Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
I honestly think it’s the best distro so far. Which sucks since it is so reliant on RedHat. I prefer to avoid corporate related distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, but I must admit they have a better experience right out of the box. I still want to give NixOS a try and maybe Gentoo, but after that I will probably come back to Fedora just like you…until something I think might be better comes along.
I would say for most people Fedora is one of the best options due to having a release cycle that is quick but not too quick, coming with all sorts of different DEs (GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, XFCE, hell, even Budgie), and not really having any issues in terms of usability (aside from installing Nvidia drivers, apparently that isn’t very smooth but I have no experience with this)
Mint is nice too and super easy to use, but you need to like Cinnamon (or XFCE and MATE).
I personally love EndeavourOS, which is Arch-based and minimal OOTB, but it is definitely not for everyone. CachyOS falls under a similar box, being an Arch-based distro.
To be honest, in the modern age, there is no such thing as a bad Linux distro (except maybe Manjaro, which feels a bit like the worst of all worlds). Fedora, Mint, the buntus, the Arch derivatives, etc. are all really neat pieces of software!
I personally prefer OpenSuSE, but Fedora is reasonably close second.
One reason OpenSuSE wins out for me is admittedly just because it’s not a US based project or related to a US based company like RedHat. Not that SuSE is “good” as a sponsor company; it’s just based in Germany and owned by a Swedish investment company, which edges out based in the US and owned by a mega corp like IBM. I know both OpenSuSE and Fedora are mostly independent, but both are under some control of their main corporate sponsors. So I prefer European.
Maybe that’s silly, but I have lost a lot of trust in the US legal system, project governance and their ability to exist without interference by the US state.
but fedora really is community driven. ibm (redhat) could disappear today and fedora would continue with out interruption
Are you talking about Leap or Tumbleweed?
As far as Leap goes. Isn’t it a bit behind compared to Fedora in terms of software package versions? And aren’t their package repos a bit smaller/limited in terms of what’s available?
I’m shopping for a new long term distro myself and can’t seem to make up my mind. I was set on Debian stable, but the software is kinda old. Especially for desktop environments like KDE Plasma. There’s some really cool stuff that came out in the more recent versions and I don’t want to wait 2 years before getting them.
PikaOS is Debian-based and maintaining its own repository based on trixie and unstable with similar patches to Bazzite & team. I’ve been using it as a daily driver on 3-4 systems for at least a year or two with no serious issues, and the updates are quick to fix any minor issues. Excellent for gaming. It’s probably not up to CachyOS gaming standards nor Debian stability but I find it’s a comfortable spot for me.
Fedora is limited to non-licensed products in the base repos IIRC. But there is EPEL and RPMfusion that provide a lot of additional packages.
There are also copr repos which I think are similar to AUR in that they are user submitted.
Tumbleweed is a very cool project
I’ve been rocking PikaOS for a little while now and I’m pleasantly surprised. Debian Cid based with prepackaged gaming tools. It’s been good
I was interested in Pika, but I took the leap and just went straight Debian. I’m happy.
Are you on the stable branch? Curious how it is for gaming. I was having issues on Mint (which is similarly stable), but they all went away when I swapped to PikaOS, kinda skipped over Debian
So in packages.debian.org , you can search different versions of debian (stable/testing/unstable) and see which version of the package for a certain… thing they offer by default, eg :
https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fastfetch
Shows that trixie (stable) has fastfetch 2.40.4dfsg-1 . Forky (testing) has 2.62.1+dfsg-1 , sid (unstable) has 2.66.0+dfsg-1.
It’s great, the bad experiences I’ve had are due to my shitty non muxing or whatever dual graphics card laptop, which pika won’t fix. Just make sure you check your card is supported by the current version of the driver. I’ll reply again to show you where you can look for that info.
I’m assuming you can also “back port” it from unstable.
Pika might fix that actually. Most of the patches and custom stuff Pika adds is around obscure and difficult graphics card configurations, with extra kernel modules and stuff like that specifically for gaming on modern graphics hardware. That’s literally its main value proposition. You could try a LiveUSB and see if it works any better, but the PikaOS second-stage installer (after the base system is installed) also has a bunch of options for various driver and kernel versions and variations that might help.
That said if you’re happy where you’re at there’s no reason rocking the boat, and Debian’s pretty solid. But maybe keep it in mind for next time you feel like trying something different on that system.
Yes, but I tried Pika after realising I had the issue, and it didn’t solve it, so I’m good. Like you said, this OS is stable and there’s no use rocking the boat.
Also, I prefer the security of the slow and steady direct debian packages instead of the packages as looked after by two guys.