Comment by jijijijij
1 month ago
> I kept reading endorsements of Fedora's level of polish/stability on HN but was kinda nervous having used Debian distros my entire life and I’m really happy I finally took the plunge. Wish I tried it years ago!
This. I don't know why, but people forget about Fedora when considering distros. They rather fight Arch than try Fedora. So, did I. Maybe its Redhat. Wish I switched earlier, too. (Although I heard this level of polish wasn't always the case.)
I love Fedora so much. Everything just works, but that's not that special compared to Ubuntu. What is special is the fucking sanity throughout the whole system. Debian based distros always have some legacy shit going on. No bloat, no snap, nothing breaking convention and their upgrade model sits in the sweet spot between Ubuntu's 4 year LTS cycle and Arch's rolling release. Pacman can rot in hell, apt is okay, but oh boy, do I love dnf.
Tho, Fedora has some minor quirks, which still make it hard to recommend for total beginners without personal instructions/guidance IMO. Like the need for RPMFusion repos and the bad handling/documentation of that. Not a problem if you know at all what a package manager, PKI and terminal is, but too much otherwise.
I dual booted Fedora back when it was still called Fedora Core from version 6 until 11-ish. I had it installed on a laptop and had a lot of driver issues with it and eventually didn't bother with dual booting when I moved to a new laptop.
I'm now looking to get off Windows permanently before security updates stop for Win 10 as I have no intention of upgrading to Win 11 since Linux gaming is now a lot more viable and was the only remaining thing holding me back from switching earlier. I've been considering either Bazzite (a Fedora derivative with a focus on gaming) or Mint but after reading your comment I may give vanilla Fedora a try too.
So far I've tried out the Bazzite Live ISO but it wouldn't detect my wireless Xbox controller though that may be a quirk of the Live ISO. I'm going to try a full install on a flash drive next and see if that fixes things.
Give it a try! Although, I do all my gaming on a Playstation. In Fedora, the Steam and NVIDIA Fusion repos come preinstalled and can be enabled during installation or in Gnome's 'Software' or the package manager later, but I can't speak to that. The opensource AMD drivers are in the main repo no action needed. ROCm too, but that can be messy and is work-in-progress on AMD's side. Can't vouch for the controller, but people claim they work. Guess, that's the live image. I heard, games with anti-cheat engines in the kernel categorically don't work with Linux, but this may change at some point. In that case, or if you want "console mode", a specific gaming distro may be worth considering, otherwise I would stick to vanilla. Good luck! Hope I didn't promise too much ;)
So I cleared out one of my SSDs and installed Fedora yesterday.
I still had the issue of no gamepad detection. I had to install xone which took some trial and error. Firstly, I didn't have dkms installed and secondly, soon after installing Fedora the kernel was updated in the background and on reboot my display resolution was fixed to 1024x768 or something for some reason (that's gonna be another issue I'll have to look into). I rebooted and went back to the previous version and then dkms complained the kernel-headers were missing. However, the kernel-headers were installed for the latest kernel but not the older version I had rebooted to. I'm not used to Fedora or dnf (I run Proxmox+Debian in my homelab) so after a quick search to figure out how to install a specific version of a package (it's not as simple as <package>@<version> but rather <package>-<version>.fc$FEDORA_VERSION.$ARCHITECTURE) I got kernel-devel installed and was able to finally run the xone install script successfully and have my gamepad detected.
The most frustrating thing is that the xone install script doesn't fail despite errors from dkms so after the first install (where I almost gave up because I thought something was wrong with my setup) I had to run the uninstall script each time there was a problem and then run it again. The xone docs also mention running a secondary script which doesn't actually exist until the first script runs successfully so that added a lot of confusion.
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Canonical releases an Ubuntu LTS release every two years: active is 24.04, next is coming in a few months as 26.04.
LTS support runs for 5 years (there is extended support for 10 years available), so you can skip an LTS if you don't need the latest base software.
You are right, I got that mixed up. To be fair, I somehow also thought of yearly releases for Fedora, which isn't the case. It's every six months, so the relation remains identical, just off by a factor of 2 :D