There comes a time when everyone has to sit and think about what they use on their PC, especially if you're on Linux. For me, Arch Linux (via EndeavourOS) just wasn't working out any more and so I've moved to Fedora.
While I was reasonably happy with Arch Linux, it's just not stable enough for me personally. It's a very subjective thing of course, and highly dependent on what hardware you use — along with how often you update. For me, it just messed things up a bit too often, and last night was the final straw.
I updated either that day, or the day before, and just before a livestream was due to start, my SteelSeries headset no longer worked. No matter what I tried, following guide after guide about PipeWire, nothing helped. Just this weird and very quiet electrical static noise whenever I tried piping audio to it. Eventually it worked again by some downgrading, plus random hotplugging and testing it on a Windows machine for a sanity check and it started somewhat working again. My Microphone was another issue, at the same time it decided to be ridiculously quiet for no apparent reason I could see so there were wider problems. I had enough, I had work to do and after hours of hair-pulling — hello from Fedora.
Fedora's KDE Spin
Thankfully, with the likes of Flathub / Flatpak packages and how far along apps like Discover have come along for installing packages and setting things up, there's not a whole lot to learn. It's been a very long time since I used Fedora, and it was one of my first Linux distributions I tried sticking with back when it was "Fedora Core" and wow — it's always surprising to see how far we've come as a platform for doing anything.
Fedora does come with some of its own issues, like NVIDIA drivers being a nuisance to install, which they definitely should improve. If other distributions can do one-click or one-line installs, I'm sure they could do it too. However, it's just another point towards me swapping to AMD when prices settle, or perhaps Intel when Arc properly launches for desktop. I also need to figure out why Dropbox won't load on startup, some little things like that.
Anyway, are you really a Linux nerd if you don't distro-hop at least once a year? Jokes aside, I look forward to seeing why people keep recommending Fedora nowadays as a stable distribution, let's see how long it takes me to break it.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
QuoteThere comes a time when everyone has to sit and think about what they use on their PCTotally agree, that was the reason i switched from gentoo to arch.
But that was more than a decade ago.
Since then, when Arch gave me problems, it was either my fault or upstream fault.
Arch is too much a wonderful distro for me, from the aur to Arch rollback machine, you can have the system you want, upgrade, freeze the state and still be able to install new packages or even roll back to the previous -Syu with little to no effort at all.
Since it gave me so little problems, if i ever wanted to switch to an easier distro for lack of time, I think i'd try mint.
Last edited by kokoko3k on 8 April 2022 at 2:43 pm UTC
Quoting: Samsai... When I switched to Fedora Silverblue ...
Oh hey a Silverblue user with sort of similar specs to mine! How do you like it for gaming, if I can ask? :)
Quoting: vildravnWorks about as well as anything else. Steam runs as a Flatpak and I maintain a Toolbx container for the miscellaneous Itch.io and GOG games that require more specific dependencies. There are some annoyances, like for instance I haven't found a reliable way to run SC Controller yet, but generally speaking it hasn't gotten between me and my games at all. Most stuff just runs OOTB on the Steam Flatpak and for the rest I can drop down to a Toolbx and pretend it's an ordinary Fedora.Quoting: Samsai... When I switched to Fedora Silverblue ...
Oh hey a Silverblue user with sort of similar specs to mine! How do you like it for gaming, if I can ask? :)
The real benefits of Silverblue are obviously elsewhere. I like the simplicity of the system updates and separation of system, apps and development environments. Being able to rollback bad updates (including OS version updates) and updating my dev environments separately from my system is also neat.
I started with Slackware, installed from something like 75 floppy disks. A few years later I bought a new compupter, with a gfx card known to work with XFree86, and a boxed version of Red Hat Linux 4.0 with the Red Baron web browser bundled in. Then Debian for a few years. APT was a revelation - no more RPM dependency hell. Next up was Gentoo. I wrote most of the original ebuilds for wifi support.
But, after the first kid, I bounced around of a while. Tried Fedora and a few others, but I got too used to having the latest software features in a rolling release, so was never happy. Tried Arch and it stuck. I did use Manjaro for several years on my work computer at my previous company, but always Arch at home.
I think switching now would be a lot easier. Most of the applications I use have reached, more-or-less, a steady state. With CI builds and snaps/flatpacks it's not a huge amount of work to use a newer version than what is packaged with your distro, anymore.
I haven't been in a situation like Liam where something broke that I needed immediately. Close with the update to libvirt-8.1 in February, but I had my work laptop handy, so used that instead of my usual Anarchy Linux VM, before pinning libvirt back to 8.0 - finally found the config setting I needed to change this past Wednesday after testing with 8.2. It's usually the work laptop reminding me how much more stable Linux is than Windows. 1909 was good, but the two versions that IT updated me to since have constant freezes and multiple BSODs a day. If they let me, I'd wipe that machine in a second. Seriously considering it and dealing with the consequences.
Quoting: DenysMbIt kinda make me sad that everyone forget about openSUSE and it is such a great and solid distribution. 😢Just the last two days I've been booting an openSUSE VM at work to do some database testing. So it's not forgotten! And I guess if I'm ever fed up with Ubuntu at home, it's either going to be Debian or openSUSE. Though without the original yast it's just not the same any more :-(.
Quoting: SamsaiQuoting: vildravnWorks about as well as anything else. Steam runs as a Flatpak and I maintain a Toolbx container for the miscellaneous Itch.io and GOG games that require more specific dependencies. There are some annoyances, like for instance I haven't found a reliable way to run SC Controller yet, but generally speaking it hasn't gotten between me and my games at all. Most stuff just runs OOTB on the Steam Flatpak and for the rest I can drop down to a Toolbx and pretend it's an ordinary Fedora.Quoting: Samsai... When I switched to Fedora Silverblue ...
Oh hey a Silverblue user with sort of similar specs to mine! How do you like it for gaming, if I can ask? :)
The real benefits of Silverblue are obviously elsewhere. I like the simplicity of the system updates and separation of system, apps and development environments. Being able to rollback bad updates (including OS version updates) and updating my dev environments separately from my system is also neat.
Oh, using the toolbox for itch and gog games is pretty clever! :)
Thanks for the reply
Quoting: axelbQuoting: STiATrebooting several times since it just didn't install all packages downloadedare you sure you arent mistaking it with windows by accident?
Yes, I am. Doing a system update it triggered the "you need to restart" after every package instead after all were downloaded and ready to install.
In Gnome Software that works, in discover it was bugged (switched 2 weeks ago from KDE to Gnome, so it's likely to be still not fixed).
My PC is a bit slower now, so I guess I'll try again an advanced distro the day I won't have anymore a Nvidia graphic card. But despite the performance loss, I enjoy having a PC that doesn't break out-of-nowhere at the worst moment.I tried Fedora before going with Mint, and Steam was unable to launch any game. I really appreciated PipeWire, though! Then I tried POP, and it as Flatpaks that were unable to launch! Mint was the winner of the day.
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