9 ms·

Switching to Fedora from Ubuntu

77 points by alexzeitler 4y ago

eatonphil 4y ago
I like that Fedora is as easy to operate as Ubuntu, but that it is updated more frequently, so I've used it on my servers for years. I've used Arch and Gentoo a bit before and they felt like too much work. But now Fedora package updates feel too infrequent. I want to run the latest stuff but without the hassle of Arch/Gentoo. Maybe Debian Unstable?
- packetlost 4y ago
  <insert favorite distro> + Nix has been working ok for me. I run a mix of Ubuntu and Arch and use Nix on Ubuntu to bridge the gap. Fedora Silverblue looks interesting as well, though it's not clear to me whether the update frequency is higher than normal Fedora. Edit: I also like Alpine
  - tapoxi 4y ago
    Silverblue tracks Fedora releases, the only difference is that you're using ostree deployments which keeps "bit rot" at bay. For the unaware, ostree treats your root filesystem somewhat like a git repo, and you add/remove packages with rpm-ostree or by using containers.
  - DEDLINE 4y ago
    Just checked out Nix. I can definitely see myself using nix-shell. Do you actually use nix-build? If so, do you like it more than working with the familiar 3P tooling (i.e. docker)?
- tmtvl 4y ago
  OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is pretty solid, the installer also makes setting up root filesystem snapshots as easy as ticking a checkbox.
- segasaturn 4y ago
  Debian sid is still slow as molasses on updates, probably slower than mainline Fedora releases. Best bet for a 'user friendly' distro with the latest pkgs is Fedora or Tumbleweed.
- warner25 4y ago
  > updates feel too infrequent Wow, really? I think I see available updates everyday if I run dnf or open GNOME Software. I just checked right now and got the 6.2.8 kernel. I guess it wasn't available on Fedora until 28 March, after being announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman on 22 March?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Coupling base OS updates and user programs together sucks, but nearly every Linux distro does it. Probably in part because the way Linux's GUI (and media generally, including audio) stack works makes cleanly decoupling the OS, including the GUI desktop portions, from programs, difficult. The distros that do rolling-release introduce a different problem of fiddliness and frequent risk to system stability, by making everything update faster and usually assuming you're running latest or near-latest of everything (and you're on your own if you're not). It's the cost of so very much choice and of having 500 entities all separately defining what "the Linux desktop" means at any given time, though I'm not sure it's always appreciated just how steep the price is. For fairly a broad category of "nice things", it's literally why we can't have them (in Linux land). IMO it's the core reason we still haven't seen the "year of the Linux Desktop".
bastard_op 4y ago
I've used Ubuntu since going full-time Linux desktop ~2006, but for many of the same reasons in here, jumped from Ubuntu to Arch circa 2018 and haven't looked back. I use Ubuntu or fedora/cent for disposable server vm's as needed/desired, but any primary boxen I interface directly with every day is Arch.
- segasaturn 4y ago
  I'm one of those freaks who actually liked Unity, especially towards the end it felt like such a snappy and efficient desktop interface. The switch to GNOME killed what differentiated Ubuntu on the desktop for me.
  - max-m 4y ago
    I'm one of those freaks who use Unity to this day. :) In the beginning Unity was rough, but the last version was actually quite comfortable to use. At the moment I'm daily driving Ubuntu 20.04 with root on ZFS, but I'm debating really hard whether I should distro hop or not. I dislike Canonical's insistence on "snap", their advertisements in "apt" output, ... But on the other hand Ubuntu gave me mostly a "it just works" experience on my desktop for multiple years. For a while I ran Arch on another system and had quite the opposite experience. Upstream broke dependencies at least twice for example, so a lengthy session of "how the heck do I fix this" ensued.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    When Ubuntu has finally killed Gnome 2, I looked at Unity and said, no, I want gnome and booted Gnome 3. ... and after just a few minutes of using it I decided that Unity is actually not that bad! ... and after a few years it kinda grew on me, so it was a pity that Canonical killed it.
- strken 4y ago
  I wish there was something like Arch, except with point releases of the core operating system like FreeBSD's world but everything else on a rolling release.
gjvc 4y ago
if the author wants up-to-date packages, I wonder why they didn't move to debian testing
- treve 4y ago
  I also want something that's quite popular and has good support. I don't want to be tester, as it's my main work machine.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Isn't there a difference between running latest stable vs testing yet still not being stale? I'm not using linux desktop as a daily driver, my linux use comes in CLI-only form, so I'm just not familiar with why something isn't receiving "good support" in this conversation yet is being actively worked on to even have "tester" as an option.
  - phoronixrly 4y ago
    Fedora is probably not your thing then. You'd just be a tester for Red Hat
  - imp0cat 4y ago
    It's quite stable actually, on par with Ubuntu. The stuff with rough edges is kept in the unstable repos.
candiddevmike 4y ago
Just started doing slightly the opposite (going from Debian to Fedora). For me, Debian keeps screwing with upstream packages in ways that introduce unintended bugs, Ubuntu is probably similar. Also really disappointed systemd 253 didn't make it into bookworm. Fedora feels closer to upstream (both version and build) without being a rolling release like Arch, and I'll get full podman support.
koito17 4y ago
I was first introduced to Linux with Ubuntu around 2009 - 2010. I used it up until 2014 or so, then toured my way around Windows and Mac OS. I'm currently on a Mac, but at a past job I had to boot straight into a Linux VM, and Fedora was fantastic. I always hear how Ubuntu nowadays makes a lot of questionable decisions, how Snaps are bad, and so on. I also hear a lot of criticism about Flatpak. But Fedora 36 more or less "just worked". I disliked GNOME 3, but the GNOME 40 interface is a huge improvement. I also like how Fedora is able to just get out of my way. There are no quirks added to the desktop environment besides a little Fedora watermark. Flatpaks more or less "just works" for me, and I can hardly tell the difference between Flatpaks and "native packages" on GNOME Software. They both are one click, enter password, wait, then ready. DNF is slow as molasses, though, but otherwise Fedora was straightforward to install and use daily for development. I'm very likely going to run Fedora on a Framework 16 when the time comes to replace my MacBook.
- grumpyprole 4y ago
  Ubuntu offer an LTS distro though. In theory this should be more stable than Fedora. Perhaps it matters less for the desktop.
  - mixedCase 4y ago
