Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing, tinkering with some self-hosted stuff that is on separate hardware.
I don’t like the way Ubuntu is moving with snaps. And LTS version falls behind too much. So I decided to move to Fedora.
My plan is simple:
- I will install Fedora on a fresh nvme drive. I want disk encryption, so I’m going to have LUKS over btrfs for /home, and the root will remain unencrypted.
- I will copy all files from old /home to new /home, with the exception of dot-files.
- I plan to make use of flatpaks, so I don’t think configuration for my apps is easily transferable. I’ll have to install and configure apps from scratch, unless I’ll have to use an RPM package.
Does all of this make sense? Is there a way to simplify app re-configuration in my case?
And as I never used Fedora extensively (booting from live image doesn’t count), are there any caveats I should be aware of?
Yes. However the level of difficulty increases.
Zorin, Mint and Pop all are Ubuntu based distros that replace snaps with flatpak by default. I don’t know what would make any of those any more difficult than straight up Ubuntu. I’d even argue that most mainstream distros aren’t any harder to use than one another. Most of the differences between traditional distributions are behind the scenes: package manager, init system, default applications/configurations…
Even Arch, which has a reputation of being “hard”, isn’t particularly hard to use. It’s the lack of an installer that makes people freak out. The rest is just Linux. Once you plop in a GUI for package management and a proper desktop environment, from an end user perspective, nothing of it is inherently harder.
Solving problems is what becomes more difficult. There’s rarely issues with the happy path. The further away you move from mainline, the more components are different, the fewer of the solutions on askubuntu.com work by simply copy-pasting them. A novice user has no idea what the solutions do and why they don’t work. Instead they have to keep trying other copy-pasta hoping some would work. At best taking longer to solve it, and at worst some copy-pasta breaking something on their system.
Copy pasting random stuff from askubuntu is how you break your install in the first place. Novices don’t “have” to do that, they get told to do it by randoms on askubuntu that should not do that. Understanding an issue is key to fixing it, regardless of the problem’s nature.
I’ve yet to hit anything that worked on Ubuntu that didn’t on Mint. Hell, I find half of what I need on Arch Wiki even when not using Arch.
While you’re right, this expectation is unrealistic. Not only is it unrealistic for novice hobbyists, it’s unrealistic for people who use Linux to do other things, not for the sake of using Linux or learning its innards. For example my family members who use it for work an leisure. They couldn’t and won’t be bothered with learning how hibernation on Linux works. They want hibernate to work. The have me to make it work for them but folks who don’t will go to askubuntu.com, grab a well upvoted answer and copy-paste it straight into a terminal.