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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I installed Fedora Linux recently and used it for a few days. I did not spot a single bug, despite using it in a quite heavy scenario (Docker, Android Emulator, IDE, big file transfers). For example Windows had issues with sound drivers and GPU drivers, Linux is rock stable.

Also it was as easy as macOS install: I just installed it in a 5 minutes and it was ready to work. With Windows I had to spent hours to install all the drivers from the manufacturer website (I tried to let Windows to install their own drivers, but it did not find all the necessary drivers).

I have few issues with some Linux UI choices, for example I don't like Gnome 3 UI. But that's not a bug.

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Did you use Docker or Podman? because Podman is the thing available on Fedora and isn't even in the repositories.

I used docker, that's what I used before. I'm aware of podman, but did not try to use it. But thanks for suggestion, I'll look into it.

PS I just tried to use it. I've got some permission denied errors from containers which were not present with docker. I guess podman is not ready as a complete replacement of docker for me.

  echo "user.max_user_namespaces=28633" | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.d/98-userns.conf
  sudo sysctl --system
  sudo usermod -v 10000-65536 -w 10000-65536 $(id -un)
  podman system migrate
  podman unshare cat /proc/self/uid_map
  podman info

It wasn't a suggestion, because it doesn't have all the features that many people utilized in the Docker ecosystem. Like Docker-compose. (Right now on 22 May 2021.)

it's not ready for replacement.

There's podman-compose which seems to almost work for me, but not completely, yep.

If I would write containers myself from the scratch, I'd definitely try to ensure that podman works. But I'm using containers from other people, so I have to live with that for now.

Isn't docker a symlink to podman on Fedora these days?

I installed docker from the docker repository, it's definitely not a symlink to podman on my system right now. I did not check whether that symlink existed before docker installation, but I doubt about that.

There's a command that uses podman command to use docker. But I can't find it right now.

  sudo dnf install -y podman-docker

  cat /usr/bin/docker
  #!/bin/sh
  [ -f /etc/containers/nodocker ] || \
  echo "Emulate Docker CLI using podman. Create /etc/containers/nodocker to quiet msg." >&2
  exec /usr/bin/podman "$@"

I have solved the last "bug" by using xubuntu, which has an astonishingly stable, coherent and well integrated xfce desktop experience. There something similar for Fedora perhaps?

xUbuntu really is one of the better polished distros. When I had a spare laptop, I tried some distrohopping on it. Little quirks existed in most distros but it just felt like xUbuntu was the most (for the lack of better words) sane overall. Everything I'd change in XFCE on another distro was essentially what xUbuntu had configured by default.

The only thing I've had to do after installation, aside from installing my apps from repos, is to add the Mainline PPA and update the kernel to newest just to take advantage of newer kernel drivers for some of my hardware. Other than that, everything is there and everything works.

That's really good to hear. Perhaps I need to stop using fringe distros like NixOS.

This works until something does go wrong. At least with NixOS you can simply roll back!

This is one of the reasons why I use openSUSE, it has automatic btrfs snapshots that let you roll back in case anything breaks. Tumbleweed is already one of the most stable rolling-release distros, and I haven't had anything break yet, but it's nice to have regular snapshots as an an extra layer of safety.

Fedora uses btrfs by default. I don't think that snapshots are enabled by default, but quick googling reveals some instructions which should enable snapshots for updates. I guess that might help to achieve similar behaviour.

Or, if you want to use Fedora, try Fedora Silverblue [1]. It uses an immutable root filesystem and offers atomic updates and rollbacks through OSTree.

[1] https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/

I don't think btrfs is a shining example of Linux stability/reliability. NixOS gives me rollbacks using XFS for root.

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