I just updated a few minutes ago, and it was very smooth. I have a tricky setup with Wayland + GNOME Classic, so I had to manually reconfigure that, and for some reason Bluetooth was turned off in the BIOS, but otherwise very nice. GNOME 3.38 seems faster, but I can’t say for sure.
Upgraded to Fedora 33 on my work laptop right now. The upgrade was very fast and smooth (~5-7min), but I ended up with a broken wifi. Downgrading the linux-firmware packge to 20200918-112.fc33 fixed it. In case if anyone is wondering, my laptop has an Intel Wireless 9560 chipset (iwl-7260 firmware). Not the first time that an update to linux-firmware has broken the wifi for me, though.
On the brighter side, the system actually does feel smoother now. DNF is somewhat faster too (placebo?), and the UI looks more polished than before.
I very nearly switched my Linux servers over to Fedora 32, as it felt reasonably clean and coherent for a mainstream distro (available by default with most VPS providers). But then I ran into an SELinux issue which cost me hours because many SELinux related errors apparently don’t point to SELinux being the cause in any way, they just come up as something generic like ‘permission denied’. It just feels very bolted on rather than nicely integrated. I don’t mind configuring things, but the lack of discoverability just killed it for me unfortunately.
SELinux is always the first thing I disable after installing a CentOS server. It’s just too much of a departure from the standard *nix permission model and its random errors (well, not random of course but they seem that way when looked at from a standard *nix point of view) make no sense to me at all.
You’re totally right, it feels bolted on. None of the standard tools can even manipulate its “special” permissions, so it feels like a parallel universe. Of course, standard *nix permissions still apply, so you need to know both these universes to effectively manage a server.
I rather pick CentOS for my servers instead of Fedora. The 8-month (or so) upgrade cycle is a bit too much for servers - some of my past servers have had longer uptimes than a desktop/laptop distro support cycle.
The problem is that it doesn’t advertise itself to legitimate access, either. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a machine with properly-configured SELinux policies, even in a corporate setting. The tooling and the documentation are so bad (e.g. a while back Fedora’s docs started by telling you to install a package that didn’t exist anymore!) that lots of people just give up, set its policy to permissive and get on with their lives.
I don’t recommend it, either, but I completely understand why it happens. I picked up SELinux at a former workplace a while back, but not by reading the docs, there are no useful docs. Someone showed it to me and gave me their cheatsheet. They’d picked it up at a former workplace, too, from someone who worked at Red Hat.
I just upgraded two system, and did a fresh install on another to see how the new btrfs setup is. The upgrades went smooth like always, but I noticed they’re not using any extra mount options like compress=zstd or ssd. I think the intent is to add them later once fully tested, but something to be aware of that you’ll need to add them manually if you’d like to take advantage of those options.
I really want to run Fedora but 25 years of dpkg & apt are hard to get over. Maybe I’ll try it again when I next get a new laptop. But I’m just so comfortable on Debian…
I just switched this year, after a few years of debian. It’s probably not the same experience, but for basic things, dnf is practically equivalent to apt. My personal intuition is that it might not be worth it, unless you’re also interested in GNOME (strictly speaking, the Fedora spins aren’t real Fedora releases, and usually aren’t as polished).
the Fedora spins aren’t real Fedora releases, and usually aren’t as polished
I concur with this sentiment. I’m pretty steeped in the Red Hat universe for some time, so I really like Fedora on the systems I have to touch most. As an experiment, I tried the KDE spin for a year. It was OK, but had lots of paper cuts that the standard workstation edition just doesn’t have. They’re generally very minor, like needing to use the command line for firmware updates instead of getting alerted to them by the system tooling. Since I was mostly in KDE for kwin-tiling and a few other things that are much less integrated than that, I switched back to the standard workstation edition once Pop Shell shipped and got easy to integrate with the standard Fedora GNOME installation.
My personal intuition is that it might not be worth it, unless you’re also interested in GNOME
To me, the most interesting subproject of Fedora, even though it may not be ready for wide use yet, is Silverblue. Having an immutable base system with atomic upgrades/rollbacks is really nice. This really sets it apart from other Linux distributions (outside NixOS/Guix). Sure, Ubuntu is trying to offer something similar by doing ZFS snapshots on APT operations, but that looks like another hack piled upon other hacks, rather than a proper re-engineering.
I like Debian and I’ll run it on servers but for desktop use, I want things to Just Work out of the box. My experience with Debian on the desktop is that you have to know all the packages you need in order to get the same out-of-the-box experience as Ubuntu or Fedora. At least, that’s what it was like when I tried Debian with XFCE.
You might also be interested in PopOS and Linux Mint, both of which are based on Ubuntu but strip out most of the annoyances like snapd.
A couple years ago I went through a distro jumping phase. Fedora worked fine but I didn’t find any particular advantages of running it over - say - running Ubuntu. The one thing setting it apart from other distros was Wayland as default.
I ended up on Manjaro, and it’s been a breath of fresh air: most software is a click away (thanks AUR!), things just work out of the box and in general their configuration of Plasma and Gnome feel snappier than Fedora and Ubuntu.
You are not wrong. What I meant was on the ‘experience’ front. Most of the time - if I’m lucky and the hardware obliges - I don’t bother remembering what version of the kernel, Mesa, etc. I am using, so being on the bleeding edge doesn’t introduce a lot of advantages.
BTW, the last time I tried Fedora was when Intel introduced their Iris driver and I wanted to see if it’d improve the sluggish performance I was experiencing on Gnome.
I just updated a few minutes ago, and it was very smooth. I have a tricky setup with Wayland + GNOME Classic, so I had to manually reconfigure that, and for some reason Bluetooth was turned off in the BIOS, but otherwise very nice. GNOME 3.38 seems faster, but I can’t say for sure.
