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Lately I've been running Fedora. Early Ubtuntu & Mark Shuttleworth were a big part of my teens and my first real experience with a Linux Desktop and Philosophy
by thx-2718 3y ago
Lately I've been running Fedora.
Early Ubtuntu & Mark Shuttleworth were a big part of my teens and my first real experience with a Linux Desktop and Philosophy tied to Open Source Software.
It's been fun watching Ubuntu evolve over the years and see distros like Mint evolve off of them as well.
- elischleifer 3y agoDevil's advocate...how much do we really care about these different distros at this point. The world lives out of the browser. As long as I have chrome and VS Code I'm pretty good to go.
- WD-42 3y agoWhen your browser is shipped via a snap and is 2 versions out of date because the update mechanism sucks and has been failing silently for over a month, it makes a difference. There's my personal anecdote.
- tifik 3y agoFirefox through snap has been the last straw for me as well. Not quite enough to ragequit on the spot, but next time I have to install a new OS, it won't be Ubuntu.
- ffjffsfr 3y agowhy do you install it from snap? I'm using ubuntu and don't install from snap most of the time.
- WD-42 3y agoIt's the default now.
- netule 3y agoYup, and installing Firefox via apt installs a snap as well. I manually had to add a separate apt repo for Firefox alone. I seem to have to do this more and more for things that just can't be slow on my machine.
- midoridensha 3y agoYep, I did the same. But I don't want to mess around with hacks like that any more, so my next distro isn't going to be Ubuntu, even though I've used some Ubuntu variant for over a decade now. I'm looking at Tumbleweed for my next distro.
- barbariangrunge 3y agoI like the security/privacy promises of options like snaps. It seems like other issues, like file sizes, aren’t the worst. And getting it to match your os options seems like a solvable problem. Could somebody explain why they hate these systems?
- everdrive 3y agoI still use applications and my file system.
- mdp2021 3y ago> The world lives out of the browser Exactly: my productive environment is «out of the browser» and I want it to be as fitting as possible, for my efficiency and comfort.
- jonathankoren 3y agoAgree. OSes are practically irrelevant. The only thing I need is a web browser and a terminal with posix like commands. I can (almost) get that on Windows these days. I’ve run Mac for 20 years now, and before that Linux for almost 10. I can’t think of anything I lost when switching beyond focus follows mouse.
- markstos 3y agoYou also need some form of window management, and if you like tiling windows, Linux has the most options by far.
- zdragnar 3y agoIf you miss focus follows mouse and like tiling windows, i3 and sway both have that option. Others might too, those are the only two I have experience with though.
- jonathankoren 3y agoThat's one of the jobs of Finder. And no, I don't like tiling windows.
- pjmlp 3y agoOne of the downfalls of Linux Desktop, besides the fragmentation, was Apple and Microsoft figuring out that a large majority wants a POSIX like experience, and aren't that deep onto GNU/Linux anyway. There is a certain irony when the Linux Desktop is on minority when looking around laptops at FOSDEM.
- markstos 3y agoI didn't care much about one distro vs another until I found a lot of packages I wanted were packaged for Arch Linux and not Ubuntu Linux, and the Arch Wiki was better than Ubuntu's docs. And also, yes "Snaps" were annoying.
- lofatdairy 3y agoImo package managers/repos, update cycles, and installation process can still be a reasonable differentiator between distros. Admittedly these decisions are fairly minor -- most popular packages are available on the major repos and you probably aren't installing your distro every day. But even though most the time I'm just living in nvim and Firefox, if adding or changing something becomes a chore it can really expand quickly as I might avoid making a positive change to my system just because I can't overcome the initial inertia from having to bend my distro to my will. Then again, that's probably a sign that I should swallow my pride and switch from Arch to Manjaro at some point.
- orbital-decay 3y agoGood for you I guess, but most features I need aren't offered by web apps. Paradoxically, Linux is the only platform where desktop apps are the default.
- dabluecaboose 3y agoLinux still has its fair share of electron wrapper "applications"
- JohnFen 3y agoThere are some, but nothing of real importance (to me, YMMV). There are no electron-based applications that I use.
- JohnFen 3y ago> The world lives out of the browser Your world does, and I know that it does for many. But mine absolutely doesn't -- there isn't anything critical I use that is browser-based. And many are like me. Different strokes and all that.
- dboreham 3y agoSome people run servers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Topfi 3y agoFedora Workstation and especially Silverblue made Linux work for me in a way no distribution I have used before has been able to. Being bleeding edge yet stable and reliable just made it so pleasant, coming from a mix of Slitaz, Elementary and Manjaro.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y agoYeah, I agree (although with Kinoite because fuck GNOME). It still has plenty of issues, but at least I don't feel like I'm constantly fighting the system just to use software.
- mrtedbear 3y agoAlso switched to Silverblue and love it. Ubuntu wasn't especially bad, it was more that Silverblue made so much sense. It fixed the issues I was having with other distros where messiness would creep into my setup over time. I also tried NixOS, but it felt too rigid. Silverblue offered the same benefits of immutability without a loss of flexibility.
- howinteresting 3y agoDo you do development on it? If so, how do you work around Silverblue's restrictions? Curious about people's experiences.
- mrtedbear 3y agoI do. I use toolboxes for pretty much all my development. I've scripted the setup each type of toolbox I use, so they can be reproduced. I use a terminal editor (neovim), but I think it's possible to run vscode from a toolbox too[1]. For graphical apps (browsers etc.) the flatpaks are very handy. The above setup means I don't really need to layer much in the OS, mainly drivers and common terminal utilities. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/107lvlf/silverblue_questions_toolbox_vscode/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/107lvlf/silverblue_...
- akvadrako 3y ago
- kitsunesoba 3y agoFedora isn't perfect, but it can go for weeks without updates and then update cleanly reliably, which is not something you typically get with rolling distributions. This makes it well suited for use as a dual booted secondary OS or VM OS.
- sh34r 3y agoIf you desire stability and you’re already used to Ubuntu derivatives, there’s always Debian.
- kitsunesoba 3y agoThe issue with Debian is how old application packages are, and I'm not really into Flatpak. Fedora's packages are pretty close in recency to what's shipping on other platforms.
- sh34r 3y agoStability and update frequency are inversely correlated. It’s largely an unavoidable trade-off. It makes perfect sense to me that you’d feel that Fedora struck a better balance for you. Many people prefer Debian based distros. Some people use Debian on the desktop because they prefer less frequent updates (among other reasons). I’m just stating the obvious here, really.
- mcagl 3y agoDebian testing is more stable than other "so-called stable" distros, and has often newer packages than the contemporary ubuntu version.
- lmm 3y agoDebian testing puts you in a pretty bad place in terms of security updates; you're not getting new upstream releases as quickly as unstable/experimental, but they don't do dedicated backports of security fixes like with stable.
- 3y ago
- bjablonski 3y agoI'm super happy with Fedora for ~ 4 years. It's always one/two versions behind (currently 37) and it never gave me any problems (compared to manjaro/arch/ubuntu and few other smaller distro that I've used, but names escapes me) Fedora seems faster than Ubuntu out of the box on the same hardware. It's also rock solid from my experience. That may be somehow related to docker doing heavy lifting when needed. Ofc YMMV.
- barbariangrunge 3y agoI found the installer was lacking something I typically wanted. Disk encryption maybe? Or maybe it’s partitioning or file system options were limited? Can’t recall. It kept me from trying it out full time at one point
- speed_spread 3y agoThe installer having disk encryption is one of the reasons I chose Fedora. I use Kinoite with btrfs over LUKS, FWIW.