I am currently running Xubuntu on all my systems but there are so many things that feel rather unstable/buggy - I am sure it is not all Xubuntus/Xfce’s fault, but my knowledge is limited so I just attribute it to that.
Therefore, I am currently considering switching to Fedora. I feel like it is time trying out a new desktop (KDE) and a more up to date kernel. I am not entirely sure what I am hoping from this post, but maybe a “yea, it is worth it” would ease my mind a bit.
Also, I am a bit unsure how to easily move between them (programs and data).
To name a few of the bugs I encountered in the past:
- When connecting screens, quite often the created profile is ignored, screens get disabled, overlapped, … By applying the profile multiple times eventually you can overcome this issue
- Dell specific: Webcam does not work, system sometimes freezes after closing the laptop lid even if sleep mode is deactivated
- Certain shortcuts are bugged (WIN+Left works, WIN+Right doesn’t. When you reset WIN+Right, it works until the next restart)
Fedora is solid. It’s as close to Debian as a fast update track distro can be in terms of stability.
It’s also obnoxious. Between SElinux, updates typically requiring reboots, cockpit being a sloppy feature incomplete mess, and things just taking longer to do on fedora than anything other distro, you might want to think twice.
It’s not bad, it just makes certain trades not everyone is happy with. It feels windowsy. You use fedora because there’s a reason you are using fedora. It’s not a default distro.
I mean it is very stable in my experience and also you get updates within weeks of upstream release gor many programs (like KDE itself)
Fedora is pretty stable itself, but I have experienced some problems with KDE, for instance dolphin crashing on opening a directory attached by KDE Connect. Keyboard shortcuts seem to work just fine, but they may be not configured the way you expect, so consider tweaking them in the settings, no difficulties here.
Also, keep in mind KDE is quite a heavy environment, it may feel slow after Xfce, even on a middle-end system. Personally, I would probably choose GNOME if I returned to the past moment of installing Fedora.
Fedora is based on Red Hat, you’ll need time to get used to some minor differencies in contrast to Ubuntu, especially commands’ syntax. You’ll have to reinstall all needed programs, relogin your accounts and so on. I think you will generally be able to copy and paste some configs, but they may need a bit of adjustment.
While it is quite stable, Fedora still recieves updates really frequently, you should ask yourself if you really want to update every week or two.
If you use Xfce with X11, be ready to face Wayland’s specifics with screen recording and working with monitors.
My conclusion: KDE is probably not an optimal choice, but switching to Fedora is worth it, if you are ready to spend a day or two getting known with it’s specifics.
Also, keep in mind KDE is quite a heavy environment
Isnt this only true of older versions of KDE?
I use KDE on a really slow Microsoft Surface Go (Gen 1) and it’s still snappy.
Its also a LOT lighter than GNOME.
Not sure about GNOME but I can’t call KDE snappy on my setup
Fedora is known to be a good middle ground, and that’s why Linus Torvalds is running it on its work machine. But Fedora is more GNOME focus, while it does not stop you from using KDE, if you’re on Xubuntu you might want to consider Kubuntu.
I’ve tried most distros over the years. I liked arch with gnome, but maintaining it was a bit of work. And then I realized that when I was done setting it up the way I liked it, I was essentially just building fedora workstation. So I switched a few versions ago and I haven’t looked back.
Fedora is boring, like sometimes too boring. But then I remember that’s what an os is supposed to be. I now run it on all my PCs and it’s what I install on family members PCs. (Yup it’s even done well with windows converts who don’t know anything about linux - their transition has been easy)
Issues I have encountered:
- Rpmfusion is a must, otherwise the distro doesn’t handle much. It’s also the best way to nvidia.
- i still run into the odd codec thing even with rpm fusion-I just use VLC and it works fine
- it took me a while to figure out that the fedora based flatpaks are not always the same as the flathub versions. For example, back to point 2, the fedora flatpak of VLC is missing codecs while the flathub version works with everything.
