I’m just checking in to give my initial thoughts on using Fedora as my main personal computer (Ryzen 9 7900X with 3080 Ti). Only a couple weeks in, but I’ve used it enough to gather some impressions.
A bit of background – I have been using Linux servers and some desktops for a couple decades. Mostly the desktops have been hardware or VMs of Ubuntu/Debian/Pop! running Gnome-ish or Xfce. I really like CrunchBang++. But those machines were mostly for dabbling, not hours-a-day endeavours.
I took the plunge and converted my main rig to Fedora 37/KDE/Wayland and held my breath, waiting for some show-stopper to immediately arise. It hasn’t. I did of course need RPM Fusion and a few of my favorite apps needed installing via snaps or flatpak, mostly for GPU reasons.
After years of micromanaging my hardware via Windows apps, though, Fedora seems very barren regarding hardware reporting. I haven’t run across anything close to MSI Afterburner, HWInfo64, RyzenMaster, etc. The nvidia-settings and GWE apps seem allergic to Wayland. Yes, I can set the GPU power limit via the CLI, but that’s about it. I can see the overall CPU and GPU temps, but per-core clock speeds have eluded me.
X-Plane 12 seems to run fine, so that’s a plus. I haven’t tried any games yet.
Thanks for the tip! I liked the KDE System Monitor better than the Gnome one, but that was just based on apperance. I had no idea how powerful it is. KDE has so many options!
Yeah they remade the System Monitor a while ago, previously it was KSysMon (which I think technically still exists) which had some things I miss in the new one, but overall the new one seems more performant.
Well it looks like my adventure has come to a standstill, at least temporarily. After 3 weeks with nary a hitch the machine decided to boot into a black screen with cursor. After myriad web searches, nothing I have tried has been able to fix it. GRUB editing, rescue mode-ing, GPU-switching, etc. Dozens of reboots is not really my idea of a good time. About six in a row is my patience limit. So it is back to Windows for a bit while I try some more web searches and attempt to be productive for a stretch.
So I am back on that proverbial horse that threw me. Practicality won the day and I avoided more troubleshooting and just went with the known solution – wipe the disk and reinstall from scratch. It cost a few hours for installing Fedora 37, installing the apps, restoring my home files from backups and tweaking KDE back to the way I had it set up. But at least everything seems as smooth as it was previously.
Fingers crossed the black screen does not reappear.
I had that happen last year. Never did figure out what happened but same solution. I figure if I have to trade 1 wipe and reinstall every year or two for otherwise rock solid stability on a laptop I’ll take it. Not to mention a reinstall of Fedora takes less than 10min vs reinstalling windows which is 30min+ depending on how fickle it is being that day.
Have you not separated your /home partition in the installer? Pretty sure Fedora does that by default these days. Reinstalling Fedora including all the packages takes roughly 15 minutes for me (although granted I may or may not have written a shell-script to install all the software I want).
I had to do that a couple times when F37 came out (I installed the Beta and there was an installer bug I was testing), other then that I had been using the install for 3-ish years.
I had accepted the defaults when installing Fedora 37, so I ended up with a btrfs subvolumes for root and /home, but both on the same partition. That doesn’t seem helpful for reinstalling, so I will do a little partition maintenance and move move /home to a new partition or drive as a precaution.
It actually does. You can go into the manual mode in the installer and assign the partitions/subvolumes manually. That way you can keep the /home subvolume while still destroying the root.
I like this idea.
A separate drive makes it much easier to move home (sic) between installations and / or editions / distro’s.
Some setting will be carried over which might interfere / break stuff, but in general, saves some hassle
Well I was looking forward to Fedora 38. I did the upgrade, but now my system hangs on boot. Probably due to nvidia gpu issues. Fedora 38 stops just before the spot where Fedora 37 dmesg says [drm] Initialized nvidia-drm 0.0.0 20160202 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0
It’s good that I can still use grub to boot into Fedora 37. Am I going to have to do the nvidia/nouveau shenanigans after every new version? Really this is a hassle.
Reinstalled everything and back up and running for the time being. I really love Fedora and KDE when it is stable. But it already has two strikes and getting good at reinstalling is not a goal of mine.
Idk if it is the Nvidia card or what but that is a rough time of it you are having. I have been on the same install for well over a year but it is an Intel laptop with Intel graphics.
Fedora 36 and 37 were good releases but 38 seems to have a lot of papercut issues. Perhaps one of the broken things that irked me more (even though it was low stakes) was gnome-mahjjong - I could only click the topmost block and nothing else. Unsure if it is a GNOME 43 issue specific or Fedora itself. AFAIK nothing changed on the side of the app itself.
Oh I am on Fedora Silverblue 38 to be more specific. I like me some flatpaks but the sandboxing isnt as good as how the browser sandboxes itself from the system (specifically on chromium based browsers).
You can always switch to ubuntu to get e.g. the htop snap. We can container everything today
I like my flatpaks. Most stuffs run fine with default package manager, but for others, I just go Flatpak and be happy with it. Some projects just prefer to have a streamlined deployment and not worry about 100 different distros. I could run everything in flatpak tbh.
I’ve been using Silverblue. It is Fedora with Gnome but the whole system is frozen and you are supposed to handle your needs with containers and flatpaks. You can still use RPMs but those are layered on top of the base OS. Fedora Kinoite is the same but with KDE instead.
Besides flatpaks, toolbox is a tool that deploys a Podman container already integrated into your system where the user can run more advanced tasks, install packages and so on. Graphical stuff works.
It’s super stable and I like it. Games run very well and overall things work as they should. Before this I had some adventures with Nobara (which is a Fedora unofficial spin optimized for gaming and media handling) but I found the update cycles to be too frantic and some stuff simply didn’t worked as they should like laptop suspend.
