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Comment by cmdlinecowboy | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat for enterprise use, Fedora for personal desktop use. One of the largest communities you’ll find. If you want Debian based maybe just straight Debian.

The centos debacle was poorly handled but I think what red hat was /trying/ to do made sense. The community just wasn’t there to sustain it. Red Hat was paying to give away free RHEL basically lol. CentOS Stream should have just been called RHEL Stream. It’s basically RHEL minus minor bugs that would only effect small pools of people.

I’m glad Rocky and Alma sprung up and have budding communities though.

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I just moved over from Ubuntu to Fedora as I felt I was starting to lose my edge: apt is so easy you forget that the other half of the universe thinks in dnf and I need to keep my skills sharp. Its been a good decision.

A bad decision was to use a Fedora mix with KDE. It works very well, but I think its rough edges would simply not be there if I'd chosen the GNOME path. You get the sense that the RH team default to GNOME and KDE is an afterthought. Which is fine by me, but its a bit of a shame, cos I much prefer it.

KDE user here who has been installing Debian derived distros for about a decade, Fedora Core before that. I often reconsider Fedora. What KDE specific issues should I know about before giving serious consideration to moving back?

>A bad decision was to use a Fedora mix with KDE. It works very well, but I think its rough edges would simply not be there if I'd chosen the GNOME path.

I've been using Fedora as a desktop for many years and agree that KDE is annoying. That said, I understand your point of view, but I find Gnome to be even more so.

Which is why I use XFCE[0] instead. It generally works pretty well, although I don't push it all that hard. Perhaps it might be a good desktop for you too?

[0] https://techviewleo.com/install-xfce-desktop-environment-on-...

Is there any specific reason to choose them over Linux Mint? I'm genuinely asking, I've never tried Red Hat or Fedora.

OP wants to get away from Ubuntu, but Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. Maybe that would be reason for OP to disprefer Mint?

What about LMDE?

OP mentioned stability and long-term supported as what he’s looking for. The Linux Mint team have stated LMDE is more for themselves to gather info and not a priority. So I would stay away if looking for stability and long-term support.

“We work on LMDE primarily for us, to get that information. It is not a priority, certainly not compared to Linux Mint itself…” https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4276

That's barely even a real distribution; it's an escape plan for Mint to leave Ubuntu if necessary. This is not a serious suggestion.

Mint so far has avoided forcing snaps, I will jump ship too if they do.

Fedora is much more secure (a strong focus on SELinux, secure boot, etc.). Fedora has more cutting edge software (latest GNOME, gcc, etc.) while still being very stable.

A large chunk of the gcc/glibc/GNOME/Wayland/... developers are employed by Red Hat and Fedora shows that, it's where the Linux workstation is going and has an amazingly good of integration of new tech. Most other mainstream distributions trail by several years.

I would recommend Linux Mint for desktops and Debian stable for servers.

One of OP's issues is Ubuntu forcing snaps. I think Mint disables snap by default:

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.h...

Another Ubuntu derivative that does not use snaps is System76's Pop!_OS

Isn’t one of the purposes of snaps to allow finer grained permissions? In non-snap systems, how do you prevent that weather app you just installed from accessing your camera and microphone?

It runs as a user without the necessary permissions to access those devices?

So one should configure an alternative user for each group of permissions that any arbitrary app might need? Then what happens the day that I do decide that my weather app should access e.g. my location? Now I should move all its data and update my launch scripts to the new user?

I happen to dislike snaps as well. The hard coded install directory is a passion point for me. But at least the permissions issue they are getting right.

I wish that desktop distros would adopt the Android permissions paradigm.

No, you can create groups for permissions that you'd like to enable and disable and add the user to the appropriate groups.

The snap service tends to run when it wants and it can slow down a system when it runs. Also the snap binaries are a lot larger than with apt.

Honestly, I don't think a weather app would access a camera or microphone. That seems like a bad example. Honestly, I put a piece of tape over my camera. It looks like other posters in this thread have solutions.

Using more hard drive space than needed and not being able to control the service are show-stoppers for a lot of people, and it looks like the permissions issue has another solution.

Here’s why not Linux Mint. It’s a few years old so I’m not sure if these issues are solved but I’ve never heard of Debian or Fedora having these issues: https://lwn.net/Articles/676664/

Fedora is a nice busy, but power user and developer experience: only rolling for the parts you would care about with a year of security support.