    On the desktop, newer kernel usually means more stable, although it becomes less true as the hardware running it ages.
  - ladyanita22 4y ago
    On the Fedora side you can have CentOS Stream
    - spicyusername 4y ago
      That is the exact opposite of LTS. CentOS-stream is a rolling release beta version of the next RHEL.
      - 4y ago
unpopularopp 4y ago
I wish there was something like Debian (just plain boring works) but more up to date. I run Debian but certain packages are really out of date and sometimes have to tinker around. I don't like the snap in Ubuntu... Maybe Linux Mint or Debian version of Mint?
- ojhughes 4y ago
  Debian Sid might be worth a try
  - rektide 4y ago
    Sid is pretty good. Five years ago I made the switch from Debian/testing (with unstable pinned on at low priority) to Sid. I'd probably recommend the first config though, testing with unstable pinned on. It's definitely nowhere near as fresh as unstablr, but still often much better. And you can install fresh versions of things you care about, via apt-pinning. Unstae has never caused a real problem. Sometimes a dependency might not be resolvable, and you have to either wait a bit while a dependency makes its way to availability (days or sometimes rarely weeks), or you can go dig up slightly-older unstable versions of packages on the website, or you just apt-pin testing on (at low priority) and install the significantly older version. All in all Sid (unstable) has been quite lovely and I'd never switch back. But being unable to install something has been an issue I see a couple times a year. Testing, with Unstable pinned on gives you a nice position of getting what you want fresh & everything else being pretty dammed reliable. I also wouldn't discourage anyone from running Sid either, but it has some pretty small caveats.
- switch007 4y ago
  Fedora?
- prottog 4y ago
  I'm running bullseye on desktop and haven't found anything terribly out of date, but it was first released a year and half ago so maybe it will happen soon, and of course YMMV. I find that most local development is containerized anyway so how recent my desktop OS doesn't factor as much as it used to.
habibur 4y ago
My reason to choose it was its excellent hardware support. Installed without any hiccup on any hardware I tried. That wasn't true for other distributions at that time.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  From its earliest releases through IIRC '08 or so, one of the nicest things about it was that its default installation and config choices were obviously better for most users than what other distros picked. "No, goddamnit, I don't want Epiphany or whatever, I want Firefox". Sure enough, Ubuntu installs Firefox by default. "If you've got wifi and you want to manage it from the GUI you'll want to install and configure X, Y, and Z, and you'll need to uninstall the default that Y replaces because it's bad" Or, you know, why doesn't the damn distro do that for me? And Ubuntu (mostly) did. Any other distro at the time, I'd have to install & uninstall a bunch of crap on first boot, or spend time selecting packages in the installer. Ubuntu was the only one I could just hit "install" on and end up pretty close to a reasonable initial set-up. [EDIT] Of course, that went to hell pretty much immediately when they started trying to "lead" on Linux desktop with their own projects, rather than curating & tweaking existing community software. I despise most of what Red Hat's created and done along the way, but they've played the same game and clearly come out on top—Ubuntu both made their distro worse and burned resources getting their ass whupped by Red Hat at the influence-and-control-the-Linux-desktop game, over and over. Ubuntu's init system competitor? Dead, Red Hat's systemd won. Their GTK alternative DE to Red Hat dominated Gnome? Dead, Gnome won. Mir? Dead, Red Hat backed Wayland won. Snap? I dunno but it sucks and everyone hates it so I assume it's heading the same way, and Flatpack or AppImage will win instead (probably Flatpack, though I prefer AppImage).
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    Unity ain't dead, Ubuntu Unity is an official flavour, it's a bit like Mint's Cinnamon (though less widely available).
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Well, technically none of those projects are dead. Even Mir's a Wayland compositor now(!?). All failed, though.
mpsprd 4y ago
For work, I use Ubuntu+i3wm. Imo, when working with corporate environment with mostly windows, .deb distros are hard to beat for general availability of packages. It also just works (even if Firefox snap sucks) Also Ubuntu is generally the most supported Linux distro from my experience. I've used fedora for work, but it's often more friction to get something installed. For example: teams dropped its .deb release officially not too long ago. A week later, some kind soul releases a snap with an electron wrapper of the webapp.
- shrx 4y ago
  Why not just run it as a chromium app at that point?
  - mpsprd 4y ago
    Webcam/mic permissions were more painful iirc, but I mainly didn't want to have 2 full browsers open simultaneously.
flaburgan 4y ago
For non tech people I just install Mint. Proprietary hardware support, an interface similar to windows, and it just works. Perfect.
- lopatin 4y ago
  What's the reason to install Linux for non-tech people?
  - grubbs 4y ago
    My local library installed Linux on all of their desktops when a refresh cycle was needed. Basically prevented them from buying all new computers at 10s of thousands of $$$.
  - FpUser 4y ago
    Less spying and relative stability if the original install went ok. Of course productivity might suffer in case one uses Windows / Mac only software
  - jmfldn 4y ago
    Unless you need software that only runs on Mac / Windows you get a more efficient, faster OS, not stricken with bloatware. Mainstream distros running on compatible machines tend to 'just work', so the myth of having to be a hacker to use Linux just isn't true now. Open source is also an amazing beautiful thing and it's nice to support that as much as possible. It's a revelation to most people that they don't have to be under the control of Apple and Microsoft.
  - danjoredd 4y ago
    Makes old computers faster, less marketing, or curiosity. For me, I switched in 2016 because Microsoft borked my upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10, and I was mad enough to switch to the only competitor I knew of that would run on my hardware. Start menu stopped working, icons would disappear at random, even ctl+alt+del didn't always work. Supposedly it happened because I selected the "keep my files and programs" option, but my question is why they offered the option to begin with if it wasn't going to work? Coincidentally, Linux actually converted me into a techie
morrbo 4y ago
Ha, this is funny. I did exactly the same thing a few months ago, am now on fedora with KDE plasma (which finally added their version of fancyzones (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzones https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...) and it's all brilliant.
waynesonfire 4y ago
