Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing, tinkering with some self-hosted stuff that is on separate hardware.
I don’t like the way Ubuntu is moving with snaps. And LTS version falls behind too much. So I decided to move to Fedora.
My plan is simple:
- I will install Fedora on a fresh nvme drive. I want disk encryption, so I’m going to have LUKS over btrfs for /home, and the root will remain unencrypted.
- I will copy all files from old /home to new /home, with the exception of dot-files.
- I plan to make use of flatpaks, so I don’t think configuration for my apps is easily transferable. I’ll have to install and configure apps from scratch, unless I’ll have to use an RPM package.
Does all of this make sense? Is there a way to simplify app re-configuration in my case?
And as I never used Fedora extensively (booting from live image doesn’t count), are there any caveats I should be aware of?
Enable rpmfusion for media codecs and things like libdvdcss or unrestricted mesa drivers: https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/installing-plugins-for-playing-movies-and-music/
Fedora comes out of the box with a curated flatpak repo. You might want to replace that with flathub: https://flatpak.org/setup/Fedora
Imho, there’s no reason not to enable disk encryption for root. Luks configuration during setup is very straightforward.
If you don’t have nvidia graphics, enable uefi and secure boot (no legacy options). Fedora works well with it out of the box.
Two more things that came to mind. If you want to use another desktop environment than gnome (default), you should be aware of spins: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/
Spins work against the same repositories, they just come with other sets of packages preinstalled.
Also, you said you’re using amd gpu. Fedora has the drivers for that out of the box. But due to fedora’s strict FOSS policy, some hardware acceleration features are stripped out of the amd driver. I mentioned you can get the unstripped drivers from rpmfusion. That is detailed here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia
The relevant bit being this:
sudo dnf swap mesa-va-drivers mesa-va-drivers-freeworld
sudo dnf swap mesa-vdpau-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers-freeworld
Those packages work together with the drivers from the official repos. They can get out of sync. That never happened to me, yet. But if an update mentions some conflict with mesa-*, just don’t do that update until that conflict disappears. If you ever run into the issue you can also undo the last update with the dnf history commands.
Why not move to Debian? Ubuntu was born in a time when Debian stable had a really long release cycle and wasn’t desktop ready. But times have changed. Debian is a great desktop without all of Canonical’s Ubuntu “experiments” like snap.
This. Edit /etc/sources/apt, switch to sid, sudo apt update and you’ll have “a better ubuntu.”
Yep. Did this on my orange pi zero 3 (which has no support on Linux) and it worked. :^)
I second this. I have been using Ubuntu for at least 10 years by I really do not like snaps or flatpaks for that matter. So, after some disappointing attempts using Debian in the past, I had a new go at it 1-2 years ago and I was positively surprised: Ubuntu without the useless bloat - kind of normal because Ubuntu is based on Debian. For sure the my next PC will be using Debian: efficient, highly configurable, and quite user friendly once you understand it’s ways of configuring things.
I see your point… I use Debian for my self-hosted environment, so having similar system on desktop may save some cognitive load. My main arguments against Debian are (maybe misinformed though):
No btrfs support in installerOK, Debian wiki says it’s there- Major annual upgrades to keep up with stable look more scary than more incremental and frequent updates of Fedora. And using Sid as someone suggested sounds too crazy for main PC
So yeah, looks like it’s just upgrades… Gives me something to think about while I’m moving my apps to flatpaks
That still wouldn’t answer their dilemma of older versioning of packages, unless they went to Sid.
Why don’t you install flatpak on Ubuntu, make the packaging migration before doing the OS migration so you can evaluate your workflow with the new packaging system? Afer you’re used and confident with flatpak, backup and restore the flatpak folder into fedora and you transition should be smoother (don’t need to worry with 2 stuff at the same time)
Plan sounds alright. A couple of notes.
- Don’t forget your passwords and bookmarks stored in browser when doing the copy over.
- Personally, I’d use Full Disk Encryption (FDE) because it’s a default option on the Fedora installer and is more secure, and well-tested, and easier to configure.
- For your planned installables, I’d keep a list of apps you regularly install in a file somewhere (even better would be a script which installs them all) then when you distro-hop it’s easier as you can just change your script for whatever package manager.
- Some of your apps will store their configuration in your home directory in a dot file, you might be able to copy these over one-by-one for each app.
- Have you decided on Fedora Workstation or Fedora Silverblue? Each have their merits and demerits, and its worth investigating.
Thanks!
Bookmarks and passwords are taken care of. And for the apps I’ll try to get migrated to flatpaks as many as I can while still on original system.
I also see that full disk encryption is being recommended a lot, and I don’t have any solid reasons to encrypt only /home.
I have not given much thought on Silverblue. Is it “flatpak-only”? If so I’ll need to go through my apps to see if that could work. And my backup strategy will need to change - I use Duplicacy that is not available as a Flatpak
Honestly, if you like Ubuntu but dislike Snaps, Linux Mint might be a better choice than Fedora if you’re not as comfortable with Linux. Mint is basically “Ubuntu without all Canonical’s garbage.”
I used fedora before I was comfortable with Linux and I didn’t have any problems with it.
Do not use Mint. Ubuntu uses GNOME which is modern and secure. Mint will need a year or so to get Wayland support, and it will always be behind on security updates. Just run unsnap, install the apps and Gnome tweaks you want I would say.
Why is using Ubuntu against it’s nature, by removing snaps, preferable to moving to a distro that aligns more with OP’s preferences?
