS replacement and am torn between going back to Linux or making the leap to BSD. (which I'm technically using a polished version of presently) Not having to clean up fonts is a small +1 for less pain.
84 • Fedora (by AdrienM on 2026-05-13 05:10:44 GMT from United States)
Maybe I missed something, but I see Jesse did *not* try the official flagship Fedora with Gnome. I get the others had issues they should not have, but I'm puzzled there was no attempt at the 'default' or 'suggested' version.
85 • Fedora 44 Flawless (by vmc on 2026-05-13 05:34:31 GMT from United States)
I don't use Fedora, but Ubuntu, but I had to install after reaing all the brouhaha.
It installed and ran flawless! I was expecting lots of issues. Had none. Even the new install worked like a dream. MUCH better than Fedora's old antiquated installer.
I have in the past installed several Fedora Workstations, but never kept them because I'm so use to debian/ubuntu philosophy. To use to APT to change now(I think). But Fedora 44 is the very best Fedora yet that I have come across !
86 • Fedora44 (by Anthony on 2026-05-13 05:37:31 GMT from United States)
@82, "It's unstable by default, and they even warn you about it. I've never understood the insistence of using it as a daily driver when it changes so much and each release goes EOL so quickly." Tell that to Linus Torvalds. He has used Fedora for many years on his workstations, mostly with Gnome, "due to it's balance of up-to-date packages and stability."
87 • Fedora (by EH2 on 2026-05-13 15:59:41 GMT from Mexico)
@84, the Fedora project is treating the KDE edition as mainstream instead of a "spin" nowadays, so I'd say it's fair to treat it the same as the original GNOME edition.
Now, I'd also say that it's a bit unfair to editorialize the whole thing about "no one I know wants to deal with Fedora", I might not be the only one to think it doesn't fit what a review should be about. Although, considering the whole thing with the AI adoption, I sympathize with Jesse's acquaintances, hahaha
88 • A.I. definition (via Google) Fedora releases.. (by Huckleberry Hiroshima on 2026-05-13 18:11:38 GMT from United States)
Query: Are Fedora releases testing distros for public feedback in making of RedHat Enterprise
Response: No, Fedora Linux is not just for public testing of RHEL, although it serves as the primary upstream source for it. Fedora is a stable, functional, and leading-edge community distribution in its own right, intended for users seeking the newest technologies. It acts as an innovation hub where new tech is refined before potentially appearing in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
89 • Fonts on OpenBSD (by Keith S on 2026-05-13 18:33:31 GMT from United States)
I did some more reading on OpenBSD fonts (the man page for fonts(7)) which explains that they have all the old bitmap fonts from X.org plus the "newer" Xft fonts with support for scalable fonts etc. I don't think I've ever encountered tofu on any website with OpenBSD (using dooble or another non-Firefox / non-Chromium browser), with the caveat that I very rarely visit sites that use Asian languages.
I think that just loading up hundreds of fonts just to cover edge cases is more lazy than thoughtful. Yes, there are people using Linux who need more fonts for their languages, but why not offer that during installation? Just my $0.02. Minimalist by nature lol.
90 • Partition managers (by Kleer Kut on 2026-05-14 01:07:40 GMT from United States)
I had a problem with a number of distros, and after trying Arcgbang that came with 4 partition managers I learned gparted didn't have some DOS tools for reading the UEFI FAT partition. It will make it but immediately fail and not tell you untill the end of the installation. If you just let the installer manage partitions it will still install, at least on the Budgie spin of Fedora that I tried.
I was trying to do this all offline and had so many installs fail. Thankfully I have Ventoy loaded up and got a couple to work. All the trouble with LXQt Wayland has me trying out LXDE on Trisquel and makes me miss LXLE.
91 • Partition managers (by Anthony on 2026-05-14 01:52:03 GMT from United States)
@90, I have no problems with gparted and FAT. I just created 500MB and 4GB FAT32 partitions while installing AerynOS . Could be you're missing dosfstools.
sudo pacman -S dosfstools, sudo apt install dosfstools
92 • Fonts (by Æthelred on 2026-05-15 02:16:46 GMT from United Kingdom)
Fresh install of Void here, reports 652 fonts taking 19MB of disk space. Looks as if it includes terminus, TTF, cantarell, and the X11 fonts (including Cyrillic which is convenient since Russian is my second language). There are no others and I've never felt the need to install additional fonts on Void. Cheers.
93 • Fonts (by Craig on 2026-05-15 06:34:08 GMT from United States)
3649, according to "fc-list | wc -l".
Didn't really care, though. The only fonts I added to my Trixie install were Red Hat fonts.