- i don’t like how flatpaks update automatically. I’m sure I can stop that behavior but I haven’t bothered to look into it yet. It manifests itself with steam. The flatpak updates but the main system has not. Steam then has driver differences which leads to processing more shaders and sometimes outright conflicts and my games default to the integrated gpu. This is always fixed by simply updating the system, it’s never a real issue. But sometimes I don’t want to update, I just want to game.
- it’s got some funny ways of doing things. Always worth googling before you do something. For example, the way you update grub, there’s a special fedora way to do that. They push Podman instead of docker and despite what they say, it doesn’t always build cleanly - just use docker. That kind of stuff.
What I like about fedora
- It’s boring and “just works” not even mint “just worked” as good for me
- the upgrades between versions are boring and non events. It works if you go into detail cleaning up old things from the command line, it works if you just click the “upgrade” button in the gui.
- its not bleeding edge but still pretty new. I’ve thrown some brand new hardware at it and it was supported, whereas all other distros failed except arch
- It’s cake to maintain. Updates don’t require the attention arch does, and honestly I’ve had more issues with Ubuntu updates. It sets up btrfs by default - some may see that as a detriment - but it sets you up nice for snapshots and whatnot right out of the box.
I say give workstation a shot and give it a little time to get used to things. Definitely do rpmfusion. It’s the one time I’d recommend just jamming commands into the terminal exactly like the website says without thinking. (You still have to read the website for the right commands). Good luck!
This comment very much resonates with me. been distro hopping for a while, with ubuntu, arch, debian, and nix. fedora has been very awesomely boring, with the caveats mentioned above.
codecs were confusing at first, just like flatpaks.
in just one way my personal preferences differ here. i love using podman and always try using that first, and only then switch to docker if necessary. i also use fedora on my work laptop, and was surprised how many more steps it took for my colleagues to get podman running well. (still more enjoyable than docker imo)
Thanks! rpmfusion sounds super helpful:
RPM Fusion is a repository of add-on packages for Fedora and EL+EPEL maintained by a group of volunteers. It distributes packages that have been deemed unacceptable to Fedora for various reasons, such as patented codecs, nonfree drivers, or tainted software.
I will definitely take a look at it. Knowing about a few oddities definitely helps, too.
I don’t know, but I can tell you that I use Bluefin - Fedora Silverblue. I have it for 7 months now and had 0 stability issues.
If you just want to switch to kde you can install it on your current system:
apt install kde-full
Or
apt install kde-standard
No need to reinstall an entirely new distro.
Been running Fedora with KDE Plasma as a daily system for 9 years now. It’s more stable the longer I use it, but I still keep using a version until a week before end of life. I just don’t want to deal with quirks I have no patience for these days, and rarely I need the newest version of what’s in repos, it’s usually pretty new anyway with two releases a year.
Keep in mind if you are using a lot of normie applications (or maybe stuff for work), it may only be officially supported on ubuntu and Fedora may be a bit of work to get going. But there’s tools to turn debs into rpms and such. I don’t miss ubuntu at all.
You’re looking for stability and KDE Plasma. Fedora doesn’t seem to be the right candidate.
Arch Linux (or Endeavour / Manjaro), or OpenSUSE are better candidate.Fedora doesn’t seem to be the right candidate.
Why do you think that?
Arch Linux (or Endeavour / Manjaro)
If you mean that they’re more stable, then I simply have to assume that you think those are more robust than Fedora (because the other interpretation[1] wouldn’t make any sense). Which (again) begs the question… why do you think that?
The way Debian uses the term Stable for its slowest moving release. ↩︎
My experience with fedora was the opposite of robust. I’ve tried multiple times over the last decades, my last experience is fairly recent (a couple of years ago) but always disappointing: hardware issues, minor but annoying bugs, etc.
And KDE Plasma has always been neglected by the core team. So clearly not the right distribution for OP.
Ah, okay. I do concede that -historically- Fedora wasn’t robust, no. They weren’t shy about breaking changes, which even led them to be referred to as Red Hat’s test bed distro by the community and beyond.
However, for (at least) the last 5 years or so, Fedora’s direction has changed significantly. I’m not entirely sure what prompted this change, but it has definitely been a welcome one. For example: most recently, Fedora has somewhat even formalized this new approach with their new initiative.