Fedora is especially useful for a new hardware workstation with that year of support. Any longer than that in my experience you tend to run into issues. For example: DXVK, for Windows games with Steam/Proton, just moved to requiring Mesa 22.0 as a minimum and Fedora 35 has Mesa 22.1 something. Similar issues with Ruby development in the past.

Updates are more limited, with a few select packages kept rolling compared to a true rolling distro like Arch. When a new kernel series is release (6.0 => 6.1) Fedora holds off for a few weeks to test until 6.0 goes EOL. Gnome is kept to it's major release with only minor versions to fix bugs. Mesa is updated until a Fedora is released. Firefox is kept up to date and I use the snap for VSCode and Chromium based browsers. Most other packages are not updated to major new versions, except for Vim (and Emacs if I remember).

My main gripe with RHEL based distros is the lack of support for in-place upgrades. I know you shouldn't do it, etc but for small servers that can benefit from newer kernel versions, its annoying.

Also dnf-autoupdate doesn't support auto restarts to update the kernel.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports in-place upgrades: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

Here “supports” means “does not result in itself in a loss of support coverage”. It's been possible to do it in an unsupported fashion before.

Not rhel clones though, which are what most small scale people are going to use. Also still no auto kernal updates.

RHEL is free for up to 15 instances (including prod), and 9.1 has pleasantly current packages. It’s a solid choice for startups and small teams who need to minimize time spent on infrastructure.

I found the one year renewal thing annoying, but other than that it looks to be really good! Just the auto kernel update part is left

Kernel live patching helps to guard against major security and bug issues and is fully automated in RHEL via kpatch.

But it's paid, I don't necessarily need livepatching, just auto restarts to update the kernel

Not quite sure which scenario you mean, but both of these work in the official RHEL distro that is free for up to 15 instances:

1. Restart is ok: automatically apply all security updates as they come out ("dnf-automatic), then restart if required ("needs-restarting -r").

2. Restart is not ok: automatically apply all kernel patches as they come out("kpatch auto")

Dnf automatic should support restart now! https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf/pull/1879

However its o my going to work on rhel 10 or anything that has very very up to date DNF version.

Only*

Unfortunately Fedora has been making a lot of similar decisions to Ubuntu lately, although it's still better IMO. I'd say coming from Ubuntu, Mint is probably a lower learning curve anyway.

Could you please give some examples of those similar decisions? I'm eager to find any evidence of the Fedora admins as bad actors.

My only complaint is that the switch to Wireplumber caused a lot of audio issues on my machine until I reverted back to PulseAudio.

I could also see people not wanting Wayland by default, though that has been working fine for me and the software I use.

I've only been using Fedora for 2 years, but apart from those two decisions, it's been a lot more stable than my time with Ubuntu.

> I could also see people not wanting Wayland by default

It takes a single line change in /etc/gdm/custom.conf to disable it.

Even easier, at login window you can select, and then it will remember your choice.

I haven't seen a decision made in the past that would be relevant, but there is one for future fedora releases https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/269 about installing certain apps as flatpaks rather than rpms by default. These would be fedora based flatpaks rather than from flathub.

It does not actually say how it interacts with existing rpms or whether said rpms will continue to exist or be maintained in the future.

I would say it's too early to get up in arms about just yet.

Me personally, I agree with this approach, but a lot of other people clearly won't.

What decisions? Fedora is my daily driver and I follow Fedora dev pretty closely, so far they haven’t done anything like Ubuntu. Maybe the custom Flathub repo? But that’s a requirement for them since they can’t host proprietary software for legal reasons.

As far as I understand, the next Fedora release will stop masking most of Flathub by default.

Fedora should not be recommended anymore for personal desktop use for the simple reason that they removed hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding support. Must all run on the CPU now.

You can enable it manually, like almost every other non-beginner friendly fedora quirk

https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/proprietary-video-codecs-are...

The nice thing about Windows and MacOS is that users aren't expected to jump through hoops to restore functionality.

I mean its not limited to macOS, you can just use Ubuntu or any other more user friendly distro.

Fedora isn't really noon friendly, and probably will never be, because of copyright limitations compared to the UK where Canonical is based.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Fedora disabled hardware video decoding support in their Mesa builds, which mostly affects AMD GPUs. Intel has hardware video decoding in the GPU driver (or in the firmware or wherever), and it's not dependent on Mesa having it enabled. NVidia of course does its own thing.

It's still a shame for AMD GPU users, of course, although understandable from the point of view of legal risk management.

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