94 • Rust coreutils vulnerabilities (by Tony Agudo on 2026-05-15 15:12:28 GMT from United States)
93 comments, and absolutely nobody is willing to say *anything* about it, but instead obsess over fonts? Maybe the lesson that even though you could rewrite it in a hyped up language for the sake of further hyping a language doesn't mean you *should*(especially if it's foundational and rock solid), is probably something a little too uncomfortable for Rust and Ubuntu fans alike.
95 • Rust coreutils vulns (by Keith S on 2026-05-15 18:56:27 GMT from United States)
@94 Maybe no one commenting uses Ubuntu. The result of the rewrite is predictable. As the story points out, GNU coreutils have been around since forever (since before Linux anyway) and it was foreseeable that rewriting them in a new unstable language would result in lots of bugs. But I generally ignore such stories since they don't affect me, similar to stories about systemd problems or Wayland bugs. Much more concerning are things that affect the kernel, like CopyFail and Dirty Frag. Those have me seriously thinking about ditching Linux and going back to OpenBSD for good.
96 • Re 94 and (human) entropy (by grindstone on 2026-05-15 20:47:32 GMT from United States)
There's nothing to say. We're all passengers wagged-around on the tail of a long entity being driven by the people that fund and perform the work. Our job is to either (a) do it better ourselves or (b) say thank you may we have another.
It was a nice run for a lot of years. No, restarting everything forevermore is the only way.
I'd have stayed on older stuff if there was ever a hope of current patches...but no, such is not the way of Progress.
97 • @10 # of fonts and size (by I'm Free Today on 2026-05-15 21:38:09 GMT from United States)
@10
Thanks to you for the code to type to find about my currently installed 1936 fonts totaling 73M of space!
98 • Bug reports (by Oliver on 2026-05-15 22:45:45 GMT from Germany)
Jesse, have you reported the bugs that you have encountered to the Fedora bug-tracking system or to the LXQt developers?
"In other words, Fedora's build of the LXQt desktop uses about twice as much RAM as Debian's build of the same environment".
I would highly appreciate if you tried to investigate such issues to uncover their underlying causes if time constraints permit. It would really show that the OS is free (as in freedom) and not just a closed-source black box where the user is powerless, not being able to understand and improve the crucial pieces of software s/he runs. Best regards, and thank you!
Number of Comments: 98
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1172 (2026-05-11): Fedora 44, dealing with extra fonts, Fedora plans to provide AI tools, problems with Ubuntu's new coreutils, TrueNAS extends its development cycle, postmarktetOS improves the boot splash screen, Redox ports tmux |
| • Issue 1171 (2026-05-04): Xubuntu 26.04, extending memory with VRAM, Ubuntu plans AI features, Devuan developer forks GTK2, Mint introduces hardware enablement builds, Linux running on a PlayStation 5, local kernel exploit found in Linux |
| • Issue 1170 (2026-04-27): ENux 5.2.1, picking a second distro, AlmaLinux expands CPU support, FreeBSD publishes Status Report, Ubuntu MATE skips 26.04 release |
| • Issue 1169 (2026-04-20): Lakka 6.1, free software and source-based distributions, FreeBSD Foundation publishes compatible laptop list, Debian holds Project Leader election, Haiku progresses ARM64 port, Mint to extend development cycle, Linux 7.0 released |
| • Issue 1168 (2026-04-13): pearOS 2026.03, EndeavourOS 2026.03.06, which distros are adopting age verification, Arch adjusts its firewall packages, Linux dropping i486 support, Red Hat extends its release cycle, Debian's APT introduces rollbacks, Redox improves its scheduler |
| • Issue 1167 (2026-04-06): Origami Linux 2026.03, answering questions for Linux newcomers, Ubuntu MATE seeking new contributors, Ubuntu software centre is expanding Deb support, FreeBSD fixes forum exploit, openSUSE 15 Leap nears its end of life |
| • Issue 1166 (2026-03-30): NetBSD jails, publishing software for Linux, Ubuntu joins Rust Foundation, Canonical plans to trim GRUB features, Peppermint works on new utilities, PINE64 shows off open hardware capabilities |
| • Issue 1165 (2026-03-23): Argent Linux 1.5.3, disk space required by Linux, Manjaro team goes on strike, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA driver support and builds RISC-V packages, systemd introduces age tracking |
