I was on Ubuntu for a year. No major issues, although I used the interim releases, which are supposed to be less solid than LTS. Then, a couple of months ago, I decided to switch to Fedora, just out of curiosity. Many people stated how Fedora is rock solid, Fedora is the new Ubuntu, etc. First some rpmfussion updates broke mesa, then the ostree update broke Flatpak, and recently there was a broken kernel 6.3.11 update that affected some AMD users. A few days ago, I updated my kernel to 6.3.12, and I got frequent freezes on boot. Other users are also reporting such issues. So now I boot with an older kernel. Which is not optimal. There is no LTS kernel on Fedora, the old kernel version doesn’t receive security updates. Was it always like that, or it’s an unusual bad phase.
You want an honest answer? Fedora was never that great to begin with and went down quite a bit in quality since the whole patent debacle. I had to switch distros when Mesa was constantly breaking. Also, untested kernel updates would remove HDMI audio (and despite a fix being available they waited a crazy long time to push it) among many other things
Tumbleweed is just plain better.
I think it’s worth noting that Tumbleweed also has the Mesa/codecs situation, where if you want the codecs you have to enable the Packman repo and install mesa from there, and when there’s an update for mesa you have to wait for the update on Packman repo, otherwise you get some conflicts when trying to update. Though packman usually updates quick enough so it’s usually not an issue but it can be a bit weird the first time you see it.
Aside from that yeah, Tumbleweed is great. Though i’m currently running Fedora Kinoite and overall I’ve been happy with it, but I would probably go back to Tumbleweed if something were to happen.
Fedora was never that great to begin with
I always just found it to be really, really, ridiculously slow. I swear DNF might rival Windows in terms of update slowness and it seems to permeate the whole system.
How does Tumbleweed compare to Fedora for you? The Mesa situation is also the driving force behind me looking for alternatives.
No issues at all, packman (the rpmfusion equivalent) is much more in sync with official repos and so I never had to wait until mesa caught up or anything. Also, Tumbleweed is feature packed and offers a much better experience than Fedora.
Nice to hear someone say the truth. People keep recommending it but I had nothing but trouble. My girlfriend tried it also and had ton of weird bugs, like couldn’t copy paste from Firefox and other super weird things going on.
She installed Pop OS and now she loves Linux. Never any issues whatsoever.
I’ve been using Fedora and haven’t encountered any of the issues you mentioned. To me it’s always been rock solid.
Same here. For me Fedora is incredibly solid and fresh experience. Hope Red Hat will not make strange decisions with Fedora in future.
I personally found Fedora to be rock solid, and along with Ubuntu provided the best hardware support out of the box on all my computers - though it’s been a couple of years since I used it. I did end up on Ubuntu non-LTS in the end as I now run Ubuntu LTS on my servers and find having the same systems to be beneficial (from a knowledge perspective).
Very strange, I am using Fedora as my daily-driver since about 6 months now, and I had none of the issues you mention. Rock solid experience so far.
Rock solid on my 11-yo laptop that has been running fedora and updated every 6 months since I bought it in 2012.
I’ve always updated late in the fedora cycle - maybe that’s the go.
Yeah, I’ve been running Fedora since the first Fedora Core release. Only ever had an issue once, back on FC4 but was easily fixed. My current laptop is 8 years old and is solid. Only issue is rotating it causes airplane mode to turn on, so I don’t rotate it.
I only have problem with driver in Fedora, and nothing Else. Only Upgrade driver when needs to.
Anecdotally it seems to be an unusually bad phase, lots of people reporting problems since kernel 6.3 ,then there was the bad ostree update (which I don’t think was exclusive to Fedora).
I have enough years of good experience with Fedora to know that’s not normal and confidence enough to stick with it.
Last year Silverblue spent a whole month broken, the developers have no concept of rolling back bad updates.
Not for me it wasn’t, when was that?
You probably didn’t notice, but you couldn’t install anything or update, rpm-ostree was broken.
Unless you fixed it manually, sure, there’s an argument to be had that way.
I was looking for more like a date and Fedora version number, there was a short period for a few months in August-September last year where I didn’t have an active Silverblue machine, but apart from that I’ve been running
rpm-ostree upgradeon something on a daily basis for the last two years.It didn’t spew an error message, it failed completely silently. I was completely puzzled and wasted a day trying to figure out why I couldn’t overlay a certain package.
I’m using fedora as my work system, because I have a relatively new laptop that needs the new kernels. Haven’t experienced anything you’re describing. Are you on fedora regular or on sliverblue (the immutable version)? If you’re having issues running the newest kernel, follow the fedora documented way to build and run your own. I did just that when needed a prerelease kernel and it worked out fine. I usually upgrade to a new release by the end of the cycle, so that the new version had 6 months to mature. I never immediately upgrade.
Other users are also reporting such issues.
Since kernel 6.3 my laptop would only boot 1/10 times. After a week of not turning it off, I finally moved back to Arch.
If you want to continue using Fedora try Kinoite or Silverblue. With their immutability and ease of rollback, I’ve really enjoyed using Fedora again.
Fedora Silverblue is basically my ideal distro. Used it for the past two years on all my machines.
Shame about the telemetry stuff and RHEL bullshit… Jumped to Debian 12 and haven’t looked back.
Kubuntu is very stable. love it
The fedora 37 and 38 livecds have a bug that prevents them from being bootable. So when I wanted to install fedora on my laptop I had to start with 36 then upgrade to 37 then to 38. No other distro has had this problem.
This one at least is a known issue with a few workarounds, including manually adding a fixed shim package to a bootable usb. It should be fixed in the next release though.
I shouldn’t have to do that though. Fedora should have fixed that soon after 37 was released and definitely should not have let this issue persist for as long as it had.
It is unfortunate, but the reasons are discussed in the bug report: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2113005#c52
tl;dr: Fedora cannot just build an updated shim because it has to be signed by Microsoft for secure boot support. Microsoft added a new support requirement that had (maybe still has) not been added to the kernel. Shim is not touched very often, so any distro that is using an old one that was already signed would be unaffected. I don’t know why Fedora didn’t just downgrade to one that is unaffected (I’m assuming they had compelling reasons for the upgrade in the first place), from a distro perspective that is their only option to fix the issue.
I had tough times trying to install fedora 38 kde spin.
Back in my distro-hopping days, I found it be unstable both when updating and in day-to-day use. Updates broke it and applications regularly crashed.
Yes.
Fedora is the new Ubuntu
Fedora is older than Ubuntu.
I always found Fedora to be a little unstable for my work use. I switched to CentOS because of that, and that was truly rock solid. I even used CentOS Stream for a while (but switched to Alma and Rocky eventually).
There are LTS Kernel from Red Hat Employee, you can install it via https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/kwizart/kernel-longterm-5.15/
If you really need that in long term, well, give him some coffee via paypal, haha…
JK, but it’s the well known long time best LTS kernel repo in copr. Just not directly endorsed by Fedora as fedora is bleeding edge, when it mean bleeding edge, then any kernel update could break the driver, as the driver is built in into the kernel.