Basically, Fedora wants to be innovative like they’ve always been known for. But, this shouldn’t come at the cost of alienating your own user base. Thus, the proposal details how these two perspectives can see eye to eye with each other.
As for KDE Plasma; again -historically- it has been a second-class citizen on Fedora; at least, compared to GNOME. But, KDE Plasma has since been promoted. There’s no meaningful difference between the two variants when it comes to how Fedora regards them. Even the website alludes to this:
Thanks for the additional context. I may have misunderstood the announcement 5 years ago as I remember reacting very negatively to that news. Are they still defaulting to flatpak for new apps?
Sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer:
I may have misunderstood the announcement 5 years ago
I didn’t reference any 5 year old announcement. If you didn’t imply that anyways, then please consider sharing the 5 year old announcement.
Are they still defaulting to flatpak for new apps?
Did Fedora ever default to flatpak for new apps 🤔? For Fedora Atomic, sure. But I don’t recall traditional Fedora ever doing so. This isn’t Canonical that re-installs an .deb installation as a snap.
I got confused with CentOS changes in 2000: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
It eroded my trust with anything Red Hat-related. And the acquisition by IBM in 2019 had already damaged its image.
Last time I tried Fedora (around last year), anything installed via the “software” app in GNOME defaulted to a flatpak install.
This became a lot longer of a writing than I expected. My apologies*. So, without further ado.
I got confused with CentOS changes in 2000: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
It eroded my trust with anything Red Hat-related. And the acquisition by IBM in 2019 had already damaged its image.
Ah okay. Thanks for clarifying! I remember that the pushback was real on that one. But, I’m not sure if it was justified. If anything, I’d say that people had a knee-jerk reaction to it and it soon after became a ‘toxic’ environment in which reasonable discourse was (almost) non-existent.
However, Gordon Messmer[1]’s piece on this suggests that CentOS was everything but what was idealized by the community. As such, being converted to CentOS Stream might have been a positive change.
Anyhow, honestly, I’m not well-versed with RHEL(-clones). So feel free to dismiss anything I’ve said 😜.
Moving on… What’s perhaps important to note is that Fedora’s relation to Red Hat is a curious one. For example, Fedora defaults to Btrfs for its file system while Red Hat has deprecated it for quite a while now. Furthermore, while Red Hat seems to go pretty hard on Image Mode, Fedora didn’t even block a major update (until very recently) if some bug impacted its atomic variants very negatively. So, basically, Red Hat’s priorities =/= Fedora’s priorities.
But, having said all of that, I do respect your choice to not trust anything Red Hat-related. Perhaps, I would have done so as well, were it not for the fact that I’ve been daily driving Fedora(-derivatives) for quite a while. Yes, I admit that I’m probably biased 😅.
Last time I tried Fedora (around last year), anything installed via the “software” app in GNOME defaulted to a flatpak install.
Interesting. I literally did a fresh Fedora install within a VM and the results have been interesting:
- If it catches (!) that the package is available within any non-flatpak repository, then it will prefer the
.rpminstall by default. Examples include Steam and GNOME builder. - However, if for some strange reason the
.rpmpackage is not picked up, then it does default to flatpak. And it’s not possible to select the.rpmpackage within the GUI either. Even thoughsudo dnf install <package name>does work as you’d expect 😅. Examples include Neovim.
I wonder if you had to deal with the above shenanigans last year as well. Or, perhaps, it was even worse for some awful reason. Anyhow, there’s more truth to it than I expected. Though, I’d argue it’s probably some bug or otherwise unintended behavior.
If you’ve read all of my ramblings, then I’d like to thank you for the effort 😊! Have a good one, fam!
Yeah, yeah; he works at Red Hat, so you might be rightfully skeptical whether he can even be unbiased. However, he has build so much good will through his community efforts that I’m absolutely giving him the benefit of doubt. Though, please feel free to disagree with me on this. ↩︎
- If it catches (!) that the package is available within any non-flatpak repository, then it will prefer the
I’ve been running Fedora steadily since Fedora Core. I’ve used just about every version of Red Hat’s distro since RHL5. I’ve used a whole lot of other distros, too.