| • Issue 1164 (2026-03-16): d77void, age verification laws and Linux, SUSE may be for sale, TrueNAS takes its build system private, Debian publishes updated Trixie media, MidnightBSD and System76 respond to age verification laws |
| • Issue 1163 (2026-03-09): KaOS 2026.02, TinyCore 17.0, NuTyX 26.02.2, Would one big collection of packages help?, Guix offers 64-bit Hurd options, Linux communities discuss age delcaration laws, Mint unveils new screensaver for Cinnamon, Redox ports new COSMIC features |
| • Issue 1162 (2026-03-02): AerynOS 2026.01, anti-virus and firewall tools, Manjaro fixes website certificate, Ubuntu splits firmware package, jails for NetBSD, extended support for some Linux kernel releases, Murena creating a map app |
| • Issue 1161 (2026-02-23): The Guix package manager, quick Q&As, Gentoo migrating its mirrors, Fedora considers more informative kernel panic screens, GhostBSD testing alternative X11 implementation, Asahi makes progress with Apple M3, NetBSD userland ported, FreeBSD improves web-based system management |
| • Issue 1160 (2026-02-16): Noid and AgarimOS, command line tips, KDE Linux introduces delta updates, Redox OS hits development milestone, Linux Mint develops a desktop-neutral account manager, sudo developer seeks sponsorship |
| • Issue 1159 (2026-02-09): Sharing files on a network, isolating processes on Linux, LFS to focus on systemd, openSUSE polishes atomic updates, NetBSD not likely to adopt Rust code, COSMIC roadmap |
| • Issue 1158 (2026-02-02): Manjaro 26.0, fastest filesystem, postmarketOS progress report, Xfce begins developing its own Wayland window manager, Bazzite founder interviewed |
| • Issue 1157 (2026-01-26): Setting up a home server, what happened to convergence, malicious software entering the Snap store, postmarketOS automates hardware tests, KDE's login manager works with systemd only |
| • Issue 1156 (2026-01-19): Chimera Linux's new installer, using the DistroWatch Torrent Corner, new package tools for Arch, Haiku improves EFI support, Redcore streamlines branches, Synex introduces install-time ZFS options |
| • Issue 1155 (2026-01-12): MenuetOS, CDE on Sparky, iDeal OS 2025.12.07, recommended flavour of BSD, Debian seeks new Data Protection Team, Ubuntu 25.04 nears its end of life, Google limits Android source code releases, Fedora plans to replace SDDM, Budgie migrates to Wayland |
| • Issue 1154 (2026-01-05): postmarketOS 25.06/25.12, switching to Linux and educational resources, FreeBSD improving laptop support, Unix v4 available for download, new X11 server in development, CachyOS team plans server edtion |
| • Issue 1153 (2025-12-22): Best projects of 2025, is software ever truly finished?, Firefox to adopt AI components, Asahi works on improving the install experience, Mageia presents plans for version 10 |
| • Issue 1152 (2025-12-15): OpenBSD 7.8, filtering websites, Jolla working on a Linux phone, Germany saves money with Linux, Ubuntu to package AMD tools, Fedora demonstrates AI troubleshooting, Haiku packages Go language |
| • Issue 1151 (2025-12-08): FreeBSD 15.0, fun command line tricks, Canonical presents plans for Ubutnu 26.04, SparkyLinux updates CDE packages, Redox OS gets modesetting driver |
| • Issue 1150 (2025-12-01): Gnoppix 25_10, exploring if distributions matter, openSUSE updates tumbleweed's boot loader, Fedora plans better handling of broken packages, Plasma to become Wayland-only, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1149 (2025-11-24): MX Linux 25, why are video drivers special, systemd experiments with musl, Debian Libre Live publishes new media, Xubuntu reviews website hack |
| • Issue 1148 (2025-11-17): Zorin OS 18, deleting a file with an unusual name, NetBSD experiments with sandboxing, postmarketOS unifies its documentation, OpenBSD refines upgrades, Canonical offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1147 (2025-11-10): Fedora 43, the size and stability of the Linux kernel, Debian introducing Rust to APT, Redox ports web engine, Kubuntu website off-line, Mint creates new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak development resumes |
| • Issue 1146 (2025-11-03): StartOS 0.4.0, testing piped commands, Ubuntu Unity seeks help, Canonical offers Ubuntu credentials, Red Hat partners with NVIDIA, SUSE to bundle AI agent with SLE 16 |
| • Issue 1145 (2025-10-27): Linux Mint 7 "LMDE", advice for new Linux users, AlmaLinux to offer Btrfs, KDE launches Plasma 6.5, Fedora accepts contributions written by AI, Ubuntu 25.10 fails to install automatic updates |
| • Issue 1144 (2025-10-20): Kubuntu 25.10, creating and restoring encrypted backups, Fedora team debates AI, FSF plans free software for phones, ReactOS addresses newer drivers, Xubuntu reacts to website attack |
