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.
How does Tumbleweed compare to Fedora for you? The Mesa situation is also the driving force behind me looking for alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
