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Comment by rubyist5eva | Hacker News Reader

Just switched to Fedora about a week ago because I was getting fed up with user hostile Ubuntu bs, I like it a lot.

I'm a linux power user (kernel hacking level) and wanted Fedora so much to work for me. Every single time there were severe issues with getting it even installed. First two failed attempts took place on my dell laptop, the last two on my dual socket workstation with Nvidia GPU.

All four times was an exercise in a lot of googling, hacking configurations,etc. Sadly it was always too much work and I eventually gave up.

Hopefully one day the experience is seamless and I never have to go back to Ubuntu.

I feel like people who use fedora swear by it. What DE do you use? I prefer KDE but donno if it’s time to retry gnome or something else.

If you're moving to Fedora then Gnome really is the path of least resistance, and highest level of integration and support. But you can make KDE work, or even use a tiling WM like Sway and customize it to your taste. In any case, you get to enjoy the benefits of a really well done distro.

> If you're moving to Fedora then Gnome really is the path of least resistance

Which is really the largest drawback by far that I've found. GNOME 4 is user-hostile garbage made by people who really really wish they were designing for tablets. It's practically useless without third-party extensions, which are of course unsupported. It doesn't even have a system tray FFS.

If Fedora Kinoite worked as well as Fedora Silverblue, I think I could be reasonably content. Immutable base system with Flatpak and Toolboxes is pretty close to how I actually want a system to work.

Alright. Will give it another go. Hopefully it’s easier to setup a side bar and top bar than last time I used it.

FWIW, I've used Fedora's KDE spin [1] and its very polished. That said, if I was still using linux on the desktop these days I'd go with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed[2]. With KDE my experience was that they made big improvements with every release, and tumbleweed was a nice way to get a stable-ish rolling release distribution that gets all the nice KDE updates without me having to wait another 6-8 months.

[1] https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/kde/

[2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed

I'm coming from Ubuntu so I stuck with Gnome as that is the default recomendation for Fedora as well. I've tried KDE in the past and while I understand why lots of people like it it never really clicked with me.

But while we're on the topic of user hostility, I'm not really a fan of some of the changes the Gnome devs are doing either, so I may switch again in the future but at least for now I'm comfortable using it and they aren't outright antagonizing my system like Ubuntu does with snaps.

You can use both? I use Mint but also use QTCreator (KDE) for development.

Things like hiDPI support go funny, but that's just Linux for you.

I don't like that you have to update it so often. I like the idea of an LTS. On systems I want to update often I just put arch on them so there is never major breakage that I can't roll back easily with snapper.

Each version of Fedora is supported for 14 months, so you can keep it a little behind but still get updates. They also will update the kernel so you’re getting updated hardware new support. With flatpak having up to date desktop applications is not an issue either. For development libraries I’m usually in some kind of a container with a fixed version, so updates shouldn’t much of an issue either.

For example I just installed Fedora 35, I will probably install 36 at some point after 37 comes out, and stay one release behind current. Major upgrades are still relatively safe because of FS snapshots. I just personally prefer a slightly slower pace than “bleeding edge all the time”.

For a server I would just put Alma/Rocky Linux on it.

>Major upgrades are still relatively safe because of FS snapshots.

Also, in general the upgrades are quite reliable. I have a few systems that have been upgraded in-place for years without any issues (regardless of snapshots, since they're using ext4).

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