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Finally done with the distro-hop: My return to Fedora (unknownuniverse.uk)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.

Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.

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[–] 30 points 2 months ago (16 children)

I honestly think it's the best distro so far. Which sucks since it is so reliant on RedHat. I prefer to avoid corporate related distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, but I must admit they have a better experience right out of the box. I still want to give NixOS a try and maybe Gentoo, but after that I will probably come back to Fedora just like you...until something I think might be better comes along.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 months ago* (7 children)

    I personally prefer OpenSuSE, but Fedora is reasonably close second.

    One reason OpenSuSE wins out for me is admittedly just because it's not a US based project or related to a US based company like RedHat. Not that SuSE is "good" as a sponsor company; it's just based in Germany and owned by a Swedish investment company, which edges out based in the US and owned by a mega corp like IBM. I know both OpenSuSE and Fedora are mostly independent, but both are under some control of their main corporate sponsors. So I prefer European.

    Maybe that's silly, but I have lost a lot of trust in the US legal system, project governance and their ability to exist without interference by the US state.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Are you talking about Leap or Tumbleweed?

    As far as Leap goes. Isn't it a bit behind compared to Fedora in terms of software package versions? And aren't their package repos a bit smaller/limited in terms of what's available?

    I'm shopping for a new long term distro myself and can't seem to make up my mind. I was set on Debian stable, but the software is kinda old. Especially for desktop environments like KDE Plasma. There's some really cool stuff that came out in the more recent versions and I don't want to wait 2 years before getting them.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    PikaOS is Debian-based and maintaining its own repository based on trixie and unstable with similar patches to Bazzite & team. I've been using it as a daily driver on 3-4 systems for at least a year or two with no serious issues, and the updates are quick to fix any minor issues. Excellent for gaming. It's probably not up to CachyOS gaming standards nor Debian stability but I find it's a comfortable spot for me.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Fedora is limited to non-licensed products in the base repos IIRC. But there is EPEL and RPMfusion that provide a lot of additional packages.

    There are also copr repos which I think are similar to AUR in that they are user submitted.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    I would say for most people Fedora is one of the best options due to having a release cycle that is quick but not too quick, coming with all sorts of different DEs (GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, XFCE, hell, even Budgie), and not really having any issues in terms of usability (aside from installing Nvidia drivers, apparently that isn't very smooth but I have no experience with this)

    Mint is nice too and super easy to use, but you need to like Cinnamon (or XFCE and MATE).

    I personally love EndeavourOS, which is Arch-based and minimal OOTB, but it is definitely not for everyone. CachyOS falls under a similar box, being an Arch-based distro.

    To be honest, in the modern age, there is no such thing as a bad Linux distro (except maybe Manjaro, which feels a bit like the worst of all worlds). Fedora, Mint, the buntus, the Arch derivatives, etc. are all really neat pieces of software!

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    I've been rocking PikaOS for a little while now and I'm pleasantly surprised. Debian Cid based with prepackaged gaming tools. It's been good

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    I was interested in Pika, but I took the leap and just went straight Debian. I'm happy.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (4 children)

    Are you on the stable branch? Curious how it is for gaming. I was having issues on Mint (which is similarly stable), but they all went away when I swapped to PikaOS, kinda skipped over Debian

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    It's great, the bad experiences I've had are due to my shitty non muxing or whatever dual graphics card laptop, which pika won't fix. Just make sure you check your card is supported by the current version of the driver. I'll reply again to show you where you can look for that info.

    I'm assuming you can also "back port" it from unstable.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Pika might fix that actually. Most of the patches and custom stuff Pika adds is around obscure and difficult graphics card configurations, with extra kernel modules and stuff like that specifically for gaming on modern graphics hardware. That's literally its main value proposition. You could try a LiveUSB and see if it works any better, but the PikaOS second-stage installer (after the base system is installed) also has a bunch of options for various driver and kernel versions and variations that might help.

    That said if you're happy where you're at there's no reason rocking the boat, and Debian's pretty solid. But maybe keep it in mind for next time you feel like trying something different on that system.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Yes, but I tried Pika after realising I had the issue, and it didn't solve it, so I'm good. Like you said, this OS is stable and there's no use rocking the boat.

    Also, I prefer the security of the slow and steady direct debian packages instead of the packages as looked after by two guys.

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    • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Did the same. We’re a mostly fedora shop these days. Debian based for servers.

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    • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    Recently switched to Fedora myself, and I could not be happier ❤️

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    [–] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    Tried Fedora Silver blue or universalblue spins? Unless you do serious embedded development work (which takes more setup on atomic distros), then I have experienced that it is less work in general in setup and upkeep.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago*

    Yeah, Silverblue is nice; not my main distro, though. I came from many years of Gentoo on almost all machines I had. Debian stable is currently the most practical for me.

    The immutable variant of Fedora is nice for the low maintenance computers, although I needed to get my head around podman to not overuse rpm-ostree. So far so good. I think it will not replace the distro on my main machine, but I see the way it works as a general potential future. An immutable variant of Debian stable would be something I'd consider switching for.