| • Issue 1143 (2025-10-13): openSUSE 16.0 Leap, safest source for new applications, Redox introduces performance improvements, TrueNAS Connect available for testing, Flatpaks do not work on Ubuntu 25.10, Kamarada plans to switch its base, Solus enters new epoch, Frugalware discontinued |
| • Issue 1142 (2025-10-06): Linux Kamarada 15.6, managing ZIP files with SQLite, F-Droid warns of impact of Android lockdown, Alpine moves ahead with merged /usr, Cinnamon gets a redesigned application menu |
| • Issue 1141 (2025-09-29): KDE Linux and GNOME OS, finding mobile flavours of Linux, Murena to offer phones with kill switches, Redox OS running on a smartphone, Artix drops GNOME |
| • Issue 1140 (2025-09-22): NetBSD 10.1, avoiding AI services, AlmaLinux enables CRB repository, Haiku improves disk access performance, Mageia addresses service outage, GNOME 49 released, Linux introduces multikernel support |
| • Issue 1139 (2025-09-15): EasyOS 7.0, Linux and central authority, FreeBSD running Plasma 6 on Wayland, GNOME restores X11 support temporarily, openSUSE dropping BCacheFS in new kernels |
| • Issue 1138 (2025-09-08): Shebang 25.8, LibreELEC 12.2.0, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, the importance of software updates, AerynOS introduces package sets, postmarketOS encourages patching upstream, openSUSE extends Leap support, Debian refreshes Trixie media |
| • Issue 1137 (2025-09-01): Tribblix 0m37, malware scanners flagging Linux ISO files, KDE introduces first-run setup wizard, CalyxOS plans update prior to infrastructure overhaul, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1136 (2025-08-25): CalyxOS 6.8.20, distros for running containers, Arch Linux website under attack,illumos Cafe launched, CachyOS creates web dashboard for repositories |
| • Issue 1135 (2025-08-18): Debian 13, Proton, WINE, Wayland, and Wayback, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, KDE gets advanced Liquid Glass, Haiku improves authentication tools |
| • Issue 1134 (2025-08-11): Rhino Linux 2025.3, thoughts on malware in the AUR, Fedora brings hammered websites back on-line, NetBSD reveals features for version 11, Ubuntu swaps some command line tools for 25.10, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA support |
| • Issue 1133 (2025-08-04): Expirion Linux 6.0, running Plasma on Linux Mint, finding distros which support X11, Debian addresses 22 year old bug, FreeBSD discusses potential issues with pkgbase, CDE ported to OpenBSD, Btrfs corruption bug hitting Fedora users, more malware found in Arch User Repository |
| • Issue 1132 (2025-07-28): deepin 25, wars in the open source community, proposal to have Fedora enable Flathub repository, FreeBSD plans desktop install option, Wayback gets its first release |
| • Issue 1131 (2025-07-21): HeliumOS 10.0, settling on one distro, Mint plans new releases, Arch discovers malware in AUR, Plasma Bigscreen returns, Clear Linux discontinued |
| • Issue 1130 (2025-07-14): openSUSE MicroOS and RefreshOS, sharing aliases between computers, Bazzite makes Bazaar its default Flatpak store, Alpine plans Wayback release, Wayland and X11 benchmarked, Red Hat offers additional developer licenses, openSUSE seeks feedback from ARM users, Ubuntu 24.10 reaches the end of its life |
| • Issue 1129 (2025-07-07): GLF OS Omnislash, the worst Linux distro, Alpine introduces Wayback, Fedora drops plans to stop i686 support, AlmaLinux builds EPEL repository for older CPUs, Ubuntu dropping existing RISC-V device support, Rhino partners with UBports, PCLinuxOS recovering from website outage |
| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Issue 1124 (2025-06-02): Picking up a Pico, tips for protecting privacy, Rhino tests Plasma desktop, Arch installer supports snapshots, new features from UBports, Ubuntu tests monthly snapshots |
| • Issue 1123 (2025-05-26): CRUX 3.8, preventing a laptop from sleeping, FreeBSD improves laptop support, Fedora confirms GNOME X11 session being dropped, HardenedBSD introduces Rust in userland build, KDE developing a virtual machine manager |
| • Issue 1122 (2025-05-19): GoboLinux 017.01, RHEL 10.0 and Debian 12 updates, openSUSE retires YaST, running X11 apps on Wayland |
| • Issue 1121 (2025-05-12): Bluefin 41, custom file manager actions, openSUSE joins End of 10 while dropping Deepin desktop, Fedora offers tips for building atomic distros, Ubuntu considers replacing sudo with sudo-rs |
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