Fedora 37

Fedora 37 is out today. As I always say, it's usually one of the first mainstream distros to incorporate new changes and was one of the earliest distros to support POWER9 at all, so you should care about it because bugs and problems show up there first (if you don't like how the bleeding edge cuts your skin, try AlmaLinux or RockyLinux instead, which aim to occupy the niche old pre-Stream CentOS did). Chief amongst its changes is the new GNOME 43, which really does seem to have much better performance on OpenPOWER than previous releases (a big problem for the last couple) along with revised settings, toolkits and even more libadwaita-all-the-things, which means even fewer apps will respect your GTK theme. This also means Pantheon is no longer supported due to incompatibilities, so I guess I won't bother trying it again (admittedly it was definitely buggy even with GNOME the 42nd).

On the OpenPOWER side, the dust has largely settled from the 128-bit long double update, which was necessary pain and has translated into better package availability with the vast majority of regressions having been corrected. The kernel is up to 5.19, though 6.1 may arrive soon with possible good news for graphics card support on our systems. Some of us are tracking a problem with SATA PCIe cards, including ones Raptor ships as build-to-order options, using the Marvell 88SE9215/9235 SATA controllers (the earlier generation 88SE9128 seems unaffected), and I'll verify if this is still the case in the new kernel. The regression happened definitely by 5.15. gcc is up to 12.2.1.

Unfortunately, OpenPOWER is still in the AltArch penalty box (but along with aarch64 and s390x, so at least we have company), though that's better than ARMv7 (a.k.a. arm32, armhfp) which is no longer supported at all. I usually give it a week or two for any straggler packages to catch up and then I'll do our usual mini-review (here was the abbreviated one for F36). Note that I only test GNOME on my Blackbird; my daily driver Talos II is now KDE Plasma and not looking back. Should have made the jump ages ago.