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.
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.
How does Tumbleweed compare to Fedora for you? The Mesa situation is also the driving force behind me looking for alternatives.
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.
Fedora 30 - 36 were phenomenal releases and I mostly used them, recommended them elsewhere.
I had to start using the Spins because the default GNOME desktop is just becoming unusable. Stripping functionality to make it prettier, not fixing longstanding issues.
Then Fedora had that kerfuffle with the licensing issues with codecs, and I couldn’t play a certain type of HEVC video that the vast majority of my video library is encoded in.
Then, more recently, I had issues with Python in their repos. That was the last straw. I’ll definitely check it out again in a few years to see if they’ve fixed a lot of these problems, but I wouldn’t recommend the distro in its current state.
I’ve been using Fedora and haven’t encountered any of the issues you mentioned. To me it’s always been rock solid.
I always found Fedora to be a little unstable for my work use. I switched to CentOS because of that, and that was truly rock solid. I even used CentOS Stream for a while (but switched to Alma and Rocky eventually).
I’ve been using fedora since 32 and I’d say this is a bad phase. I have heard time and time again that opensuse is more stable tho
