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I heard good things about Fedora and tried to switch to it from my Ubuntu 19.10 install. I have a somewhat custom install of specific partitions across two SSDs

I heard good things about Fedora and tried to switch to it from my Ubuntu 19.10 install. I have a somewhat custom install of specific partitions across two SSDs and the installer just couldn't cope with it. It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible. Tried Pop!_OS next and all these issues went away. I could see all my partitions, assign them to whichever mount point I wanted and choose whether I wanted a partition to be formatted or not. Not a surprise though since it is based on Ubuntu and uses the same installer. Having used several distributions, Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer is the gold standard in my opinion in terms of striking the balance between flexibility, user friendliness and UX. Pop!_OS has been awesome so far but would like to try out Fedora at some point.

pepemon 6y ago
What's exactly Anaconda made wrong? Distro-tossing isn't a way how you can polish your Linux skills.
- noisy_boy 6y ago
  > What's exactly Anaconda made wrong? As I mentioned earlier: "It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible." > Distro-tossing isn't a way how you can polish your Linux skills. I agree with you. Though my primary purpose behind using Linux is not to polish my Linux skills (I've been using Linux for close to 20 years now) but is driven by my belief in open source, Linux's flexibility and the great ecosystem of software. However, one has only a finite amount of time and since Anaconda didn't provide me with an option to work with my current setup (I explored various options like advanced mode etc without much success), I had to move on to something that worked which turned out to be the Ubiquity installer used by Pop!_OS. I probably should have tried to document the probelms and raise an issue in the Anaconda forum/github - will do that next time I try Fedora.
  - pepemon 6y ago
    > It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible. Yeah, I got it. I've just wanted to get a more deeper explanation of your existing partitioning situation - I've set up RHEL derivatives on some very vague partitioning variations. Never thought that there could be the problems. Maybe it's just a GUI limitation?
    - noisy_boy 6y ago
      I think it is almost certainly a GUI limitation. E.g. I have a ext4 partition that I usually mount on /other and preserve it when distro-hopping. I can't remember exactly but one of these things happened - it didn't detect this partition / didn't give me the option to preserve it / didn't allow me to specify the mount point for it. Had a similar issue with another partition too. I think I also had some minimum space related restriction that refused to go away. Wish I had taken notes/pictures.
ausjke 6y ago
I stopped using redhat at redhat 8.0 and never looked back, redhat's desktop market share is nothing comparing to debian/ubuntu these days, I have no plan to ever try fedora again, time is limited and ubuntu did its job well so why bother.
- noisy_boy 6y ago
  I read somewhere that Fedora is a pretty significant contributor to the Linux kernel project. I've also heard good things about dnf. So I wanted to support an alternative to Ubuntu (especially after the force-feeding of Snap). That was the reason I wanted to move on to Fedora. We must support alternatives if we want healthy competition to thrive.

pepemon 6y ago

What's exactly Anaconda made wrong? Distro-tossing isn't a way how you can polish your Linux skills.

noisy_boy 6y ago
> What's exactly Anaconda made wrong? As I mentioned earlier: "It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible." > Distro-tossing isn't a way how you can polish your Linux skills. I agree with you. Though my primary purpose behind using Linux is not to polish my Linux skills (I've been using Linux for close to 20 years now) but is driven by my belief in open source, Linux's flexibility and the great ecosystem of software. However, one has only a finite amount of time and since Anaconda didn't provide me with an option to work with my current setup (I explored various options like advanced mode etc without much success), I had to move on to something that worked which turned out to be the Ubiquity installer used by Pop!_OS. I probably should have tried to document the probelms and raise an issue in the Anaconda forum/github - will do that next time I try Fedora.
- pepemon 6y ago
  > It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible. Yeah, I got it. I've just wanted to get a more deeper explanation of your existing partitioning situation - I've set up RHEL derivatives on some very vague partitioning variations. Never thought that there could be the problems. Maybe it's just a GUI limitation?
  - noisy_boy 6y ago
    I think it is almost certainly a GUI limitation. E.g. I have a ext4 partition that I usually mount on /other and preserve it when distro-hopping. I can't remember exactly but one of these things happened - it didn't detect this partition / didn't give me the option to preserve it / didn't allow me to specify the mount point for it. Had a similar issue with another partition too. I think I also had some minimum space related restriction that refused to go away. Wish I had taken notes/pictures.

ausjke 6y ago

I stopped using redhat at redhat 8.0 and never looked back, redhat's desktop market share is nothing comparing to debian/ubuntu these days, I have no plan to ever try fedora again, time is limited and ubuntu did its job well so why bother.

noisy_boy 6y ago
I read somewhere that Fedora is a pretty significant contributor to the Linux kernel project. I've also heard good things about dnf. So I wanted to support an alternative to Ubuntu (especially after the force-feeding of Snap). That was the reason I wanted to move on to Fedora. We must support alternatives if we want healthy competition to thrive.