Fedora 41 is out now with plenty of enhancements like easier NVIDIA driver installs

Quoting: dziadulewicz

Quoting: Fester_MuddVideo playback don't work! In any of the mainstream sites i tried. I recall this has been an issue with Fedora a long time

If things like video playback doesn't work OOTB how could anyone recommend this to any new user ..

Indeed. It's an absolute shitshow. It is mandatory to use terminal and somehow *know* commands and what else. You are expected to just *know* there is this thing called RPMFusion (that you have to manually enable, and from where to start with, also a mystery as not any website or link is given). The installer doesn't express any of this. You also need to install additional codecs.

Fedora doesn't ship patented media codecs by default as for example Ubuntu and Linux Mint do.

It is beyond any normally thinking user *why there are no couple of simple boxes to tick* during install to achieve this totally basic functionality to watch videos.

So basically a new comer "can't watch YouTube, Dlive and Twitch on Linux" OOTB if you happen to choose Fedora as a first distro.

Ooookay. Well, that lets me out, not gonna fiddle with all that just to watch a video. But I guess the point of Fedora was never to be for people who just want to not worry about having an OS. Glad Mint is there for people like me.

This version comes with GIMP3, GIMP2 is removed.

Quoting: mr-victoryThis version comes with GIMP3, GIMP2 is removed.

Yeah that's a little surprising; it's the release candidate for now, since v. 3 isn't officially out yet.
AFAICT, 'Version 3 RC 1' is mentioned only in the splash screen too; elsewhere the package is cited as gimp-2:2.99.19^20241011giteddaa13ad5-1.fc41.x86_64


Last edited by wvstolzing on 30 October 2024 at 5:56 pm UTC

Iguess I'm the only newcomer to Linux who picked Fedora and never looked elsewhere, I think I downloaded codecs at one point just to follow what everyone else is doing, but I don't remember ever having an issue prior to when I randomly thought of installing them.

I'd say Fedora is perfect for newbies who aren't afraid of their devices and don't mind "learning" the OS that they'll be using all the time. Dsitros that "just work" and tolerate tech illiteracy and laziness also have their place of course, it's cool that we have both options.

Quoting: Fester_MuddIf things like video playback doesn't work OOTB how could anyone recommend this to any new user ..

I rather like Fedora for reasons, but I actually wouldn't recommend it to new users for exactly (and maybe only) that reason. I actually had a friend that was thinking about giving Linux and specifically Fedora a try, and I felt compelled to warn them that it's not hard to deal with, but it is annoying that it doesn't "just work".

Quoting: wvstolzingas packages eventually get built with the newer version of rpm, the warnings should go away.

Sounds like they need to build the packages with an old version of rpm, or update the spec files to use the newer RPM functions. Annoying that they didn't get that properly sorted before release.

Quoting: dziadulewiczthis thing called RPMFusion (that you have to manually enable

If you use Nvidia drivers, I recommend this repo instead:
https://negativo17.org/multimedia/

As noted on that page: None of these packages can be distributed inside the main Fedora repositories as they are presented here due to patent and licensing issues or simply because they are coupled with non open source software.

Quoting: dziadulewiczIndeed. It's an absolute shitshow. It is mandatory to use terminal and somehow *know* commands and what else. You are expected to just *know* there is this thing called RPMFusion (that you have to manually enable, and from where to start with, also a mystery as not any website or link is given). The installer doesn't express any of this. You also need to install additional codecs.

Fedora doesn't ship patented media codecs by default as for example Ubuntu and Linux Mint do.

It is beyond any normally thinking user *why there are no couple of simple boxes to tick* during install to achieve this totally basic functionality to watch videos.

So basically a new comer "can't watch YouTube, Dlive and Twitch on Linux" OOTB if you happen to choose Fedora as a first distro.

It's codecs. It's related to patents. Patent laws are a mess. Ubuntu, and its downstreams, choose to ignore the issue. Fedora follows a stricter guidelines. There's really not much you can do with what Fedora's rules vs Patent rules.

If it doesn't fit your preference, then use one of its downstreams like Nobara, Aurora, Bazzite, UltrarisiOS, or risiOS which are more newcomer-friendly. Fedora is meant to be a very unopinionated and cleanly-operated community project

Quoting: dziadulewiczIt is beyond any normally thinking user *why there are no couple of simple boxes to tick* during install to achieve this totally basic functionality to watch videos.

It's been quite a while since I did a fresh install (I've updated in place for years), but I seem to recall they did add a third party repositories checkbox as part of it.

