8 ms·

Fedora is my daily driver, and I think it really strikes a good balance between stability, security, and bleeding edge. Having said that, I hesitate to recomme

Fedora is my daily driver, and I think it really strikes a good balance between stability, security, and bleeding edge. Having said that, I hesitate to recommend Fedora to newbies. Some things about it can be scary and unpredictable. SELinux is enabled by default, and gnome shows audit2allow notifications every time there is an AVC denial. Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS. Additionally, Fedora tends to adopt new technology very early. Gnome has defaulted to Wayland for over a year, and the experience was badly broken at first. These types of things require experience to work through. I don't personally use gnome, so none of this bothers me. But the defaults aren't what I would call "sane" for a new user.

LeoPanthera 8y ago
> Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS. I'm not sure what you're describing here. I've never seen one error after a new install, let alone dozens. The SELinux errors must be pretty rare because I've never had any complaints about them.
- snazz 8y ago
  Same here. I've never seen one on a system that has hundreds of additional packages installed and has survived a number of upgrades.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  I have seen them and been confused, maybe a couple of errors every few months.
kitsunesoba 8y ago
In the past I’ve had serious issues with drivers in Fedora — once in the past on a cheap laptop where getting sound working 100% was near impossible and I accidentally bricked the system installing RPMs in the process. More recently I had a Fedora update eat my Broadcom wifi drivers which isn’t fun to fix when you don’t have an easy way to hardwire a connection and your cell connection is too weak to tether reliably.
ryanmarsh 8y ago
Do you use a high DPI display? How is that? I'm reticent to give up my 5k screen and crisp text when programming but I'd love to use Linux as my daily driver (as much as I like macOS).
- jcelerier 8y ago
  can't speak for OP but I've been using a retina MBP since 2014 until this year and I'm typing this from a 4k screen (both running ArchLinux) - everything is fine except the occasional 1997 TCL/Tk app not updated for hidpi
  - freedomben 8y ago
    Agree. I've been running Fedora as my daily driver for 7 or 8 years now, and for a while avoided HiDPI like the plague because it was so terrible. These days tho, it's mostly fine except the occasional app that hasn't been updated to support it. Oh, that and the pseudo-terminal (you'll have to squint to see that. Luckily Fedora is so dang stable that I haven't even needed that in years).
  - xmichael99 8y ago
    Oh you use ArchLinux, tell me more (;
- jniedrauer 8y ago
  I use sway and it handles HiDPI fairly well. Any native wayland apps work great. XWayland still has scaling issues unfortunately, but the list of XWayland apps I still use grows shorter every day.
- BonesJustice 8y ago
  I’m running elementary OS on a new ThinkPad with a 4K HiDPI screen. GTK scaling looked beautiful right out of the box. I had to set an environment variable on startup before Qt apps started scaling properly. Out of the box, the scaling was similar to WinXP—text elements looked good, images were usually too small. With the ‘improved’ auto-scaling switched on, Qt apps also look great. Wine and Steam handle DPI scaling just fine too. It wasn’t automatically turned on, so you have to squint your way to the appropriate checkbox or slider, but then it’s crisp awesomeness from that point forward. The JetBrains IDEs that I use for development are all based on Java Swing, and they looked perfect on the first launch. Color me impressed with HiDPI Linux. The only thing that took a bit of effort was setting up a larger console font and configuring grub to use it in the boot menu. I can’t speak to Fedora, but I suspect it’s similar: a couple setup hurdles, but once you get everything configured right, it looks glorious.
tapoxi 8y ago
I absolutely love Fedora, and I think they've even managed to make great progress on sane SELinux defaults (I haven't seen an audit2allow prompt in Fedora 29!) but I think "Workstation" is a great term. It's a wonderful experience for developers and I think it can eventually supplant the Mac as the ideal dev workstation. But for friends/family I'll always recommend ChromeOS. A little less so these days because of the weird Android integration, but the laptops are incredibly cheap and the system is almost impossible to break. I don't need to spend Thanksgiving fixing my Mom's Chromebook, I know its already patched.
- vorticalbox 8y ago
  The android integration is actually very handy as you can use all the android apps, not so nice if you don't have a touch screen. The linux containers or what has gotten my attention. Having desktop linux apps, android and all in one os.

