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> Swapped to Arch and haven't looked back yet, Arch took me a lot more work to get set up but once it was it's been pretty invisible, which is how I like my OS

by krn 4y ago

> Swapped to Arch and haven't looked back yet, Arch took me a lot more work to get set up but once it was it's been pretty invisible, which is how I like my OS to be. I think that Fedora Workstation[1] is a #1 alternative to Ubuntu in terms of smoothness and ease of use. And if .deb is a requirement – then simply Debian. [1] https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/ https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/

philliphaydon 4y ago
I went to flavours of Ubuntu (Pop/Mint) to Manjaro, to Fedora. I love fedora, it just works. I've had 1 issue so far, NVidia GPU on Dell XPS 15. Had to disable noveau and its rock solid.
- RScholar 4y ago
  Kind of creepy, but you just described, step for step, how I ended up running Fedora's KDE Spin on all my boxes over the past year. I really wanted to like Manjaro, I mean the AUR is incredible and their visual design even uses all my favorite colors, but despite my best efforts it felt alien to me in a way I can't well articulate. Now enter Fedora for the past 4-5 months and I have to say I'm rather impressed. In particular, their package archives seem to keep current with a lot of the software I rely on far better than Debian/Ubuntu. Using dnf feels much more familiar than pacman ever did, and as of now I feel like my search for a daily driver has ended. I would recommend anyone else that's not happy with the experience of Ubuntu anymore to do likewise and see how Fedora feels in its place.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I went Fedora because of someones recommendation on HN when complaining about some issues I was having with other distros. But i too feel like my search for a daily driver has ended!
pantalaimon 4y ago
eh Fedora requires many additional steps to get hardware accelerated video decoding or proprietary drivers working. With Ubuntu it's all out of the box.
- brnt 4y ago
  Seconded. Fedora is very much NOT an all-ready-out-of-the-box experience, unless you are a FLOSS dev.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    You don't need to be a developer, the average computer enthusiast is capable of googling the matter figuring it out. It may not be appropriate for the "colloquial grandmother" sort of user, but you certainly don't need to be a computer programmer to figure it out. There's a lot of ground in-between those. My dad is a retired accountant and a computer enthusiast since the 80s. Never a programmer, but he does this kind of stuff. Has managed his own linux installations for about 15 years.
    - brnt 4y ago
      Googling =\= ootb.
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago
        Able to google =\= FLOSS dev
        brnt 4y ago
        Arguing that one, if skilled at Googling, can configure the distro correctly underlines my point.
  - Mikeb85 4y ago
    > Fedora is very much NOT an all-ready-out-of-the-box experience, unless you are a FLOSS dev. Nah it's pretty close if you have an integrated Intel or AMD system, you really don't need closed-source drivers for much except Nvidia these days. Chrome is in the non-free Fedora repositories (or can be installed easily from the website with an .rpm) and that's all most normal users need.
Kwpolska 4y ago
Another good alternative could be openSUSE: https://www.opensuse.org/ https://www.opensuse.org/ - also pretty smooth, with user-friendly configuration tools, and no snap nonsense. WSL users might also be interested in using that for their distro instead of Ubuntu.
- tesseract2 4y ago
  I used to use opensuse around 2010, and had very pleasant experience with it. Things just worked, and their Yast tool was very handy. I used to joke that opensuse is the Mercedes of linux distro :). I am wondering why it isn't more popular. Is there any sentiment/experience people would like to share about this distro?
  - stinkytaco 4y ago
    It's the second biggest Linux company behind Redhat, so I think it's reasonably popular. It's also been a while since I used it, but I'll also point out that it's developed primarily in Germany, so it's entirely possible it's just not as popular in the English speaking community. However, the licensing agreement with Microsoft put many people in the open source community off, so I think that's contributed to its decline among hobby users.
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    Ubuntu does a pretty good job marketing-wise, many people start they journey with Ubuntu and never look for other distros. Or on the other hand, they end up on advanced/continuous-maintenance distros like Arch Linux.
    - ghostpepper 4y ago
      Do you really think 'continuous maintenance' is an appropriate category for Arch? That hasn't been my experience.
      - Kwpolska 4y ago
        If you go to an Arch community and you say you haven’t updated your system in a month, they will be mad.

by krn 4y ago

philliphaydon 4y ago

I went to flavours of Ubuntu (Pop/Mint) to Manjaro, to Fedora. I love fedora, it just works. I've had 1 issue so far, NVidia GPU on Dell XPS 15. Had to disable noveau and its rock solid.

