FEDORA 30 – GNOME 3.32, Pantheon, Deepin Desktop: the choice is yours

The latest version of Fedora, Fedora 30, is now out and available for download. It’s always been one of the best distros to use GNOME 3, but they have added a few other desktop environments this time around, so let’s take a tour of everything that changed !

GNOME 3.32 Review: https://youtu.be/eRuj8EL_tXw

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The desktop
Fedora 30 ships with GNOME 3.32. While I’ve already covered most of the new features in that release in a dedicated video, let’s recap what’s changed.
First are the performance improvements: GNOME 3.32 is now faster, smoother, and more responsive, especially in the shell. While 3.30 already had added a bunch of optimizations, this is the version where GNOME really starts to be lag free for me. I can’t say I noticed any difference in fluidity between 3/32 on Fedora and it’s Ubuntu implementation on 19.04, both are equally responsive now.

The theme also has seen a bunch of changes. The most notable is in the icons, obviously, which abandoned the hyper realist, 3D look that was too hard to draw and incoherent with 3rd party icons.
The Adwaita theme has also been largely improved, with better contrast and colors, more rounded elements with more subtle borders and shadows, especially visible in the tabs and the headerbars.

The settings have been an area of focus for this release, with a new sound panel, redesigned to be more legible and clear, and the addition of Application pages to manage file type associations for each app, as well as the storage space they use. Flatpak apps will also display their permissions, in GNOME software, and in the settings, and if these are user modifiable, the settings panel will let users enable or disable permissions for each individual app. Night Light can also be tweaked a lot more, with a manual mode and color temperature selection slider.

Under the hood
Most packages have been updated to a more recent version, notably with the Linux kernel version 5.
Fedora 30 ships with Firefox as its default browser, in version 66, LibreOffice 6.2.2, Rhythmbox 3.4.3, and most default GNOME Software.

Installing multiple language support should now be easier, with the grouping of all language related stuff in language packs. These include input methods as well as font packs, to make sure you can install a specific language support with just one package.

Other desktops
Fedora runs on vanilla GNOME, but they allow using other desktop environments as well. With Fedora 30, they added the ability to install the Deepin Desktop environment, and Pantheon, the one used on elementary OS.

Deepin DE is pretty much unchanged. You still get the dock in its two modes, all the specific Deepin software, and the sliding settings and notification panel. It seemed a little less reactive on Fedora than on Deepin itself, though, and had a few glitches here and tehre, especially in the dock. Fedora even installs Deepin’s GTK theme to make sure GTK apps look like other deepin apps. Installing deepin DE is easy, you just install the package called Deepin Desktop. You won’t get access to the Deepin Store, but that’s not really an issue, since it’s only sourcing older versions of software you’ll find in GNOME Software on Fedora.

Pantheon is a different beast. You can install it by running sudo dnf groupinstall “Pantheon Desktop”. The problem is, it does not set, by default, the elementary icon theme, or the GTK theme that goes with it, so many things are broken. Some app icons simply don’t show up. To fix that, you’ll have to install GNOME Tweaks and set the themes to “elementary”. Even with that, the dock won’t look right, so you’ll have to wontrol + right click on it, select preferences, and switch the theme to GTK+.

Still, if you want to replicate the deepin or elementary OS experience, it’s a great way to do so, and it’s nice that these desktops have been included. Just remember that you’ll have duplicate entries that might bear the same name. For example, both Nautilus and elementary’s file manager are called Files, so you’ll get two “files” entries in your menu. Same goes for terminal.

All in all, Fedora 30 is a great release if you’ve been using 29. It’s more up to date, and GNOME 3.32 is a must-have upgrade over 3.30 for the performance enhancements alone. Users of other distributions that don’t really enjoy GNOME might want to try using Deepin or Pantheon on Fedora.