LeoPanthera 8y ago

> Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS. I'm not sure what you're describing here. I've never seen one error after a new install, let alone dozens. The SELinux errors must be pretty rare because I've never had any complaints about them.

snazz 8y ago
Same here. I've never seen one on a system that has hundreds of additional packages installed and has survived a number of upgrades.
Brakenshire 8y ago
I have seen them and been confused, maybe a couple of errors every few months.

kitsunesoba 8y ago

In the past I’ve had serious issues with drivers in Fedora — once in the past on a cheap laptop where getting sound working 100% was near impossible and I accidentally bricked the system installing RPMs in the process. More recently I had a Fedora update eat my Broadcom wifi drivers which isn’t fun to fix when you don’t have an easy way to hardwire a connection and your cell connection is too weak to tether reliably.

ryanmarsh 8y ago

Do you use a high DPI display? How is that? I'm reticent to give up my 5k screen and crisp text when programming but I'd love to use Linux as my daily driver (as much as I like macOS).

jcelerier 8y ago
can't speak for OP but I've been using a retina MBP since 2014 until this year and I'm typing this from a 4k screen (both running ArchLinux) - everything is fine except the occasional 1997 TCL/Tk app not updated for hidpi
- freedomben 8y ago
  Agree. I've been running Fedora as my daily driver for 7 or 8 years now, and for a while avoided HiDPI like the plague because it was so terrible. These days tho, it's mostly fine except the occasional app that hasn't been updated to support it. Oh, that and the pseudo-terminal (you'll have to squint to see that. Luckily Fedora is so dang stable that I haven't even needed that in years).
- xmichael99 8y ago
  Oh you use ArchLinux, tell me more (;
jniedrauer 8y ago
I use sway and it handles HiDPI fairly well. Any native wayland apps work great. XWayland still has scaling issues unfortunately, but the list of XWayland apps I still use grows shorter every day.
BonesJustice 8y ago
I’m running elementary OS on a new ThinkPad with a 4K HiDPI screen. GTK scaling looked beautiful right out of the box. I had to set an environment variable on startup before Qt apps started scaling properly. Out of the box, the scaling was similar to WinXP—text elements looked good, images were usually too small. With the ‘improved’ auto-scaling switched on, Qt apps also look great. Wine and Steam handle DPI scaling just fine too. It wasn’t automatically turned on, so you have to squint your way to the appropriate checkbox or slider, but then it’s crisp awesomeness from that point forward. The JetBrains IDEs that I use for development are all based on Java Swing, and they looked perfect on the first launch. Color me impressed with HiDPI Linux. The only thing that took a bit of effort was setting up a larger console font and configuring grub to use it in the boot menu. I can’t speak to Fedora, but I suspect it’s similar: a couple setup hurdles, but once you get everything configured right, it looks glorious.

tapoxi 8y ago

I absolutely love Fedora, and I think they've even managed to make great progress on sane SELinux defaults (I haven't seen an audit2allow prompt in Fedora 29!) but I think "Workstation" is a great term. It's a wonderful experience for developers and I think it can eventually supplant the Mac as the ideal dev workstation. But for friends/family I'll always recommend ChromeOS. A little less so these days because of the weird Android integration, but the laptops are incredibly cheap and the system is almost impossible to break. I don't need to spend Thanksgiving fixing my Mom's Chromebook, I know its already patched.

vorticalbox 8y ago
The android integration is actually very handy as you can use all the android apps, not so nice if you don't have a touch screen. The linux containers or what has gotten my attention. Having desktop linux apps, android and all in one os.