Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
I honestly think it’s the best distro so far. Which sucks since it is so reliant on RedHat. I prefer to avoid corporate related distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, but I must admit they have a better experience right out of the box. I still want to give NixOS a try and maybe Gentoo, but after that I will probably come back to Fedora just like you…until something I think might be better comes along.
I personally prefer OpenSuSE, but Fedora is reasonably close second.
One reason OpenSuSE wins out for me is admittedly just because it’s not a US based project or related to a US based company like RedHat. Not that SuSE is “good” as a sponsor company; it’s just based in Germany and owned by a Swedish investment company, which edges out based in the US and owned by a mega corp like IBM. I know both OpenSuSE and Fedora are mostly independent, but both are under some control of their main corporate sponsors. So I prefer European.
Maybe that’s silly, but I have lost a lot of trust in the US legal system, project governance and their ability to exist without interference by the US state.
Are you talking about Leap or Tumbleweed?
As far as Leap goes. Isn’t it a bit behind compared to Fedora in terms of software package versions? And aren’t their package repos a bit smaller/limited in terms of what’s available?
I’m shopping for a new long term distro myself and can’t seem to make up my mind. I was set on Debian stable, but the software is kinda old. Especially for desktop environments like KDE Plasma. There’s some really cool stuff that came out in the more recent versions and I don’t want to wait 2 years before getting them.
Tumbleweed is really really good, my second favourite after Nixos (which is leagues ahead of any other OS imo)
PikaOS is Debian-based and maintaining its own repository based on trixie and unstable with similar patches to Bazzite & team. I’ve been using it as a daily driver on 3-4 systems for at least a year or two with no serious issues, and the updates are quick to fix any minor issues. Excellent for gaming. It’s probably not up to CachyOS gaming standards nor Debian stability but I find it’s a comfortable spot for me.
I dunno. The maintainer warns us on startup that this is a hobby for them. I don’t know how quick they’ll answer to important security issues.
It sounds great on paper, but I’m looking for something a little more stable and serious.
but fedora really is community driven. ibm (redhat) could disappear today and fedora would continue with out interruption
The correct choice is NixOS, fyi
I’m actually switching from Fedora today. miserable experience.
Care to elaborate? Not saying I doubt you, it’s just the polar opposite of my experience and I’m curious why that is.
Tried Fedora Silver blue or universalblue spins? Unless you do serious embedded development work (which takes more setup on atomic distros), then I have experienced that it is less work in general in setup and upkeep.
Yeah, Silverblue is nice; not my main distro, though. I came from many years of Gentoo on almost all machines I had. Debian stable is currently the most practical for me.
The immutable variant of Fedora is nice for the low maintenance computers, although I needed to get my head around podman to not overuse
rpm-ostree. So far so good. I think it will not replace the distro on my main machine, but I see the way it works as a general potential future. An immutable variant of Debian stable would be something I’d consider switching for.
It shows you haven’t tried Void Linux. 🤪
I have looked at Void a little but honestly the handling of the package manager and even it’s name just throw me of for some reason. Why do you like it?
Precisely, the package manager is one of the best things about it. Quite fast. I like it because it doesn’t have systemd and it’s one of the few distros left with a Unix philosophy. A very well-made distro.
