How did you install it, I tried Fedora some weeks ago, but had a lot of instability issues, so I switch to Ubuntu, still had instability issues on Ubuntu until I upgrade the Linux kernel to 4.14 and my instability issues went away. Now the drive I had Ubuntu installed on died on Saturday evening, and I am thinking of giving Fedora Rawhide a Try, and I am wondering what is the correct way to install it.
Well, define “easier” ?
My use case would be best described by buzz words such as: ZFS, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, GIMP, Digikam, Rhythmbox, Virtualbox, Kodi, Steam, VFIO, Tumbleweed.
I am perfectly happy with a 2 year LTS release in this scenario. If Ubuntu would not keep Firefox current, I might change opinion. My point is: I have had far better experience with a slightly more conservative approach to software releases than rolling for just this set of applications. Rolling has bitten me, both on the kernel level and on the application level.
And I know I can trust distribution updates, they never failed me once. Even then, I have ZFS to the rescue. One time a laptop lost power during the upgrade process (power cable got disconnected), recovery took a single boot into recovery and a 10 second rollback of the root filesystem.
So I guess I’m not one of those persons who believes in the holy grail of rolling. Sure, Solus is rock stable and I think Ikey is pure genius. But then again, Solus does not have that many applications yet so I feel that comparison is not 100% correct. I also don’t consider AUR to be a part of Arch (which makes it score better when comparing stability).
I think you need to define what you want to do, and take the Linux advantage of having choice to find a solution that suits you best.
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I went to this website and followed the steps to point the installer to rawhide. I tried upgrading from a borked regular fedora but couldn’t get it to work. Idk if its because of upgrade tool or because of how messed up my install was.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Rawhide
For a point of reference, I tried to upgrade from 26 to 27 but lost power halfway and half the things would say f26 but the other half would say f27. It would say I could upgrade to f27 so I would, then it would download and say I’m already on f27 and wouldn’t do anything.
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Why not just run the rawhide branch if you like Fedora?
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Rawhide
@reavessm beat me to it.
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IIRC, Rawhide is Fedora 28. When Fedora 28 is released as stable, you’ll need to switch to release 29 in order to stay on Rawhide, from what I understand.
@SgtAwesomesauce Rawide works more like Debian Testing. It is rolling until frozen. Once it is frozen, you are on that branch until an official release of Fedora is made. Then they unfreeze rawhide and start working on the next release. From my google fu, it looks like it is never frozen for more than a month or two between releases. No special migration plan necessary.
Ah, okay. That makes sense.
I guess I misunderstood what they meant by “frozen for release”
Rolling is nice, yes, but consider this. Upon the standardizatiot of flatpak and snaps I have all but abandoned arch. App availability is through the roof an every os, apps are sandboxed and more secure, update themselves, and are easily available. The only advantage something like arch has now is bloat cutdown; but guess what? POP_OS starts out empty and you get the tools yourself. Ubuntu makes it easy to uninstall everything and start fresh. And fedora probably has the apps you want packaged in anyways.
On top of all this, LTS no longer means ‘old and shitty’ to me. Theres an up to date kernel that utilizes all of my hardware and I have no dliver issues whatsoever.
Arch has only been throwing a hissy fit lately and I’m tired of it. As a now 4 year arch user, I’m done. At least for now.
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@FaunCB you’re a BSD hacker, right? I’m considering puttting FreeBSD as my Workstation. I’ll have to look into virtualization on it, but I’m getting the impression things don’t break when you update.
Any merit to this or are desktop upgrades on BSD as ugly as Linux?
I mean I’m an OSX hacker more or less… But I’ve been looking into BSD recently.
So you get 4 choices, right? Void Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and TrueOS/GhostBSD.
Void is the most BSD linux I have ever seen. Its rolling, is dependant on flatpak completely, and doesn’t explode on updates according to users. Its devs are even from OpenBSD so that tells you a lot on how it works by design.
FreeBSD seems to be fine if you want to learn it. I want to learn it, but like linux I’d have to start on a visual based OS before I could actually go to a blank black nothingness and building it myself. If you want to run FBSD and have the user manual by all means.
