Fedora Linux 37

I'm honestly more surprised that they are shipping Python 3.11

Sha1 has collisions risk, so it's good to get rid of it!

My poor beagle bone black is becoming more and more of a paperweight :’)

Yeah, when I was playing with Silverblue before the 36 release it was wild having the download speed of the mirror being the bottleneck.

I’ve been using Fedora since release ~30 on desktop and laptop, previously a Debian user for like 15 years.

I think it switched cause I wanted Wayland and more recent Gnome at the time. Everything more or less always seems to work without issue, I’ve done upgrades, swapped out hardware over the years and never had any show-stopping bugs.

More recently I became a package maintainer and it’s been an excellent process, from the documentation to the community. I used to be weary of RPM and the “dependency hell” but it’s not really a thing anymore.

I like picking the right tool for the job, and so far Fedora has worked out well in this regard, but Ubuntu, MacOS, Windows, etc all have their place.

I've been using Fedora Desktop since ~25 or so.

It also typically "just works" and has much newer packages in it's repos.

Fedora software is typically newer. I enjoy using it over Ubuntu, but my work experience kind of influenced me to be more comfortable with Fedora over Ubuntu or others. It just works well for me, but that could be my years of using it.

Typing this from my Fedora based workstation, been daily driving Fedora since switching from RHEL 8 to Fedora 34 last April. As I don't work in or use Ubuntu-ecosystem-centric tools (this was a PITA when I was working on a RHEL 6 based HPC cluster) I don't really run into any issues. And for applications if there's something not in the primary repos (Fedora + RPM Fusion) there's typically a Flatpak covering my use case.

on a laptop a couple of years ago, fedora 33. I liked it generally, but for linux I am more of a debian person.

I've been using Fedora as daily driver since the i3 spin was made official (which actually was only a few versions ago).

I am much preferring the experience vs. [k]ubuntu.

If you count Silverblue, I use it on almost everything but my primary desktop, which runs Windows 10.

I switched my personal laptop (Dell XPS 17) from Ubuntu to Fedora about a year ago and have been pleased. The GPU situation is more polished, suspend and resume works with less quirks, and I like the more recent versions of upstream software. I’ve also been feeling pessimistic about Ubuntu’s general direction and Snaps in particular.

It's been my main desktop for 2+ years and on my home server since Fedora 28 or 29. I also have it on a Surface Go 3 and Lenovo W541 laptop.

It's great.

I switched to Fedora after ~14 years of using Ubuntu as my daily driver. One year in, it's been rock solid.

Although I did accidentally screw up the Windows install while doing an upgrade.

Fedora 37 is working _great_ for me on a graviton2 (or graviton3? i forget) for several weeks too, just as a data point.

> does anyone use fedora as their desktop?

I've been using it since Fedora 21 which amounts to almost 8 years. In these 8 years, I've had zero problems with the OS - besides some proprietary Nvidia driver issues which are/were pretty common on Linux; since I've switched to AMD GPUs I haven't had any problems whatsoever. Upgrades go smooth every time, even when upgrading to beta versions.

Fedora is a rock-solid distro and I always recommend it over alternatives.

I've been dual booting fedora alongside windows as a desktop since somewhere around 25 and have been pretty pleased with it. As others mentioned, I had some issues with nvidia drivers initially and have purchased AMD graphics cards since then partially due to that. I've found that fedora strikes a balance between up to date software and reduced requirement for tinkering that suits my uses better than alternatives I've tried as a general desktop.

> it seems like more people use ubuntu based distributions.

I think it depends which sub-populations you measure. The modern web and social media can make it hard to understand how your anecdata are sourced. I think the marketing behind Ubuntu is a large part of its visibility, expanding into a bit of a vacuum left by Red Hat's turn towards enterprise and away from regular users. This has compounded over the years with more network effects among new users. I'd say that cloud hosting and blogging environments have had more novice user influence than prior enterprise and university-based environments that had more senior-driven inertia.

From my POV of academic and scientific computing with a sprinkling of enterprise consultancy, there used to be a strong Red Hat bias in US (maybe North American?) Linux usage with SuSE having a similar role in Europe. When RHEL emerged, this preference was inherited by CentOS and Scientific Linux. I don't know exactly how my own filter bubble developed, but I had little awareness of Debian until the Ubuntu marketing arrived and I read the back story. It was one of those parallel world experiences. Perhaps I knew more about SuSE as "the competitor" due to high-performance computing conferences being dominated by US, western Europe, and East Asia participation back in those days.

I'm planing on switching to Nobara[0] after it's updated to 37 as well. I had a rough time in the same distro with my Asus Rog Zephyrus G15 2022, like keyboard backlight not switching off and freezes after inactivity or moving the mouse slightly slower.

[0]: https://nobaraproject.org/

I recommend fedora to anyone as starter distro, I run manjaro as my desktop (aka lazy arch). Ubuntu is not what it was anymore IMO.

I actually used ubuntu for desktop for many, many years, and really didn't have many issues with it. At some point i moved to Linux Mint (can't recall why, or maybe just to distro hop)....and stayed from about version 17.1 (Rebecca?) til about 19.2 (Tess or Tina?)...and at some point got annoyed with Mint...so hopped to Fedora ~early 2020, and have enjoyed it ever since. While both ubuntu and fedora work nicely, i *feel* like Fedora has newer things in it. Certainly with Snaps, Flatpaks, and AppImages, technically one can keep living in a world with newer things....but i favor fedora's near-cutting edge approach. I have not tried Arch yet or any of the rolling distros....that seems a tad too cutting edge for me. Of course everyone's mileage may vary. But nowadays Fedora runs really nicely on desktops, and i have no desire to hop to any other distro (for desktop).

Not that you asked, but for servers, it has been ubuntu all the way for me...but that's simply for familiarity, and work has only required a basic ubuntu server to do a job, and cary on with other matters. I have no experience with non-ubuntu stuff on the server side. While i know tons of people who run CentOS on servers, i don't know anyone who personally runs fedora on the server. (I'm excluding mention of good ol' Solaris, BSD, and other unix systems from back in the ol' days of course. ;-)

I have the same concern and it's a major one for me. I don't like to switch to distros that destroy such basic QoL functionality as HW decode and turn your laptop into loud battery draining stovetop when watching a Youtube tutorial, without also providing a quick and easy workaround. And I have not found any quick and easy fix on how to revert this (all search results for me yield just threads of people being annoyed with this decision rather than solutions) which is why I'll be staying away from vanilla Fedora for now despite being a favorite distro of mine. Worse, my other favorite distro, OpenSUSE, will follow suit on this, despite being a EU company not affected by the US SW patents issue.

The super ironic thing is that, after the Linux community preaching for so many years that "AMD works best with Linux, always buy AMD, f*ck Nvidia", only AMD users are affected by the axing of VA-API, as Nvidia and Intel have alternative/proprietary APIs for hardware decoding to fall back to which can be easily enabled out of the box, versus the "just works™" AMD users which are currently screwed by this.

I hope G.E. from the Nobara Project[0] will fix this and give us a great Fedora 37 spin with batteries included.

[0]: https://nobaraproject.org/

> remove hardware acceleration for decoding video via VA-API

??? They only removed hardware acceleration for patent-encumbered codecs...

And FYI the most popular streaming sites (Netflix, YouTube, PrimeVideo, etc...) all use royalty-free codecs (AV1, VP9) so won't be affected...