RScholar 4y ago
Kind of creepy, but you just described, step for step, how I ended up running Fedora's KDE Spin on all my boxes over the past year. I really wanted to like Manjaro, I mean the AUR is incredible and their visual design even uses all my favorite colors, but despite my best efforts it felt alien to me in a way I can't well articulate. Now enter Fedora for the past 4-5 months and I have to say I'm rather impressed. In particular, their package archives seem to keep current with a lot of the software I rely on far better than Debian/Ubuntu. Using dnf feels much more familiar than pacman ever did, and as of now I feel like my search for a daily driver has ended. I would recommend anyone else that's not happy with the experience of Ubuntu anymore to do likewise and see how Fedora feels in its place.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I went Fedora because of someones recommendation on HN when complaining about some issues I was having with other distros. But i too feel like my search for a daily driver has ended!

pantalaimon 4y ago

eh Fedora requires many additional steps to get hardware accelerated video decoding or proprietary drivers working. With Ubuntu it's all out of the box.

brnt 4y ago
Seconded. Fedora is very much NOT an all-ready-out-of-the-box experience, unless you are a FLOSS dev.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  You don't need to be a developer, the average computer enthusiast is capable of googling the matter figuring it out. It may not be appropriate for the "colloquial grandmother" sort of user, but you certainly don't need to be a computer programmer to figure it out. There's a lot of ground in-between those. My dad is a retired accountant and a computer enthusiast since the 80s. Never a programmer, but he does this kind of stuff. Has managed his own linux installations for about 15 years.
  - brnt 4y ago
    Googling =\= ootb.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Able to google =\= FLOSS dev
      - brnt 4y ago
        Arguing that one, if skilled at Googling, can configure the distro correctly underlines my point.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  > Fedora is very much NOT an all-ready-out-of-the-box experience, unless you are a FLOSS dev. Nah it's pretty close if you have an integrated Intel or AMD system, you really don't need closed-source drivers for much except Nvidia these days. Chrome is in the non-free Fedora repositories (or can be installed easily from the website with an .rpm) and that's all most normal users need.

Kwpolska 4y ago

Another good alternative could be openSUSE: https://www.opensuse.org/ https://www.opensuse.org/ - also pretty smooth, with user-friendly configuration tools, and no snap nonsense. WSL users might also be interested in using that for their distro instead of Ubuntu.

tesseract2 4y ago
I used to use opensuse around 2010, and had very pleasant experience with it. Things just worked, and their Yast tool was very handy. I used to joke that opensuse is the Mercedes of linux distro :). I am wondering why it isn't more popular. Is there any sentiment/experience people would like to share about this distro?
- stinkytaco 4y ago
  It's the second biggest Linux company behind Redhat, so I think it's reasonably popular. It's also been a while since I used it, but I'll also point out that it's developed primarily in Germany, so it's entirely possible it's just not as popular in the English speaking community. However, the licensing agreement with Microsoft put many people in the open source community off, so I think that's contributed to its decline among hobby users.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  Ubuntu does a pretty good job marketing-wise, many people start they journey with Ubuntu and never look for other distros. Or on the other hand, they end up on advanced/continuous-maintenance distros like Arch Linux.
  - ghostpepper 4y ago
    Do you really think 'continuous maintenance' is an appropriate category for Arch? That hasn't been my experience.
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
      If you go to an Arch community and you say you haven’t updated your system in a month, they will be mad.