OpenBSD is the other BSD I’d look at. It seems to have a good update structure and I like the devs a lot. Again, start out black and build up, but I think theres “Desktop Installers” available somewhere but I haven’t really looked into it to be honest.
Then TrueOS / GhostBSD. Both based on FreeBSD but are a one and done install like a linux distro. They’re just extremely buggy is all and that might be why you’d not want to use them. Just experiment.
Personally I’d look at void and if you don’t wanna do that then sure fuck it go all in.
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I may Leroy Jenkins this.
I need to find a burner box. FreeBSD runs virtual box…
I def recommend looking at Void Linux first.
With that said… from my experience things don’t tend to break too often but when it happens at an inappropriate time it can be slightly annoying.
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I have FreeBSD running as a vm as a live disk. I guess I’ll install it. Then get a desktop environment going on it. It seems to me I could get it with gnome and basically running like my Fedora install.
FreeBSD started to lose it sexiness though with its pkg thing and ability to port Linux binaries. It’s like if I wanted Linux - well - I’d keep using Linux.
Void may be the next best option. It may have a longevity isssue. I mean it’s been around since 09 but it really is it’s own distro.
@FaunCB do you use void?
It currently lives on my thinkpad, was on my newest toy till I broke it, will be on my macbook and netbook, and if I’m reeeeeaaaaally feeling jumpy it’ll go on my desktop. ATM I’m relearning enlightenment (I used E17 last :U) and how to theme it. I’m on 4.14.something and have all my apps installed at baseline with flatpak and if I need anything else I will just build it. I spend most of my time in the terminal, terminology to be exact, but window management is neat either way.
The BSD does shine through. Its not full on BSD, and if you really really want BSD then do openBSD and save yourself some time. Void could be considered just another linux, but its feature set is nice enough that I don’t need an SSD to get 10 second boot times and its stable as a… I dunno. Stable as the mariana trench. I haven’t had problems.
I’ll note one thing that might convince you, and honestly its really got me hooked. I have had one single problem thus far: something.lib.6.so could not be found. You know, the sort of glitch that doesn’t have an actual fix that kills your updates, you can’t run steam, eventually crashes firefox and the only apps that are stable are your terminal and TTY’s? welp, sudo xbps-remove gaypackage.lib.6.fuckyou and sudo xbps-install -Sy and all my problems went away magically. Just… Gone. And after the update everything was back to normal. NO OTHER OS DOES THAT AND I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY.
I mean Fedora is about as close as you can get to a rolling release. Soooo I kinda feel like you are experiencing the pros and cons of a rolling release right now. You just also have to deal with erroneous point release updates.
Opensuse tumbleweed actually tests all of their updates before submitting them. So they have a pretty decent level of quality assurance with their rolling release.
Even Debian Testing is pretty solid.
Arch is where things get kinda tricky. Arch really doesn’t have any sort of quality assurance. If the developer says the package is stable, it gets sent out. Either the developer is good, and the package is stable, or he was a dirty liar and now you have a broken system.
Yeup.
I love it when arch people talk about OS bloat and then turn around and install more programs than debian has by default.
Hell I have seen arch users with more bloat than a bestbuy windows laptop.
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One thing that I did not see here as people are mentioning VOID and the BSDs.
May want to look into Debian GNU/kfreebsd it is Debian’s packaging of the GNU tools an libraries running onto of a freeBSD kernel. It is not an official distro of Debian anymore due to systemd taking over the init space in the Linux world, but it still is unofficially supported as a Debian port. It is worth a shot if you want to get into BSD but not familiar with the BSD tools yet. It is like the gateway BSD *nix before going full blown BSD.
Another BSD honorable mention is DragonflyBSD.
Its literally freebsd with a blob of custom tools and terminal themes. I do like the installer more though.
They have some things that they straight up rip from GNU and the Linux kernel. Also their files system Hammer is a custom job. I like dragonflyBSD. I find that I am so used to the GNU/Linux world though that I cannot totally get behind the BSD way. It is like SuSe. I like what they do and I like how there things look, but I never feel 100% at home with SuSe. Especially when they do things the SuSe way and not the normal GNU/Linux way; most of the time they are right, but it still feels… odd.