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    • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    I'm actually switching from Fedora today. miserable experience.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Care to elaborate? Not saying I doubt you, it's just the polar opposite of my experience and I'm curious why that is.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    i don't know if it was just the hardware I had it on or what but had to reinstall it a couple times as for whatever reason the desktop manager kept breaking, it wouldn't kick over to a TTY when hitting ctl+alt+f2, it decides on a whim when it will or won't display the grub menu, audio issues as well as AMD GPU issues of all things which I found weird, random kick outs back to the desktop manager or just straight up crashing (using Fedora KDE which I wish I picked a different "spin") and I found it sluggish as well as dnf being slow regardless of the fact I edited the dnf.conf to set install_weak_deps to false, max parallel downloads to 10 and fastestmirror to true.

    Sorry but I just don't like it. Not to say I think it's a bad distro it's just clearly not one for me.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Oof, yeah, that sounds painful. It does sound like some kind of hardware-related issue, maybe the default settings in the Fedora kernel are seriously aberrant when mixed with one or more of your hardware components? Given the broad range of issues (GPU, network speed, audio), I'd be inclined to suspect the problem was related somehow to something core/common like CPU or mobo. Almost certainly not a pure hardware fault, given the problems didn't follow the hardware when you changed distros.

    Sorry but I just don't like it. Not to say I think it's a bad distro it's just clearly not one for me.

    I totally get it. Doesn't take much of that kind of frustration to leave a bad taste in your mouth. I had some perplexing intermittent lockup issues years ago that turned out to be BTRFS, or at least the issue went away when the VMs were rebuilt with a different root FS. I'm still leery of BTRFS, even though it was a fairly esoteric stack (SLES, ESX, NFS datastores served from a ZFS-backed storage server), so entirely possible the fault didn't lie exclusively with the filesystem. But I still avoid it, just because I've been burned once.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Well to follow up I decided that this could potentially be more of a me problem than a fedora one. And actually...it was a KDE problem. I decided to switch to a basic WM, DWM, on it and low and behold all my problems just vanished. no crashing, switching to a TTY suddenly started working, audio and video was fine, no kick backs to the login screen. hell even something that SHOULD be unrelated as DNF suddenly improved.

    So I'm not sure if I just got a wonky KDE install or an update went wrong with it but I'm more than happy to ditch KDE to keep using Fedora. I'd reinstall with a different spin but honestly at this point I spent a week or so setting this up i'll just keep using the KDE version without the KDE. I'd like to switch the DM to something other than Plasma Login Manager but at this point I'm not sure if that's a can of worms I should attempt to open.

    So a question would be, is it a good idea to keep using Fedora KDE without using KDE? I'd just hate to update a system for something that I'm not going to use. Or would I just be better off reinstalling Fedora with a basic spin or a WM focused one.

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    • [–] 4 points 2 months ago*

    I started with RedHat 2.0 and CDE, then spent almost 30 years jumping around including almost a decade on Arch BTW, and now I'm back at Fedora and Plasma. Something catastrophic will need to happen to knock me off it.

    The circle of life.

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    [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    Just read the title and made me realized I use 4 different OS....

    Main pc: cachyos Steamdeck: steamos Tiny server: Ubuntu server RaspberryPi: dietpi

    I mean yo could say two if you just say "2 arch based and two Debian based"

    But never thought about it.

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    [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    M'linux

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    [–] 3 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    It shows you haven't tried Void Linux. 🤪

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I have looked at Void a little but honestly the handling of the package manager and even it's name just throw me of for some reason. Why do you like it?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Precisely, the package manager is one of the best things about it. Quite fast. I like it because it doesn't have systemd and it's one of the few distros left with a Unix philosophy. A very well-made distro.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    OP posted to this sub with an article about void 17 days ago. OOP, sure maybe.

    I'm trying Void on old hardware and it feels pretty usable. Package availability still an issue*. I've also noticed some dependencies not getting added (git not included with programming lang that needs it for its package manager, installed archive manager engrampa and it couldn't actually open zips until I added another package for that). I'll probably keep this on my old machine just for testing musl compilation.

    * appimages might help, other solutions with redundancy not so much with extra downloading

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yes, the installation is similar to Arch, it gives you the versatility to do an installation however you want without software blobs.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    I like that Void seems to better handle less frequent updates than Arch, but my point is that the package system seems to be a bit of a step backwards. (which to be fair doesn't seem like anything unique to Void, optional dependencies is commonly not a thing or is inconvenient like OpenSUSE's patterns)

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    • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    I haven't done any distro hopping since I tried CachyOS.

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    [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    The correct choice is NixOS, fyi

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    [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I recently switched to Fedora after using PopOS for years. I like it because it’s just less… fiddly? Like, I don’t like COSMIC because it just doesn’t feel ready yet, and I honestly prefer DNF over APT. It has a very ‘set it and forget it’ sort of feel, which is great for a server.

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    [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I like fedora. I used it 20 years ago. I recently switched a laptop over to it, quickly realized atomic distros are kind of a PITA if you know how to linux and hopped off.

    It feels... mature? Clearly there's a lot of work that has gone into making fedora a "Set and Forget" experience, the normie distro... if you don't try to use it like a windows machine.

    If you want a machine that just works, doesn't bug you about just frankly stupid shit that's been solved already (looking at you kwallet), and feels like a computer that your grandma could check her email on without feeling like she's starting the falcon's hyperdrive, Fedora Atomic Silverblue is the distro for you.

    I am not a shill. I don't use fedora on any of my machines currently (unless you include my partner's bazzite rig, I don't, personally). I don't plan to use fedora on anything currently, but the next time I get a laptop that's meant to be "Just a fuckin computer", you bet your ass I'm going straight to Fedora Atomic Silverblue.

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