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.
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.
I do use the https://negativo17.org/ repositories (actually just the multimedia repo that contains everything) instead of RPM-Fusion, especially the NVIDIA packages do integrate very well and keep me away from usual update headaches.
(Tbf, I always switch to nouveau for distro updates for being on the safe side)
Last edited by jens on 8 April 2022 at 11:50 am UTC
I did not ever use arch, but I had Manjaro installed for several years, and then had a similar "I've had it" moment and switched to opensuse tumbleweed. Its been over 2 years now, and I love it. BUT: I maintain that the most important aspect of a distro is their support community. Arch's motto or whatever is literally (or at least was, again, I'm old) "RTFM", and their forums were WAY more helpful and less aggressive than that of Manjaro. This was to the point where if I ever needed something fixed, I usually found the answer in the Arch forums rather than Manjaro forums. When I switched to opensuse, I noticed that the main forum admin is the same person who was their back in 2008. He, and all others I have dealt with, have been awesome. Hopefully, Fedora is similar.
In my personal laptop (that I also use for gaming), I use openSUSE and I recommend.
It kinda make me sad that everyone forget about openSUSE and it is such a great and solid distribution. 😢
Still have bad memories of those Fedora core experiments days. But truly believe they (Red Hat and co.) have made palpable progress ever since.
Anyway personally (with Artix as my 2nd driver now) still consider MX project as a greatly balanced one.
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QuoteAnyway, are you really a Linux nerd if you don't distro-hop at least once a year?
Next year I'm on Debian for a quarter of a century.
Need to find out the exact date. :D
Quoting: Rekias a fedora user: YAY!As a former Arch user: Oh no!
Jokes aside, I use Snapper+BTRFS on Garuda. An incremental backup solution like that (or Timeshift) can be a life saver.
Quoting: jensCool, I hope Fedora works for you, I’m more than happy with it since several years. Fedora shines with its Gnome integration (which I use), but don’t know how well the KDE integration is set up.
I do use the https://negativo17.org/ repositories (actually just the multimedia repo that contains everything) instead of RPM-Fusion, especially the NVIDIA packages do integrate very well and keep me away from usual update headaches.
(Tbf, I always switch to nouveau for distro updates for being on the safe side)
I tried Fedora KDE spin in 2020 or 2021 and it worked great. It's very polished and stable.
My problem to not stay with Fedora was DNF. DNF for me is too slow, and I don't know if this is a problem because I live in Brazil or what... 😪
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