Ooo big bold move!! Call me when you're on FreeBSD
- speed_spread 4y ago
  FreeBSD? pshah. Call me when you're on TempleOS.
Thaxll 4y ago
I still enjoy Ubuntu, no reason to change, especially not about stuff like removing flatpack which I don't care at all. Ubuntu is still the best overall desktop distro imo, and it's still linux so you can customize it the way you want. Fedora has a release every 6 month which laughable honestly, Ubuntu has 5 years of LTS support.
- imp0cat 4y ago
  Ubuntu LTS is great, but if you have a recent AMD cpu, you have to jump through some hoops to get newer kernel (install the linux-oem-22.04c) with better support for your hw. And when you do that, you still only get linux kernel 6.1. :(
- gabrielgio 4y ago
  > Fedora has a release every 6 month which laughable honestly Why? If you want a LTS go for Ubuntu, if you are more for a rolling distro experience go for Fedora. They have different approaches. Also LTS for desktop serves me nothing. I prefer to use the latest kernel for a wider hardware support so I’d prefer Fedora. Also Fedora tents to adopt newer technology first which I’d also prefer. It is up to your needs.
- bravetraveler 4y ago
  > Fedora has a release every 6 month which laughable honestly Not to nitpick on the phrasing, but I find laughable grating. Are you aware that Fedora supports two releases at a time? You get a year of support for newer software. The ancient kernels on Ubuntu are 'laughable' at times. There are real benefits to newer kernels (and userspace), particularly for consumer hardware. It's not all good - there are quirks too. Point is, everyone has different priorities - and while LTS leans to stability, it also imitates "long term stuck". I've been watching this bug for years: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firewalld/+bug/1835188 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firewalld/+bug/183... 18.04 is going EOL very soon if not already, so this incompatibility between their releases of iptables and firewalld will never be fixed. Enjoy the stability from an upgrade. Wonderful 'support' for a clear distribution defect. I close with this: not all old software is stable, nor new/scary. It's hard thankless work, and such widely painted brushes are unhelpful. There's nuance to the nuance.
ejj3jii3i2 4y ago
Meanwhile MacOS has Ads on absolute every corner: - Ads in preinstalled Music Player to buy their apple subscription for music - Ads in App Store when you search for something - Ads in System Settings advertising their iCloud - Ads in Subscription Manager advertising their cloud services .... So basically MacOS has nothing to offer, except watching endless advertising from apple.
- rudedogg 4y ago
  There are also ads inside Apple News, even if you have a subscription. For me, the benefit of macOS or Windows is that I can keep an install running. With Linux I always end up stuck with a system that doesn't boot, and trying to figure out what happened on the command line. Maybe I should try Nix or Fedora Silverblue
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I’ve been slowly figuring out the way I like to keep a Linux install “just running”: - Debian - AMD or Intel GPU (Nvidia binary blobs sometimes break on kernel upgrades) - Avoid Snap
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      I can't say I've ever had a problem with NVidia breaking on kernel upgrades, and in general it's easy enough to just wait a day or two until the binary package catches up. It's much more important for me to have functioning GPU acceleration and in particular CUDA, than it is for me to have the latest and greatest kernel. AMD doesn't come close and still has the same problem with binary blobs, and Intel doesn't work at all, so NVidia it is, although I agree that your requirements may be different from mine.
      - klodolph 4y ago
        I’m not willing to adopt CUDA if the cost is having to babysit kernel upgrades and roll back when the GPU stops working. > I can't say I've ever had a problem with NVidia breaking on kernel upgrades… It’s definitely happened within the past two years—if I were motivated, I could dig up the specific kernel version ranges and Nvidia driver version ranges. Maybe your kernel version was pinned or something. The experience of using Nvidia on Linux is just beyond terrible, and it’s just such a high price to pay for CUDA when I just want to get work done. I suppose if I were doing lots of ML projects at home, maybe the pain would be justified, but I’m not doing ML at home. I just want the computer to work, and Nvidia makes it difficult. I had originally purchased an Nvidia card because I had bad experiences with AMD on Linux in the early 2010s, and the situation seems to have flipped—I can just use an AMD GPU + Mesa and it will work well enough. I can get work done instead of playing sysadmin. I do use Nvidia GPUs through cloud services when I want to run CUDA workloads (ML), and it’s a lot more tolerable because the problems don’t interfere with my desktop. For some reason, CUDA doesn’t work sometimes and I have to reinstall Nvidia drivers or reboot or something like that. This is apparently a known problem.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
"named after a fashion faux pas" was pretty hard for me to read after that, tbh.
- imp0cat 4y ago
  That was the funniest part of the article for me.
margorczynski 4y ago
Ubuntu really messed up their dominant position with the constant NIH syndrome or stuff like the Amazon deal. Still, it really opened up Linux to many people and promoted ease of usability to other distros. As for Fedora - I prefer it to Ubuntu mainly because the packages are more fresh. Eventually replaced with Arch and Pacman + AUR but for Arch the overhead to set it up is much greater than Fedora. At least was a few years ago, now from what I know there is some installer shipped with the image.
danjoredd 4y ago
I just got done making this switch myself. I used Ubuntu derivatives for pretty much ever since I started using Linux in 2016. I sometimes used Arch but always found myself going back to Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS, or some other Ubuntu flavor. Lately though Canonical has made a lot of choices that I personally dislike. A few weeks ago I remember hearing about how they were planning on putting non-removeable packages into their distros and official flavors, so I decided to jump ship. Mint and Pop!_OS, while not official Ubuntu flavors, still take quite a bit from the distro IIRC. Arch can be a mess sometimes if you are not careful with your setup, and Manjaro has a slew of problems on their own, so I decided to try something new. Fedora has been interesting. It feels very basic. I used to avoid flatpak quite a bit because I disliked its sandboxing, but lately I have been warming up to it. It is probably going to be my main distro if I don't try setting up Arch again
crispinb 4y ago
