Fedora 43 — A Second Look

I’ve been using Fedora 43 for a little over 3 days, since Tuesday, and I’m quite happy with it on all my systems. However, I’ve encountered a change to the installation procedure that you need to be aware of. I didn’t find this until Thursday when I installed two different F43 Editions and one spin on VMs.

After upgrading all my systems to F43 on Tuesday and ensuring that all is well, I decided to install F43 Workstation and Server, along with the Xfce spin on VMs. I really need to get more familiar with Workstation and Server so this is the perfect opportunity.

The Anaconda installer

Oh, the new web-based Anaconda installer is fine and works well and is much simpler with fewer choices for the user to make. That’s a good thing for Windows users migrating to Fedora Linux.

Making things simple for new converts to Linux is important so that their initial impression is a good one. In some respects I think that this is due to pressure from Linux Mint which has a very simple installation procedure.

My problem

My only issue with that simplification is that there is only one possible filesystem, BtrFS, and it’s not provided as a choice. You can see that I don’t trust the BtrFS filesystem in this article. It’s no longer possible to choose the EXT4 filesystem during the system installation — or any other filesystem — as BtrFS is locked-in except for the BIOSboot and boot partitions.

However, the Fedora 43 Server Edition does allow you to select Logical Volume Management (LVM) and EXT4. Other filesystem options are also available, such as BIOSboot, BtrFS, XFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, swap, and a couple more. This at least provides those who still prefer other filesystems an opportunity to specify them during installation. But I’m here to lobby for more choices for the Workstation edition and the other desktop spins. I think the additional options should be XFS and EXT4.

Final thoughts

BtrFS is the default filesystem on Fedora and other popular Linux distributions — but not yet Linux Mint. BtrFS has been around awhile so is well-tested in mainstream applications.

Considering that I’m going to stick with Fedora because I really like it, and that I’ve suggested to my editor at Apress that I should write a 3rd Edition of my “Using and Administering Linux” series of books to address BtrFS as the default and only filesystem, and that BtrFS is here to stay, I think I’ll begin migrating some of my systems to BtrFS. One at a time, not starting with my primary workstation or the Both.org server. I’ll start with one of my VMs.

I’ll probably never migrate Both.org or the firewall/router for my network. There’s really no reason to migrate most older systems without a specific need for the features it provides. I’ll only be migrating some of my systems to get more experience with BtrFS rather than any functional needs.

But I have been thinking about completely reinstalling my primary workstation to simplify my disk layout and to ensure that I’ve got as little cruft hanging around as possible. That system — well this one because it’s the one I’m working on right now — was originally built by me in 2017, so it’s currently eight years old and I’ve never reinstalled it in that entire time. I’ve always upgraded from one version of Fedora to the next. I’ll let you know how it goes.