Weekly Journal 18 - Fedora 34

Synopsis

This week I upgraded my work laptop to Fedora 34, and I am very happy with the results so far. All other efforts to do useful work were stymied by a lack of sleep.

Fedora 34

Fedora has been my favorite Linux distribution for a long time. At work, we originally standardized on Ubuntu LTS since that was what we were using on our cloud instances. As we continue to embrace cloud-native development it becomes less relevant to use the same operating system across systems. So when I was issued a new laptop earlier this year, I opted to install Fedora 33 on it instead of Ubuntu 20.04.

Overall I liked having Fedora 33, but it suffered from some unusual problems. The one that really caused problems was the inability to use SSH when on a Zoom call. I still do not know why, but whenever I tried to SSH in terminal during a Zoom call the terminal window just hang until a killed it. This, of course, makes any kind of group debugging session nearly impossible. The best I was able to manage was getting on Zoom with the new laptop, and using the old one for SSH access.

I have run a few experiments now with Fedora 34, and it appears that problem has disappeared. I am looking forward to putting it through its paces next week. I am also thrilled that Xfce 4.16 should be able of remembering my monitor settings when I plug into my laptop dock. I have been running GNOME, which is far from my favorite, solely because it remembers my monitor settings.

So far I am really pleased with Fedora 34 and am excited to use it more.

What’s Next?

Looking into building some automation to push iptables rules out to server instances.