As a long-time (but often part-time) Linux user and critic, I find Fedora to be in a pretty sweet spot right now. The last couple of years is the first time since the Snow Leopard MacOS era that I've been pleasantly content with my desktop OS, rarely thinking about it (certainly not considering any significant switch). I just use it. This won't last, because nothing does. Another distro (or even OS) will eventually cast enough shade to tempt a move, or the Fedora project will make a daft decision. But for now it's great, and I find it peaceful not to think much about the OS I use.
phkahler 4y ago
My main issue with Fedora/gnome is that it doesn't remember where I had app windows when I reopen them. I know in the Xwindows days apps would remember and place themselves. With Wayland apps don't have access to their environment (which I understand and agree with) so IMHO that means the DE has to remember, which seems more sensible anyway.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
Ubuntu was very good in 2012 and actually great in 2016 with first class support by manufacturers (Dell, Lenovo) and commercial sw vendors (MS), great launcher/shell app (Unity) but IMO has had too many regressions: broken power management, touchpad, crappy container software just to run the same old software, broken notifications, barebone yet dysfunctional GUIs pointlessly wasting space on notebooks (gnome/gtk 3+), non-competitive power efficiency despite intrusive Windows-y system management monolith challenging the size of the Linux kernel itself and requiring frequent updates (systemd), focus on developer frameworks rather than users (Wayland), yet still multiple/HiDPI monitor support not great either ... More than any single point of criticism in isolation, it's the feeling of a dying platform (for desktop) past its peak. Doesn't help there haven't been new high profile desktop apps for ages either. RH definitely won't save the Linux desktop, they've abandoned any commercial interest/offering in that space many years ago. IMO using Fedora is just wasting your time alpha-testing RH's enterprise offerings, like CentOS is nowadays. Personally, I'm in the process of completely transitioning to Mac OS which I've always used on and off since 2003. Hope to be able to run aarch64-native Linux VMs on Mac OS for development.
- segasaturn 4y ago
  The truth is that desktop Linux is a novelty feature of the OS and mostly exists so core Linux devs can dogfood their own changes. Linux is still developed first and foremost as a server/cloud hosting OS. The main players in the Linux ecosystem have either abandoned desktop Linux (Canonical, RedHat) or never cared about it in the first place (Intel, IBM). The ones who remain on desktop Linux are extremely user-hostile and opinionated (GNOME devs) or deeply underfunded (KDE). Many of the people who develop the core desktop Linux projects do their work on MacOS!
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    Agree with many points, but Canonical very much does care about the desktop, and Linux traditionally always had a home/enthusiast user base; you could say the core Linux devs sold out to where the money is (and finally land in the arms of IBM) but that was 25 years ago. The point is, if nobody cares about the desktop, why didn't they just leave it alone (modulo driver updates) in the state it was in 2016 to make it objectively worse, without a single new app or other capability gained in return?
csk111165 4y ago
Hi everyone, Since it is a ubuntu/fedora thread, I wanted to ask one thing , as the author has suggested that we can make changes in GNOME UI, my quesiton is , how can I make changes and build them locally to see the change, I am very beginner but I know C++, python and has worked on multiple projects. I wanted to make some changes in the UI and wanted to add some custom command utility , but I am not sure how to build it and see the changes locally. Could someone please guide me, I will be obliged from the insight and will definietly help me to start with open source contribution journey Thanks
- lproven 4y ago
  If you want a desktop that you can customise yourself, don't use GNOME. It is singularly hard to modify, and the official way is by writing extensions in Javascript, which is a very hard way. There are lots of extensions to play with on https://extensions.gnome.org https://extensions.gnome.org but watch out -- your desktop will break the next time you upgrade your distro. If you want a user-modifiable desktop, try KDE or Xfce. Personally I much prefer Xfce: it's smaller, faster, and easier, IMHO. Just install Kubuntu or Xubuntu, and enjoy.
selivanovp 4y ago
In the last few months it really looks like someone payed for a web campaign against Canonical/Ubuntu. I've never seen so much articles how someone had to abandon Ubuntu for Fedora/Arch before. And the most curious thing that the reasons provided are usually very outdated. Like many years old story about Amazon deal (even when it was valid you had to write a single command to remove integration). Or horror stories about snaps that are not valid for many months already. How firefox snap is shit (I'm writing it from snapped firefox and it works perfectly and faster that .deb and flatpak alternatives). And let's just look on this article specifically. So, the guy ditched Ubuntu for Fedora because he felt that Canonical uses Ubuntu users as testers. And it's true, they do, just like RedHat uses Fedora to betatest for RHEL. So he switched to Fedora and had to fix one problem after another just because previously Canonical was fixing them and now he has to do it himself. Complains that Ubuntu is a bit behind in Gnome features is true, but it happens specifically because Gnome devs don't care much about stability of a fresh release and tend to break UX because they just felt so, or because they were unable to reintroduce some feature in a shiny new library they just created and had to rewrite entire app with it but dropping features due to lack of time/effort. Nautilus is notorious for throwing away features people love and use for years, and Canonical had to stick to older versions to not infuriate users. Fedora just provides what Gnome released and you have to deal with that. Flatpak and Flathub are nice for him, but what stopped him using both in Ubuntu? He 'feels' that Fedora is more stable, but have to deal with 3rd party software crashes, because devs tend to test everything for Ubuntu. Even the Software center crashes for him all the time (yeah, Gnome devs...) And he's happy that he switched as he feels more solid. Quote: "To get to this state I did have to put in some work and research, but not at a level of recompiling kernels. If you are comfortable googling, using the terminal for some commands and interpreting an occasional error message I would now recommend Fedora over Ubuntu." It really feels like someone has paid for an anti Canonical media campaign, because this shit is ridiculous.
- blibble 4y ago
  > Flatpak and Flathub are nice for him, but what stopped him using both in Ubuntu? https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/927262/6adb2350e2b0d2ce/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/927262/6adb2350e2b0d2ce/ > In the last few months it really looks like someone payed for a web campaign against Canonical/Ubuntu. maybe canonical's bullshit have caused enough people to hit the tipping point? I had a similar moment with microsoft with the 2015 windows 10 release