Upgraded to Fedora 33 on my work laptop right now. The upgrade was very fast and smooth (~5-7min), but I ended up with a broken wifi. Downgrading the
linux-firmwarepackge to20200918-112.fc33fixed it. In case if anyone is wondering, my laptop has an Intel Wireless 9560 chipset (iwl-7260 firmware). Not the first time that an update tolinux-firmwarehas broken the wifi for me, though.On the brighter side, the system actually does feel smoother now. DNF is somewhat faster too (placebo?), and the UI looks more polished than before.
I very nearly switched my Linux servers over to Fedora 32, as it felt reasonably clean and coherent for a mainstream distro (available by default with most VPS providers). But then I ran into an SELinux issue which cost me hours because many SELinux related errors apparently don’t point to SELinux being the cause in any way, they just come up as something generic like ‘permission denied’. It just feels very bolted on rather than nicely integrated. I don’t mind configuring things, but the lack of discoverability just killed it for me unfortunately.
SELinux is always the first thing I disable after installing a CentOS server. It’s just too much of a departure from the standard *nix permission model and its random errors (well, not random of course but they seem that way when looked at from a standard *nix point of view) make no sense to me at all.
You’re totally right, it feels bolted on. None of the standard tools can even manipulate its “special” permissions, so it feels like a parallel universe. Of course, standard *nix permissions still apply, so you need to know both these universes to effectively manage a server.
I rather pick CentOS for my servers instead of Fedora. The 8-month (or so) upgrade cycle is a bit too much for servers - some of my past servers have had longer uptimes than a desktop/laptop distro support cycle.
Have you considered that it might be by design a security feature does not advertise itself to what it thinks is illegal access?
The problem is that it doesn’t advertise itself to legitimate access, either. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a machine with properly-configured SELinux policies, even in a corporate setting. The tooling and the documentation are so bad (e.g. a while back Fedora’s docs started by telling you to install a package that didn’t exist anymore!) that lots of people just give up, set its policy to permissive and get on with their lives.
I don’t recommend it, either, but I completely understand why it happens. I picked up SELinux at a former workplace a while back, but not by reading the docs, there are no useful docs. Someone showed it to me and gave me their cheatsheet. They’d picked it up at a former workplace, too, from someone who worked at Red Hat.
Not particularly no, I’d prefer to know how my own server is working and exactly where to look when things go wrong.
I just upgraded two system, and did a fresh install on another to see how the new btrfs setup is. The upgrades went smooth like always, but I noticed they’re not using any extra mount options like
compress=zstdorssd. I think the intent is to add them later once fully tested, but something to be aware of that you’ll need to add them manually if you’d like to take advantage of those options.I really want to run Fedora but 25 years of dpkg & apt are hard to get over. Maybe I’ll try it again when I next get a new laptop. But I’m just so comfortable on Debian…
I just switched this year, after a few years of debian. It’s probably not the same experience, but for basic things, dnf is practically equivalent to apt. My personal intuition is that it might not be worth it, unless you’re also interested in GNOME (strictly speaking, the Fedora spins aren’t real Fedora releases, and usually aren’t as polished).
I concur with this sentiment. I’m pretty steeped in the Red Hat universe for some time, so I really like Fedora on the systems I have to touch most. As an experiment, I tried the KDE spin for a year. It was OK, but had lots of paper cuts that the standard workstation edition just doesn’t have. They’re generally very minor, like needing to use the command line for firmware updates instead of getting alerted to them by the system tooling. Since I was mostly in KDE for kwin-tiling and a few other things that are much less integrated than that, I switched back to the standard workstation edition once Pop Shell shipped and got easy to integrate with the standard Fedora GNOME installation.
My personal intuition is that it might not be worth it, unless you’re also interested in GNOME
To me, the most interesting subproject of Fedora, even though it may not be ready for wide use yet, is Silverblue. Having an immutable base system with atomic upgrades/rollbacks is really nice. This really sets it apart from other Linux distributions (outside NixOS/Guix). Sure, Ubuntu is trying to offer something similar by doing ZFS snapshots on APT operations, but that looks like another hack piled upon other hacks, rather than a proper re-engineering.
Then again, I haven’t head good things about trying to use Silverblue with XFCE or other WMs.
I like Debian and I’ll run it on servers but for desktop use, I want things to Just Work out of the box. My experience with Debian on the desktop is that you have to know all the packages you need in order to get the same out-of-the-box experience as Ubuntu or Fedora. At least, that’s what it was like when I tried Debian with XFCE.
You might also be interested in PopOS and Linux Mint, both of which are based on Ubuntu but strip out most of the annoyances like snapd.
I’d like to add that rpm command is similar to dpkg
for example: dpkg -l > rpm -qa
A couple years ago I went through a distro jumping phase. Fedora worked fine but I didn’t find any particular advantages of running it over - say - running Ubuntu. The one thing setting it apart from other distros was Wayland as default.
I ended up on Manjaro, and it’s been a breath of fresh air: most software is a click away (thanks AUR!), things just work out of the box and in general their configuration of Plasma and Gnome feel snappier than Fedora and Ubuntu.
The one thing setting Fedora apart from other distros is often getting bleeding edge stuff as default. Most of the times it works out super.
You are not wrong. What I meant was on the ‘experience’ front. Most of the time - if I’m lucky and the hardware obliges - I don’t bother remembering what version of the kernel, Mesa, etc. I am using, so being on the bleeding edge doesn’t introduce a lot of advantages.
BTW, the last time I tried Fedora was when Intel introduced their Iris driver and I wanted to see if it’d improve the sluggish performance I was experiencing on Gnome.