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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

User hostile abuses like this is what has finally pushed me off the Windows spyware/admil after 25+ years of using Windows as my primary Desktop.

There's still some rough edges but overall Fedora 40 is an amazing Desktop OS which was easy to recreate all my dev tools including: .NET 8, VSCode, JB Toolbox/Rider/DataGrip/etc, GH CLI/Desktop, Docker/lazydocker, Ollama, AWS CLI, Discord, Obsidian, with PostgreSQL/MySQL/SQL Server/Redis running in Docker, effortlessly installed node/bun/go/python with mise, even all my major titled Windows games are working under Steam/Proton which was a pleasant surprise.

With Windows 10 nearing EOL I believe Linux Desktop is at the turning point for market share now that Microsoft is turning the crank with Windows 11 and turning it into an ad/spyware marketing channel for their Apps and cloud services.

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I've been running Fedora since v20, its been an excellent and well polished OS for my development work and gaming with it has exceeded expectations.

I only keep a Windows 11 partition around for SteamVR as my Quest 2 headset is a bit awkward to get working well under Linux. This problem will be rectified when Valve release a successor to the Index headset. All of my other games run just fine on Fedora.

Linux on the desktop is a calm and sane respite compared to the ever more shrill and needy interruptions from Windows wanting its ass wiped.

I ditched at Windows 10, and installed Fedora and KDE. Never had a single problem, and that was onto really old hardware, and then onto a brand new AMD mobo. Admittedly, I didn't go the nvidia route for graphics cards.

Booted into Windows once a year, maybe twice. Deleted Windows altogether in January.

Works perfectly for me. Gaming, development especially, and so on.

Interestingly, my company is considering ditching Windows altogether since we're on 10, and know what 11 is like, and going full Linux desktops since that's all we develop on anyway.

Installed Fedora 40 on a new Ryzen 8740u machine, I cannot believe it that everything working by default, video, audio, even sleeping working like a charm.

It flies on my new AMD 7800X3D custom build!

Fedora 40/Wayland worked beautifully out-of-the-box with buttery smooth DE animations which unfortunately started flickering after installing NVidia's proprietary drivers which should be fixed with explicit sync [1] in NVidia's latest 560 drivers which is now available in KDE Plasma 6.1 update, hopefully it'll be available for Gnome in a system update soon - looking forward to running Wayland again.

[1] https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/04/05/explicit-sync...

Did you consider Pop_OS? What made you choose Fedora? I went with Pop but I’ve always been curious about Fedora and really impressed that Wayland is working so well for you on Nvidia.

I initially started with Ubuntu to run the curated Desktop tools in DHH's new omakub.org but Wayland was broken in Ubuntu, Network Manager would frequently hit 100% CPU freezing the OS and it didn't wake from suspend.

Considered Pop!_OS but they're running an older version of Ubuntu and are in the middle of transitioning to their new Rust Cosmic Desktop which I figured would be immature at launch.

I ended up going with Fedora as IMO it was the more bleeding edge with new software, e.g. Wayland by default and their new Atomic Desktops look like they could be the future.

Excellent, thanks. This will be front of mind if the Cosmic transition goes tits-up. For now I’ll just keep mumbling the mantra to myself: trust in System76!

Never liked Ubuntu. It's just a Debian variant that lost its way.

Quite simply, Fedora is by far the distribution with more paid developers, and that certainly shows.

I started using Fedora from more or less 2 decades ago. There was tones of different issue though. But it got much better since 18 or 19. I have upgraded it all the way to 40. There was one issue around Intel display driver which I had to enter console and uninstall the update. But other than that, I hardly had anything to complain about. Did not switch mainly because of VisualStudio and games. Windows 11 put the last straw onto the camel's back. Haven't tried Pop_OS yet, probably will try it someday if I got time.

Right. I think I experienced similar issues on a Lenovo Legion 5 pro on Fedora 39. What I uninstalled Wayland and installed Xorg instead. Not sure if it's going to work for you.

I installed it on my ThinkPad T520 and the Bluetooth is unreliable and restart doesn't work. When I try to restart the laptop it looks like it powers down but then it displays an error message and hangs before it reboots.

Previously the laptop had Windows 10 on it and there were no Bluetooth or reboot issues. Unfortunately, Windows 11 doesn't work on it and 10 is rapidly approaching EoL.

Haven't tried BT on my machine. It looks the drives were loaded correctly and there were no errors or warnings. But that shouldn't be really a big issue as the WIFI/BT on my machine is a Intel AX210, which is easy to obtain. I guess you can simply get one if your machine has a slot for it. I don't really have a T520, so cannot really tell if there were any other issues. To be sure what was the problem, you will need to read the error msg. Sometimes the error msg you see might not be the root cause. And also, you did not have hardware issue before does not mean you don't have a hardware issue now...

I've bounced back and forth between Fedora and Windows a few times in the past month. Windows has no reboot or BT problems.

The machine has previously had Ubuntu on it, but that was a few years ago. Ubuntu didn't have any problems so either it's Fedora-specific or kernel or driver changes since then are the root cause.

It's most likely a driver issue. It depends on the nature of the issue. It can be as easy as turning some optional/3rd part repos on or as hard as debugging and fix in source code. I've done enough the later, and thus would simply steer away from that route. Intel cards seems to be supported pretty well. But it depends on the distribution. Last week I actually bounced between 3 distributions: Open Suse Leap, Debian and Fedora. OpenSuse failed to boot after installation, Debian lost all network config after finished installation and rebooted.

I remember the CPU model wrong. it's 7840hs actually.

> User hostile abuses like this is what has finally pushed me off the Windows spyware/admil after 25+ years of using Windows as my primary Desktop.

Security issues with the XP/IE/ActiveX axis of evil made using Windows feel like taking a shot to the groin on a daily basis. Then they brought out Vista. If you survived that, you must have been dedicated.

Isn't Fedora 40 now defaulting to Wayland? Does it work well with Steam/Proton games or do you need to switch to X?

Fedora's Gnome Desktop Environment ran great (e.g. animations were super smooth) in Wayland using Fedora's default drivers, but I installed NVidia drivers because I thought I needed them for games but that caused flickering in Wayland which made it unusable. Apparently this is fixed with Explicit Sync in NVidia's next 560 drivers so I've switched to X in the meantime.

No issues on Fedora 40 (Kinoite). Steam will capture a game's output into gamescope by default which is a good citizen on Wayland.

It's actually the Wayland compositor itself on the Steam Deck.

I had to use x11 until Nvidia beta driver v555 fixed my issues. I installed using:

  dnf upgrade --releasever=41 --refresh xorg-x11-drv-nvidia

"User hostile abuses like this" made me a full time Linux user, when Windows 10 came out. I doubt, though, that people will migrate in masses to Linux, even though I think the user experience is better. Installing a new OS is still a daunting task for most users.

Fedora has been incredible. We had been tainted by the Ubuntu/Debian ecosystem for so long.

And yes, it was seeing Microsoft get worse and worse until a lead weight broke too many camels backs.

What are the main advantages relative to Ubuntu? Ditching "snap"? Are you on GNOME?

Need a discord alternative too

I think one was Revolt. Good luck getting ur friends to switch.

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