77 points by alexzeitler 4y ago

I like that Fedora is as easy to operate as Ubuntu, but that it is updated more frequently, so I've used it on my servers for years. I've used Arch and Gentoo a bit before and they felt like too much work. But now Fedora package updates feel too infrequent. I want to run the latest stuff but without the hassle of Arch/Gentoo. Maybe Debian Unstable?

packetlost 4y ago
<insert favorite distro> + Nix has been working ok for me. I run a mix of Ubuntu and Arch and use Nix on Ubuntu to bridge the gap. Fedora Silverblue looks interesting as well, though it's not clear to me whether the update frequency is higher than normal Fedora. Edit: I also like Alpine
- tapoxi 4y ago
  Silverblue tracks Fedora releases, the only difference is that you're using ostree deployments which keeps "bit rot" at bay. For the unaware, ostree treats your root filesystem somewhat like a git repo, and you add/remove packages with rpm-ostree or by using containers.
- DEDLINE 4y ago
  Just checked out Nix. I can definitely see myself using nix-shell. Do you actually use nix-build? If so, do you like it more than working with the familiar 3P tooling (i.e. docker)?
tmtvl 4y ago
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is pretty solid, the installer also makes setting up root filesystem snapshots as easy as ticking a checkbox.
segasaturn 4y ago
Debian sid is still slow as molasses on updates, probably slower than mainline Fedora releases. Best bet for a 'user friendly' distro with the latest pkgs is Fedora or Tumbleweed.
warner25 4y ago
> updates feel too infrequent Wow, really? I think I see available updates everyday if I run dnf or open GNOME Software. I just checked right now and got the 6.2.8 kernel. I guess it wasn't available on Fedora until 28 March, after being announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman on 22 March?
yamtaddle 4y ago
Coupling base OS updates and user programs together sucks, but nearly every Linux distro does it. Probably in part because the way Linux's GUI (and media generally, including audio) stack works makes cleanly decoupling the OS, including the GUI desktop portions, from programs, difficult. The distros that do rolling-release introduce a different problem of fiddliness and frequent risk to system stability, by making everything update faster and usually assuming you're running latest or near-latest of everything (and you're on your own if you're not). It's the cost of so very much choice and of having 500 entities all separately defining what "the Linux desktop" means at any given time, though I'm not sure it's always appreciated just how steep the price is. For fairly a broad category of "nice things", it's literally why we can't have them (in Linux land). IMO it's the core reason we still haven't seen the "year of the Linux Desktop".

bastard_op 4y ago

I've used Ubuntu since going full-time Linux desktop ~2006, but for many of the same reasons in here, jumped from Ubuntu to Arch circa 2018 and haven't looked back. I use Ubuntu or fedora/cent for disposable server vm's as needed/desired, but any primary boxen I interface directly with every day is Arch.

segasaturn 4y ago
I'm one of those freaks who actually liked Unity, especially towards the end it felt like such a snappy and efficient desktop interface. The switch to GNOME killed what differentiated Ubuntu on the desktop for me.
- max-m 4y ago
  I'm one of those freaks who use Unity to this day. :) In the beginning Unity was rough, but the last version was actually quite comfortable to use. At the moment I'm daily driving Ubuntu 20.04 with root on ZFS, but I'm debating really hard whether I should distro hop or not. I dislike Canonical's insistence on "snap", their advertisements in "apt" output, ... But on the other hand Ubuntu gave me mostly a "it just works" experience on my desktop for multiple years. For a while I ran Arch on another system and had quite the opposite experience. Upstream broke dependencies at least twice for example, so a lengthy session of "how the heck do I fix this" ensued.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  When Ubuntu has finally killed Gnome 2, I looked at Unity and said, no, I want gnome and booted Gnome 3. ... and after just a few minutes of using it I decided that Unity is actually not that bad! ... and after a few years it kinda grew on me, so it was a pity that Canonical killed it.
strken 4y ago
I wish there was something like Arch, except with point releases of the core operating system like FreeBSD's world but everything else on a rolling release.

gjvc 4y ago

if the author wants up-to-date packages, I wonder why they didn't move to debian testing

treve 4y ago
I also want something that's quite popular and has good support. I don't want to be tester, as it's my main work machine.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Isn't there a difference between running latest stable vs testing yet still not being stale? I'm not using linux desktop as a daily driver, my linux use comes in CLI-only form, so I'm just not familiar with why something isn't receiving "good support" in this conversation yet is being actively worked on to even have "tester" as an option.
- phoronixrly 4y ago
  Fedora is probably not your thing then. You'd just be a tester for Red Hat
- imp0cat 4y ago
  It's quite stable actually, on par with Ubuntu. The stuff with rough edges is kept in the unstable repos.

candiddevmike 4y ago

Just started doing slightly the opposite (going from Debian to Fedora). For me, Debian keeps screwing with upstream packages in ways that introduce unintended bugs, Ubuntu is probably similar. Also really disappointed systemd 253 didn't make it into bookworm. Fedora feels closer to upstream (both version and build) without being a rolling release like Arch, and I'll get full podman support.

koito17 4y ago

I was first introduced to Linux with Ubuntu around 2009 - 2010. I used it up until 2014 or so, then toured my way around Windows and Mac OS. I'm currently on a Mac, but at a past job I had to boot straight into a Linux VM, and Fedora was fantastic. I always hear how Ubuntu nowadays makes a lot of questionable decisions, how Snaps are bad, and so on. I also hear a lot of criticism about Flatpak. But Fedora 36 more or less "just worked". I disliked GNOME 3, but the GNOME 40 interface is a huge improvement. I also like how Fedora is able to just get out of my way. There are no quirks added to the desktop environment besides a little Fedora watermark. Flatpaks more or less "just works" for me, and I can hardly tell the difference between Flatpaks and "native packages" on GNOME Software. They both are one click, enter password, wait, then ready. DNF is slow as molasses, though, but otherwise Fedora was straightforward to install and use daily for development. I'm very likely going to run Fedora on a Framework 16 when the time comes to replace my MacBook.

