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Comment by jeffparsons | Hacker News Reader

I've been hearing good things about modern Fedora as an alternative "boring" operating system. Maybe now is the time to make the switch.

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I've used Fedora as my day-to-day OS for data work and web dev for the last few years. It just works with my ThinkPad, looks great (recent GNOME with Wayland is really polished) and RPMs for any tools you might need are usually available.

Any problems I have had have been with my desktop machine and I blame Nvidia 100%.

More obvious choice for an Ubuntu user would be Debian or another direct debian derivative wouldn't it?

I would go for Debian or Gentoo.

Or use official PPAs for all the snaps that Canonical is forcing on users.

Not sure official Mozilla PPA is going to ship debs.

Makes it easy then, simply ignore Mozilla. It's not like there are no alternatives.

I would highly recommend Linux Mint as an alternative. (Cinnamon has my preference)

So far they are still kind of corporate free in the spirit of doing a desktop distribution keeping things as a normal or dev user would expect without pushing stupid changes in order to advance a corporate agenda.

Also, they are currently based on Ubuntu that they debloat but there is a debian based variant (LMDE) that show future perspectives if Ubuntu become not really usable anymore as a base in the future.

Do they take a stance against snap?

Yes

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906

They're against it; see for example https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906

tnx, good to know.

then it's just my pref for KDE that holds me back :)

I'm a kde user as well, and since I'm on ubuntu and thinking about switching to something else I did a quick search to see if it was possible to run kde on mint and it appears you can. You have to add the kubuntu backports ppa ("sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports") and then you can install kde using apt ("sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop").

I haven't tried this, so I don't know if it actually works well or not, but it is apparently possible.

Pretty much all package managers work the same. Learning dnf when you know apt isn't that big of a deal.

Perhaps, but I use plenty of other Linux distros (at least on servers) for work, so I don't imagine it being a big deal to switch. It's more the inertia stopping me from switching _at all_, rather than any concern about how big the switch would be.

Personally recommend openSuse Leap as a boring distro, if you want a bit less boring Tumbleweed is great.

I tried to install both, F35's installer made it virtually impossible to configure my partitions. And that for such a mainstream distro.

I've also had this experience with the Fedora partition configurator. FWIW, you can somewhat get around it by manually creating the partition layout you want (LUKS+LVM+RAID etc), then mounting it as you'd want to use it, then just selecting it from within the partition manager.

This is also the only way I've found to do it with Ubuntu's installer, but once it's set up it works fine.

Question regarding Fedora : I tried it in a docker environment. During some googling to troubleshoot issues, several results were found on the Red Hat commercial support website (so, not accessible). I'm afraid that a good part of advanced/niche documentations and knowledge base for troubleshooting is behind Red Hat commercial support. Is that the case in practice?

Fedora has official docs (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/docs/), and in practice I've never had a need for the commercial RHEL support. Honestly, I've been using Fedora for 3 years now and can't even remember the last time I had to dig into the docs to troubleshoot something.

I faced the same problems with some of RH's other software. It felt like they make software needlessly complicated and then hide the troubleshooting information behind paywalls in the hopes of landing support contracts.

I'm a power user and have been using Fedora for over 10 years. I'd highly recommend it, and I don't recall ever getting the feeling that the support/info I needed was gated behind commercial RHEL.

Fedora is really great, but it is a bit bleeding edge in that there are lots of updates all the time. I have found Arch with an LTS kernel (I use older hardware) to be about similar in terms of stability.

If you want stable Ubuntu, take a loot at RHEL. You can get it for free with developer license and it's as stable as it gets.

Is Rocky Linux practical yet? Is it as all-there as CentOS was?

If you want a more "LTS" like Fedora you can stay one release behind. The previous release is still supported with security updates.

Is upgrading every two versions supported?

Fedora releases are officially supported for 1 year. If you stay one version behind current you still are supported (although you still need to upgrade every 6 months). This is what I do on my home server. My workstation is currently on 35, and my server is on 34. When 36 comes out I'll upgrade my workstation to 36 and my server to 35.

I still have a 6 month upgrade cycle on my server, but I don't need to deal with package updates changing things.

I love Arch Linux, the issue I have with it is that you have to be aware of some very useful and little known configurations that can make your life easier or your performance better.

Example 1, Fedora ships with zram swap by default instead of allocating a separate swap partition. Basically it's compressed ram, good enough because when you start to swap your system is already on its knees, but orders of magnitude faster than reading from disk, and you don't need to allocate a separate partition.

Example 2, On Fedora when you format with / with btrfs, it'll enable a really fast zstd (level 1) compression on your volumes. It might save you a few gigabytes, it consumes a imperceptible amount of CPU time, and reduces the write amplification effects on SSDs and NVMe.

Fedora gives you these out of the box, while on Arch you have to be aware of them, and I bet you don't have any of these free wins enabled on your system.

I love Arch Linux, but Fedora is IMO a better desktop experience.

I've used Fedora as my daily driver for over a decade. I rarely have issues and the past few years have been particularly stable. It just works.

Switched to Fedora after a few years of hopping from different Ubuntu-based distros and I never looked back. Only problem that's most frustrating is Wayland.

Fedora is very leading edge.

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