I see I've got the fedora-workstation-repositories package installed:
Description : Repository files that make some select non-Fedora software available via search in gnome-software.

$ rpm -ql fedora-workstation-repositories
/etc/yum.repos.d/_copr:copr.fedorainfracloud.org:phracek:PyCharm.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-nonfree-steam.repo
/usr/lib/fedora-third-party/conf.d/fedora-workstation.conf

Which covers Chrome, the Nvidia driver, and Steam - but not multimedia, I see. As noted before, I prefer the fedora-multimedia negativo17 repo to the rpmfusion one.

However, the base fedora-repos package does cover h.264 browser support:
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-cisco-openh264.repo

Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: dziadulewiczIndeed. It's an absolute shitshow. It is mandatory to use terminal and somehow *know* commands and what else. You are expected to just *know* there is this thing called RPMFusion (that you have to manually enable, and from where to start with, also a mystery as not any website or link is given). The installer doesn't express any of this. You also need to install additional codecs.

Fedora doesn't ship patented media codecs by default as for example Ubuntu and Linux Mint do.

It is beyond any normally thinking user *why there are no couple of simple boxes to tick* during install to achieve this totally basic functionality to watch videos.

So basically a new comer "can't watch YouTube, Dlive and Twitch on Linux" OOTB if you happen to choose Fedora as a first distro.

It's codecs. It's related to patents. Patent laws are a mess. Ubuntu, and its downstreams, choose to ignore the issue. Fedora follows a stricter guidelines. There's really not much you can do with what Fedora's rules vs Patent rules.

If it doesn't fit your preference, then use one of its downstreams like Nobara, Aurora, Bazzite, UltrarisiOS, or risiOS which are more newcomer-friendly. Fedora is meant to be a very unopinionated and cleanly-operated community project

(H.264 refers to the video codec commonly used for the mp4 container, which I will be saying a lot)

Specifically, Fedora would love to include a H.264 decoder by default. Unfortunately, "Fedora Legal"[1] has determined it is illegal to include a H.264 decoder from ffmpeg, for example, unless they pay for it for every user of Fedora. This would cost many millions of dollars a year.

There is openH264, which Cisco created and negotiated with MPEG-LA (now Via-La) for an unlimited license. The condition was that every consumer of openH264 needed to use the binaries Cisco provided. Despite the project being open source, you are not allowed to make any modifications to it. By default, Firefox includes openH264 as an automatic download after the user opens Firefox. Fedora has intentionally intervened and disabled the auto-download, which you need to download a package to override.

This is because openH264 cannot be built from source without violating the terms of using it royalty-free. Fedora only includes open source software in its default repositories, and openH264 does not qualify with terms like these. Even if they aren't terms regarding the use of the software itself.

openH264 is inferior to ffmpeg's x264 in several ways. Even if it was included by default, it still cannot play H.264 High 10 profile media, so it may not play all of your local files. For the web, it is adequate.

In 2031, all of the current H.264 patents will have expired and it will be legal for Fedora to include a H.264 decoder and encoder by default. Fedora will still not include a H.265 encoder/decoder (to say nothing of H.266), but these formats fall back to H.264 99.9% of the time anyway. Fedora also does not include a VC-1 decoder, though this is a far nicher codec that I have yet to encounter in the wild. Maybe in some old visual novels..? The patents for this codec will likely expire before H.264; there's only a few left: https://www.via-la.com/licensing-2/vc-1/vc-1-patent-list/

Aside from this, Fedora currently includes an AAC decoder which would have been a point of contention in the years previous.

YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, and other media sites will fallback to AV1 or VP9 if they detect a H.264 decoder is not available, so if you only visit a few of these sites, you won't notice you're missing the codec. If you use Peertube, you're out of luck.

On Fedora Silverblue, this limitation will be a lot easier to solve. In the future, there will be a specially-prepared Flatpak extension in the Fedora Flatpaks repository that enables the openH264 in Firefox. You will be able to install it via GNOME Software. No terminal commands required. Still a pain, but far less of one. The real issue is most people don't even understand why they can't playback videos on certain sites or locally.

It's not as if Fedora does this to intentionally give people a bad experience. They're working within the limitations they have. Fedora team members have expressed a desire to change this, but what can they do, legally? Not much.

Further reading: https://wiki.endsoftwarepatents.org/wiki/H.264

[1]: "Fedora Legal" refers to Fedora's legal department, which doesn't technically exist. Some lawyers who work for Red Hat donate some of their time to answer legal questions Fedora developers have. That time is finite, however, and not all questions are answered in a timely manner (or at all).