grumpyprole 4y ago
Ubuntu offer an LTS distro though. In theory this should be more stable than Fedora. Perhaps it matters less for the desktop.
- mixedCase 4y ago
  On the desktop, newer kernel usually means more stable, although it becomes less true as the hardware running it ages.
- ladyanita22 4y ago
  On the Fedora side you can have CentOS Stream
  - spicyusername 4y ago
    That is the exact opposite of LTS. CentOS-stream is a rolling release beta version of the next RHEL.
    - 4y ago

unpopularopp 4y ago

I wish there was something like Debian (just plain boring works) but more up to date. I run Debian but certain packages are really out of date and sometimes have to tinker around. I don't like the snap in Ubuntu... Maybe Linux Mint or Debian version of Mint?

ojhughes 4y ago
Debian Sid might be worth a try
- rektide 4y ago
  Sid is pretty good. Five years ago I made the switch from Debian/testing (with unstable pinned on at low priority) to Sid. I'd probably recommend the first config though, testing with unstable pinned on. It's definitely nowhere near as fresh as unstablr, but still often much better. And you can install fresh versions of things you care about, via apt-pinning. Unstae has never caused a real problem. Sometimes a dependency might not be resolvable, and you have to either wait a bit while a dependency makes its way to availability (days or sometimes rarely weeks), or you can go dig up slightly-older unstable versions of packages on the website, or you just apt-pin testing on (at low priority) and install the significantly older version. All in all Sid (unstable) has been quite lovely and I'd never switch back. But being unable to install something has been an issue I see a couple times a year. Testing, with Unstable pinned on gives you a nice position of getting what you want fresh & everything else being pretty dammed reliable. I also wouldn't discourage anyone from running Sid either, but it has some pretty small caveats.
switch007 4y ago
Fedora?
prottog 4y ago
I'm running bullseye on desktop and haven't found anything terribly out of date, but it was first released a year and half ago so maybe it will happen soon, and of course YMMV. I find that most local development is containerized anyway so how recent my desktop OS doesn't factor as much as it used to.

habibur 4y ago

My reason to choose it was its excellent hardware support. Installed without any hiccup on any hardware I tried. That wasn't true for other distributions at that time.

yamtaddle 4y ago
From its earliest releases through IIRC '08 or so, one of the nicest things about it was that its default installation and config choices were obviously better for most users than what other distros picked. "No, goddamnit, I don't want Epiphany or whatever, I want Firefox". Sure enough, Ubuntu installs Firefox by default. "If you've got wifi and you want to manage it from the GUI you'll want to install and configure X, Y, and Z, and you'll need to uninstall the default that Y replaces because it's bad" Or, you know, why doesn't the damn distro do that for me? And Ubuntu (mostly) did. Any other distro at the time, I'd have to install & uninstall a bunch of crap on first boot, or spend time selecting packages in the installer. Ubuntu was the only one I could just hit "install" on and end up pretty close to a reasonable initial set-up. [EDIT] Of course, that went to hell pretty much immediately when they started trying to "lead" on Linux desktop with their own projects, rather than curating & tweaking existing community software. I despise most of what Red Hat's created and done along the way, but they've played the same game and clearly come out on top—Ubuntu both made their distro worse and burned resources getting their ass whupped by Red Hat at the influence-and-control-the-Linux-desktop game, over and over. Ubuntu's init system competitor? Dead, Red Hat's systemd won. Their GTK alternative DE to Red Hat dominated Gnome? Dead, Gnome won. Mir? Dead, Red Hat backed Wayland won. Snap? I dunno but it sucks and everyone hates it so I assume it's heading the same way, and Flatpack or AppImage will win instead (probably Flatpack, though I prefer AppImage).
- tmtvl 4y ago
  Unity ain't dead, Ubuntu Unity is an official flavour, it's a bit like Mint's Cinnamon (though less widely available).
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Well, technically none of those projects are dead. Even Mir's a Wayland compositor now(!?). All failed, though.

mpsprd 4y ago

For work, I use Ubuntu+i3wm. Imo, when working with corporate environment with mostly windows, .deb distros are hard to beat for general availability of packages. It also just works (even if Firefox snap sucks) Also Ubuntu is generally the most supported Linux distro from my experience. I've used fedora for work, but it's often more friction to get something installed. For example: teams dropped its .deb release officially not too long ago. A week later, some kind soul releases a snap with an electron wrapper of the webapp.

shrx 4y ago
Why not just run it as a chromium app at that point?
- mpsprd 4y ago
  Webcam/mic permissions were more painful iirc, but I mainly didn't want to have 2 full browsers open simultaneously.

flaburgan 4y ago

For non tech people I just install Mint. Proprietary hardware support, an interface similar to windows, and it just works. Perfect.

lopatin 4y ago
What's the reason to install Linux for non-tech people?
- grubbs 4y ago
  My local library installed Linux on all of their desktops when a refresh cycle was needed. Basically prevented them from buying all new computers at 10s of thousands of $$$.
- FpUser 4y ago
  Less spying and relative stability if the original install went ok. Of course productivity might suffer in case one uses Windows / Mac only software
- jmfldn 4y ago
  Unless you need software that only runs on Mac / Windows you get a more efficient, faster OS, not stricken with bloatware. Mainstream distros running on compatible machines tend to 'just work', so the myth of having to be a hacker to use Linux just isn't true now. Open source is also an amazing beautiful thing and it's nice to support that as much as possible. It's a revelation to most people that they don't have to be under the control of Apple and Microsoft.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  Makes old computers faster, less marketing, or curiosity. For me, I switched in 2016 because Microsoft borked my upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10, and I was mad enough to switch to the only competitor I knew of that would run on my hardware. Start menu stopped working, icons would disappear at random, even ctl+alt+del didn't always work. Supposedly it happened because I selected the "keep my files and programs" option, but my question is why they offered the option to begin with if it wasn't going to work? Coincidentally, Linux actually converted me into a techie

morrbo 4y ago

Ha, this is funny. I did exactly the same thing a few months ago, am now on fedora with KDE plasma (which finally added their version of fancyzones (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzones https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...) and it's all brilliant.

waynesonfire 4y ago

Ooo big bold move!! Call me when you're on FreeBSD

speed_spread 4y ago
FreeBSD? pshah. Call me when you're on TempleOS.