Fedora is the upstream of CentOS and RHEL. Anything targeting RHEL will first show up in Fedora. Fedora has a long history of pioneering new technologies. The release cadence is twice a year, versions are supported for 1 year from release (2 subsequent release cycles).
Your programs and data will move just fine between different Linux distributions. You’ve got nothing to worry about there.
Display issues are generally a WM/Compositor/Driver problem. If the bugs aren’t in the drivers or in Wayland itself, then you might see differences in e.g. Gnome-Shell versus KDE. This isn’t likely to be a distro-specific issue, though. It is possible that some of the distro-level patch work may have fixed the bug.
Keyboard shortcuts are fully configurable. Not a distro-specific thing, but each distro does it a little differently depending on which software they’re using. You can make any key combination do anything you want. But persisting changes may not always happen depending on how you’re setting it.
Most of what you’re talking about just requires a little deeper know-how than you’ve currently got. One detail that you’ll need to understand before anything else - The differences between Xubuntu and Fedora are a whole lot smaller than the differences between Mac and Windows or either of those and Linux. Yes, each distro is opinionated about how it’s out-of-the-box configs are set. But, they’re running more of the same software than not. So, now it’s just time for you to learn how the sausage is made. Hit the man pages and start learning how to solve some of these problems. :)
That’s a very excellent response. Greetings, fellow greybeard. I miss apt-rpm.
I don’t use laptops.
I have some dell optiplex and poweredge in the home-lab.
These machines are ported through a KVM, and I’m using a desktop on proxmox where the GPU, mouse, keyboard, sound and cam are ported into the fedora VM via proxmox from there the KVM connects.
I play WoW and zero-k, but the voice chat isn’t working in WoW.
I’ve moved the whole house to Fedora KDE. Every laptop. The only things not running it, Steamdeck and Unraid server.
I wrote a script for first installs, its mostly to make my life easier, but you might like it too. I wrote it for Fedora 42, and updated it for 43, but it should run fine on 44 as well.
Just take a minute to esit then parameters at the top. https://github.com/mortalic/firstrun
Could this be… a script sharing thread? Anyway, here’s a fedora updater and a fedora installer
Lol love it. It’s a script sharing thread, if we all share our scripts. 🤘🔥😄
Sounds very interesting. I took a quick look and might run it, too.
Nice, if there is anything you run into that doesn’t work feel free to let me know. I do accept pull requests too.
If you want stable and can deal with the downsides honestly I suggest immutable distros. Otherwise Fedora is pretty reasonably stable for a pretty up to date distro and also has decent community support which is underrated. If your drive(s) are setup for it it’s pretty easy to distro hop anyways so it’s worth a shot
Fedora has two immutable distros KDE (Kinoite) and GNOME (Silverblue) and both are excellent and very stable.
What do you mean by
If your drive(s) are setup for it it’s pretty easy to distro hop anyways so it’s worth a shot
I think he means if you’ve set up your partitions where only the core OS is on root, it’s easier to distro hop and point your new os to your home folder. There are partition strategies that make distro hopping easy.
I see. Did stuff like that in the past but always reserved too much or too little for primary and regretted it afterwards.
Yep precisely this
All I have are Fedora based machines running Bazzite & Aurora. That’s been the case since the distros were originally released about 2+ years or so. Same install. No issues ever. A whole family of 4 running perfectly working Fedora based PCs with no issues and no maintenance whatsoever. I don’t do crap and they just keep working perfectly. No complaints, all praise. My family doesn’t even know it’s not
butterWindows, I mean I told them, they just don’t care… it works and it gets the job done.If that’s not stable, then I don’t know the meaning of the word.
/home should have all your stuff, just copy that to the new installation and you’re set.
Try it and see how it works for you. There’s really no telling what it will be like because each system is different and will respond to the different distros of Linux and their kernel versions in different ways. For a time Fedora worked better on my laptop but Kubuntu caught up and hardware support was improved in their newest kernel so now I’m back on that xD
But yeah, for my 2025 laptop Fedora was extremely stable and I never ran into a problem. I just missed the big repos of the Debian/Ubuntu family.
