Comment by ewoodrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ewoodrich | Hacker News Reader

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I recently mentioned in another comment that Fedora 43 on my Ideapad is the first “just works” experience I’ve had with my multi monitor setup(s) on anything other than Windows 11 (including MacOS where I needed to pay for Better Display to reach the bar of “tolerable”).

Zero fiddling necessary other than picking my ideal scaling percentage on each display for perfect, crisp text with everything sanely sized across all my monitors/TVs.

I gave up on Linux Mint for that exact reason. I wasted so much time trying to fine tune fonts and stuff to emulate real fractional scaling. Whenever I thought I finally found a usable compromise some random app would look terrible on one of the monitors and I’d be back at square one.

Experimental Wayland on Linux Mint just wasn’t usable unfortunately and tbh wasn’t a big fan of Cinnamon in general (I just really hated dealing with snaps on Ubuntu). I did tweak Gnome to add minimize buttons/bottom dock again and with that it’s probably my favorite desktop across any version of Linux/MacOS/Windows I’ve ever used!

I kept reading endorsements of Fedora's level of polish/stability on HN but was kinda nervous having used Debian distros my entire life and I’m really happy I finally took the plunge. Wish I tried it years ago!

> I kept reading endorsements of Fedora's level of polish/stability on HN but was kinda nervous having used Debian distros my entire life and I’m really happy I finally took the plunge. Wish I tried it years ago!

This. I don't know why, but people forget about Fedora when considering distros. They rather fight Arch than try Fedora. So, did I. Maybe its Redhat. Wish I switched earlier, too. (Although I heard this level of polish wasn't always the case.)

I love Fedora so much. Everything just works, but that's not that special compared to Ubuntu. What is special is the fucking sanity throughout the whole system. Debian based distros always have some legacy shit going on. No bloat, no snap, nothing breaking convention and their upgrade model sits in the sweet spot between Ubuntu's 4 year LTS cycle and Arch's rolling release. Pacman can rot in hell, apt is okay, but oh boy, do I love dnf.

Tho, Fedora has some minor quirks, which still make it hard to recommend for total beginners without personal instructions/guidance IMO. Like the need for RPMFusion repos and the bad handling/documentation of that. Not a problem if you know at all what a package manager, PKI and terminal is, but too much otherwise.

Canonical releases an Ubuntu LTS release every two years: active is 24.04, next is coming in a few months as 26.04.

LTS support runs for 5 years (there is extended support for 10 years available), so you can skip an LTS if you don't need the latest base software.

You are right, I got that mixed up. To be fair, I somehow also thought of yearly releases for Fedora, which isn't the case. It's every six months, so the relation remains identical, just off by a factor of 2 :D

I dual booted Fedora back when it was still called Fedora Core from version 6 until 11-ish. I had it installed on a laptop and had a lot of driver issues with it and eventually didn't bother with dual booting when I moved to a new laptop.

I'm now looking to get off Windows permanently before security updates stop for Win 10 as I have no intention of upgrading to Win 11 since Linux gaming is now a lot more viable and was the only remaining thing holding me back from switching earlier. I've been considering either Bazzite (a Fedora derivative with a focus on gaming) or Mint but after reading your comment I may give vanilla Fedora a try too.

So far I've tried out the Bazzite Live ISO but it wouldn't detect my wireless Xbox controller though that may be a quirk of the Live ISO. I'm going to try a full install on a flash drive next and see if that fixes things.

Give it a try! Although, I do all my gaming on a Playstation. In Fedora, the Steam and NVIDIA Fusion repos come preinstalled and can be enabled during installation or in Gnome's 'Software' or the package manager later, but I can't speak to that. The opensource AMD drivers are in the main repo no action needed. ROCm too, but that can be messy and is work-in-progress on AMD's side. Can't vouch for the controller, but people claim they work. Guess, that's the live image. I heard, games with anti-cheat engines in the kernel categorically don't work with Linux, but this may change at some point. In that case, or if you want "console mode", a specific gaming distro may be worth considering, otherwise I would stick to vanilla. Good luck! Hope I didn't promise too much ;)

So I cleared out one of my SSDs and installed Fedora yesterday.

I still had the issue of no gamepad detection. I had to install xone which took some trial and error. Firstly, I didn't have dkms installed and secondly, soon after installing Fedora the kernel was updated in the background and on reboot my display resolution was fixed to 1024x768 or something for some reason (that's gonna be another issue I'll have to look into). I rebooted and went back to the previous version and then dkms complained the kernel-headers were missing. However, the kernel-headers were installed for the latest kernel but not the older version I had rebooted to. I'm not used to Fedora or dnf (I run Proxmox+Debian in my homelab) so after a quick search to figure out how to install a specific version of a package (it's not as simple as <package>@<version> but rather <package>-<version>.fc$FEDORA_VERSION.$ARCHITECTURE) I got kernel-devel installed and was able to finally run the xone install script successfully and have my gamepad detected.

The most frustrating thing is that the xone install script doesn't fail despite errors from dkms so after the first install (where I almost gave up because I thought something was wrong with my setup) I had to run the uninstall script each time there was a problem and then run it again. The xone docs also mention running a secondary script which doesn't actually exist until the first script runs successfully so that added a lot of confusion.

Lol. Well, that does sound terrible!

My understanding is you only need xone for the special adapter right? Have you tried cable and plain bluetooth before? Also Steam seems to come bundled with their own drivers for it, so the controller may just work within games in Steam, regardless.

I feel a bit bad, but honestly gaming on Linux is not my thing. From a quick glance, messing with the kernel like that may cause problems with secure boot and maybe that's causing your issues. Maybe you need to sign your modules or disable secure boot.

Have you tried the Copr repo? https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/jackgreiner/xone-git...

And of course Bazzite seems to have addressed this out-of-the-box... :D

Quite frankly, if you want to do anything but gaming on that machine, at least for me, manually installing kernel modules from GitHub would be a deal breaker, since that seems rather unstable and prone to cause nasty problems down the line.

I'd rather use the 2.4Ghz adapter rather than Bluetooth as the connection is supposedly more reliable (and less prone to latency issues) from what I've read. Anyway, after jumping through all those hoops I did get it working so I'm happy with xone for now. I even managed to boot into the newer version of the kernel without the degraded display resolution issue after that.

I have a new issue though after updating 900+ packages using KDE Discover which is that the GUI login doesn't work. The screen goes blank after I enter credentials and nothing happens unless I switch to another TTY at which point I get thrown back to the login screen on TTY1. As a workaround, I can login on another TTY and then use startplasma in order to use KDE. I've learnt my lesson not to use KDE Discover for updates though because it doesn't get logged in dnf history so you can't use dnf rollback.

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