Thaxll 4y ago

I still enjoy Ubuntu, no reason to change, especially not about stuff like removing flatpack which I don't care at all. Ubuntu is still the best overall desktop distro imo, and it's still linux so you can customize it the way you want. Fedora has a release every 6 month which laughable honestly, Ubuntu has 5 years of LTS support.

imp0cat 4y ago
Ubuntu LTS is great, but if you have a recent AMD cpu, you have to jump through some hoops to get newer kernel (install the linux-oem-22.04c) with better support for your hw. And when you do that, you still only get linux kernel 6.1. :(
gabrielgio 4y ago
> Fedora has a release every 6 month which laughable honestly Why? If you want a LTS go for Ubuntu, if you are more for a rolling distro experience go for Fedora. They have different approaches. Also LTS for desktop serves me nothing. I prefer to use the latest kernel for a wider hardware support so I’d prefer Fedora. Also Fedora tents to adopt newer technology first which I’d also prefer. It is up to your needs.
bravetraveler 4y ago
> Fedora has a release every 6 month which laughable honestly Not to nitpick on the phrasing, but I find laughable grating. Are you aware that Fedora supports two releases at a time? You get a year of support for newer software. The ancient kernels on Ubuntu are 'laughable' at times. There are real benefits to newer kernels (and userspace), particularly for consumer hardware. It's not all good - there are quirks too. Point is, everyone has different priorities - and while LTS leans to stability, it also imitates "long term stuck". I've been watching this bug for years: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firewalld/+bug/1835188 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firewalld/+bug/183... 18.04 is going EOL very soon if not already, so this incompatibility between their releases of iptables and firewalld will never be fixed. Enjoy the stability from an upgrade. Wonderful 'support' for a clear distribution defect. I close with this: not all old software is stable, nor new/scary. It's hard thankless work, and such widely painted brushes are unhelpful. There's nuance to the nuance.

ejj3jii3i2 4y ago

Meanwhile MacOS has Ads on absolute every corner: - Ads in preinstalled Music Player to buy their apple subscription for music - Ads in App Store when you search for something - Ads in System Settings advertising their iCloud - Ads in Subscription Manager advertising their cloud services .... So basically MacOS has nothing to offer, except watching endless advertising from apple.

rudedogg 4y ago
There are also ads inside Apple News, even if you have a subscription. For me, the benefit of macOS or Windows is that I can keep an install running. With Linux I always end up stuck with a system that doesn't boot, and trying to figure out what happened on the command line. Maybe I should try Nix or Fedora Silverblue
- klodolph 4y ago
  I’ve been slowly figuring out the way I like to keep a Linux install “just running”: - Debian - AMD or Intel GPU (Nvidia binary blobs sometimes break on kernel upgrades) - Avoid Snap
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    I can't say I've ever had a problem with NVidia breaking on kernel upgrades, and in general it's easy enough to just wait a day or two until the binary package catches up. It's much more important for me to have functioning GPU acceleration and in particular CUDA, than it is for me to have the latest and greatest kernel. AMD doesn't come close and still has the same problem with binary blobs, and Intel doesn't work at all, so NVidia it is, although I agree that your requirements may be different from mine.
    - klodolph 4y ago
      I’m not willing to adopt CUDA if the cost is having to babysit kernel upgrades and roll back when the GPU stops working. > I can't say I've ever had a problem with NVidia breaking on kernel upgrades… It’s definitely happened within the past two years—if I were motivated, I could dig up the specific kernel version ranges and Nvidia driver version ranges. Maybe your kernel version was pinned or something. The experience of using Nvidia on Linux is just beyond terrible, and it’s just such a high price to pay for CUDA when I just want to get work done. I suppose if I were doing lots of ML projects at home, maybe the pain would be justified, but I’m not doing ML at home. I just want the computer to work, and Nvidia makes it difficult. I had originally purchased an Nvidia card because I had bad experiences with AMD on Linux in the early 2010s, and the situation seems to have flipped—I can just use an AMD GPU + Mesa and it will work well enough. I can get work done instead of playing sysadmin. I do use Nvidia GPUs through cloud services when I want to run CUDA workloads (ML), and it’s a lot more tolerable because the problems don’t interfere with my desktop. For some reason, CUDA doesn’t work sometimes and I have to reinstall Nvidia drivers or reboot or something like that. This is apparently a known problem.

jonnycomputer 4y ago

"named after a fashion faux pas" was pretty hard for me to read after that, tbh.

imp0cat 4y ago
That was the funniest part of the article for me.

margorczynski 4y ago

Ubuntu really messed up their dominant position with the constant NIH syndrome or stuff like the Amazon deal. Still, it really opened up Linux to many people and promoted ease of usability to other distros. As for Fedora - I prefer it to Ubuntu mainly because the packages are more fresh. Eventually replaced with Arch and Pacman + AUR but for Arch the overhead to set it up is much greater than Fedora. At least was a few years ago, now from what I know there is some installer shipped with the image.

danjoredd 4y ago

I just got done making this switch myself. I used Ubuntu derivatives for pretty much ever since I started using Linux in 2016. I sometimes used Arch but always found myself going back to Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS, or some other Ubuntu flavor. Lately though Canonical has made a lot of choices that I personally dislike. A few weeks ago I remember hearing about how they were planning on putting non-removeable packages into their distros and official flavors, so I decided to jump ship. Mint and Pop!_OS, while not official Ubuntu flavors, still take quite a bit from the distro IIRC. Arch can be a mess sometimes if you are not careful with your setup, and Manjaro has a slew of problems on their own, so I decided to try something new. Fedora has been interesting. It feels very basic. I used to avoid flatpak quite a bit because I disliked its sandboxing, but lately I have been warming up to it. It is probably going to be my main distro if I don't try setting up Arch again

crispinb 4y ago

As a long-time (but often part-time) Linux user and critic, I find Fedora to be in a pretty sweet spot right now. The last couple of years is the first time since the Snow Leopard MacOS era that I've been pleasantly content with my desktop OS, rarely thinking about it (certainly not considering any significant switch). I just use it. This won't last, because nothing does. Another distro (or even OS) will eventually cast enough shade to tempt a move, or the Fedora project will make a daft decision. But for now it's great, and I find it peaceful not to think much about the OS I use.

phkahler 4y ago

My main issue with Fedora/gnome is that it doesn't remember where I had app windows when I reopen them. I know in the Xwindows days apps would remember and place themselves. With Wayland apps don't have access to their environment (which I understand and agree with) so IMHO that means the DE has to remember, which seems more sensible anyway.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

Ubuntu was very good in 2012 and actually great in 2016 with first class support by manufacturers (Dell, Lenovo) and commercial sw vendors (MS), great launcher/shell app (Unity) but IMO has had too many regressions: broken power management, touchpad, crappy container software just to run the same old software, broken notifications, barebone yet dysfunctional GUIs pointlessly wasting space on notebooks (gnome/gtk 3+), non-competitive power efficiency despite intrusive Windows-y system management monolith challenging the size of the Linux kernel itself and requiring frequent updates (systemd), focus on developer frameworks rather than users (Wayland), yet still multiple/HiDPI monitor support not great either ... More than any single point of criticism in isolation, it's the feeling of a dying platform (for desktop) past its peak. Doesn't help there haven't been new high profile desktop apps for ages either. RH definitely won't save the Linux desktop, they've abandoned any commercial interest/offering in that space many years ago. IMO using Fedora is just wasting your time alpha-testing RH's enterprise offerings, like CentOS is nowadays. Personally, I'm in the process of completely transitioning to Mac OS which I've always used on and off since 2003. Hope to be able to run aarch64-native Linux VMs on Mac OS for development.

segasaturn 4y ago
The truth is that desktop Linux is a novelty feature of the OS and mostly exists so core Linux devs can dogfood their own changes. Linux is still developed first and foremost as a server/cloud hosting OS. The main players in the Linux ecosystem have either abandoned desktop Linux (Canonical, RedHat) or never cared about it in the first place (Intel, IBM). The ones who remain on desktop Linux are extremely user-hostile and opinionated (GNOME devs) or deeply underfunded (KDE). Many of the people who develop the core desktop Linux projects do their work on MacOS!
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  Agree with many points, but Canonical very much does care about the desktop, and Linux traditionally always had a home/enthusiast user base; you could say the core Linux devs sold out to where the money is (and finally land in the arms of IBM) but that was 25 years ago. The point is, if nobody cares about the desktop, why didn't they just leave it alone (modulo driver updates) in the state it was in 2016 to make it objectively worse, without a single new app or other capability gained in return?

csk111165 4y ago

Hi everyone, Since it is a ubuntu/fedora thread, I wanted to ask one thing , as the author has suggested that we can make changes in GNOME UI, my quesiton is , how can I make changes and build them locally to see the change, I am very beginner but I know C++, python and has worked on multiple projects. I wanted to make some changes in the UI and wanted to add some custom command utility , but I am not sure how to build it and see the changes locally. Could someone please guide me, I will be obliged from the insight and will definietly help me to start with open source contribution journey Thanks

lproven 4y ago
If you want a desktop that you can customise yourself, don't use GNOME. It is singularly hard to modify, and the official way is by writing extensions in Javascript, which is a very hard way. There are lots of extensions to play with on https://extensions.gnome.org https://extensions.gnome.org but watch out -- your desktop will break the next time you upgrade your distro. If you want a user-modifiable desktop, try KDE or Xfce. Personally I much prefer Xfce: it's smaller, faster, and easier, IMHO. Just install Kubuntu or Xubuntu, and enjoy.

selivanovp 4y ago

In the last few months it really looks like someone payed for a web campaign against Canonical/Ubuntu. I've never seen so much articles how someone had to abandon Ubuntu for Fedora/Arch before. And the most curious thing that the reasons provided are usually very outdated. Like many years old story about Amazon deal (even when it was valid you had to write a single command to remove integration). Or horror stories about snaps that are not valid for many months already. How firefox snap is shit (I'm writing it from snapped firefox and it works perfectly and faster that .deb and flatpak alternatives). And let's just look on this article specifically. So, the guy ditched Ubuntu for Fedora because he felt that Canonical uses Ubuntu users as testers. And it's true, they do, just like RedHat uses Fedora to betatest for RHEL. So he switched to Fedora and had to fix one problem after another just because previously Canonical was fixing them and now he has to do it himself. Complains that Ubuntu is a bit behind in Gnome features is true, but it happens specifically because Gnome devs don't care much about stability of a fresh release and tend to break UX because they just felt so, or because they were unable to reintroduce some feature in a shiny new library they just created and had to rewrite entire app with it but dropping features due to lack of time/effort. Nautilus is notorious for throwing away features people love and use for years, and Canonical had to stick to older versions to not infuriate users. Fedora just provides what Gnome released and you have to deal with that. Flatpak and Flathub are nice for him, but what stopped him using both in Ubuntu? He 'feels' that Fedora is more stable, but have to deal with 3rd party software crashes, because devs tend to test everything for Ubuntu. Even the Software center crashes for him all the time (yeah, Gnome devs...) And he's happy that he switched as he feels more solid. Quote: "To get to this state I did have to put in some work and research, but not at a level of recompiling kernels. If you are comfortable googling, using the terminal for some commands and interpreting an occasional error message I would now recommend Fedora over Ubuntu." It really feels like someone has paid for an anti Canonical media campaign, because this shit is ridiculous.

blibble 4y ago
> Flatpak and Flathub are nice for him, but what stopped him using both in Ubuntu? https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/927262/6adb2350e2b0d2ce/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/927262/6adb2350e2b0d2ce/ > In the last few months it really looks like someone payed for a web campaign against Canonical/Ubuntu. maybe canonical's bullshit have caused enough people to hit the tipping point? I had a similar moment with microsoft with the 2015 windows 10 release