Is the loss of pacman and AUR that bad?
What things are to be gained? I expect that SELinux and Redhat backing should really make fedora way more secure.
Fedora is excellent. Even major release upgrades run usually smooth. Big point is also, that you may find rpm packages beside debian package for software directly from vendor
It may be fixed and perfect, now, but I will never forgive Redhat for RPM, and by extension, every derivative. Fedora. CentOS. Anything rpm-based. I’m not a huge fan of debs, either, but I have never experienced dependency hell as bad as on rpm systems.
Lots of people like it. It’s really popular for installing on a desktop configured to run an obscure, but mission-critical, service, putting the computer in a closet, and then later walling up the closet so that the physical computer can never be found again. It’s great, as long as you never upgrade it.
If you’re not on RHEL-likes manually installing piles of out-of-tree software or randomly dumping RPMs into your system blindly hoping that things will “just work”, all is good on most rpm-based distros (RHEL, Fedora, AlmaLinux, OpenSUSE Leap, etc.). Updates don’t have issues and system upgrades (where possible) have had minimal problems within the past few years on all of my systems.
Which is - in my experience - another way of saying “if you don’t care that you’re running hopelessly obsolete versions of software, and don’t have access to about half the software available written in the past several years.” Even if you compile yourself, it’s often a game of bisecting a project’s history to find a point in the when it’ll compile against the ancient versions of libraries available on the system.
That’s been my experience, anyway.
For desktop/workstation users: the simple answer is just use the flatpak from Flathub or from some other source if you need a user package that doesn’t align to the ethos of your chosen distro. In most cases desktop Linux users have gone beyond self-packaging for specific library versions and just use a separate set of common libraries to power application needs beyond the out of box experience of any given distro. It’s part of why immutable distros are starting to take off and make more sense for desktop/workstation use-cases.
For servers, it’s in the nature to become part of the technical debt you are expected to maintain, and isn’t unique among RHEL, OpenSUSE Leap, Debian, Ubuntu, or any other flavor of distro being utilized.
I experienced it back in the early 2000s before Yum. I used CentOS recently and it really isn’t as bad as it used to be.
I don’t know how people find themselves in dependency hell nowadays. It takes an effort to break things.
I can believe this. If they hadn’t improved, they wouldn’t still be around, because it was truly awful.
But I can hold a grudge. And, honestly, I have no reason to try it again, so it costs me nothing to be petty about RPM.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA same!!!
On the topic of things to never forgive Redhat about, aren’t there other things that are more pressing? Like, inventing a whole scheme to circumvent the idea of the GPL license via service contract blackmail?
Yes, but only one of those hurt me viscerally. The other was too abstract to take precedence.
I have never had luck with stability with fedora. But this was 5 years ago. Might try that.
Same exeperience a few years ago, but modern Fedora (post-39) has been better than debian-based and much more up to date.
Fedora is corporate bullshit. I stay away from it even though its works good.
In my experience, fedora is more stable and more of a hands off distro.
I like arch and mostly use it, but for things that I just don’t want to have sudden issues that I need to take care of, I don’t use fedora.
But really, at this point, I feel like all of the major distros are kind of the same once you know what you are doing. Best tip I can give you is to just distro hop, it’s fun, it’s educational and by the time you did 5 distros you kinda already know what you like and what works well.
Skip Fedora and leap straight to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I’ve been told OpenSUSE software availability is very, very limited compared to Fedora’s. What do you think about it?
Wherever you end up, if you’re willing to use Flatpaks, you’ll have many up-to-date options.
The only program I wanted to use but haven’t managed to access using the openSUSE package management system is one that’s unlikely to be available using Fedora’s either.
When there is a package provided by the original creator of a program, it’s less likely that openSUSE compatibility will be tested, and it’s probably more likely that compatibility will not be tested as rigorously. In my experience, a package intended for use with Fedora will be useful to use with openSUSE without needing to modify it most of the time (the names of basic dependencies/capabilities are probably the same for both operating systems in many cases). I think coverage is expanding over time, since the examples I thought only explicitly supported Fedora currently do support OpenSUSE too: https://brave.com/linux/ https://vscodium.com/#install-on-fedora-rhel-centos-rockylinux-opensuse-rpm-package
I don’t like the idea of using Flathub, but most programs that aren’t accessible while only using YaST are available using GNOME Software, and it might be true that the exact same set of programs is accessible using that method while using either Fedora or openSUSE.
This is my answer as well. As an American, I have trust issues with Fedora being both US based and IBM owned now. That said, Fedora has been a very good OS and more reliable than Mint/Ubuntu with regards to cutting edge stuff, like VR support, drivers, and Wayland. Debian/Ubuntu/Mint and other derivatives may be ol’ reliable for servers, but as a desktop, it’s too “vintage” to keep pace with modern stuff, and I’ve had more problems with trying to get new stuff to run on them.
What’s “vintage” for you?
You can still use distrobox if you need an AUR Package really bad
I made the same move a few years back and really like it. Can’t say much regarding SELinux and security though. Regarding the AUR, it depends on how much you use it but I only rarely miss it. A lot of stuff that is not in the default fedora repos can be found in copr https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/
I’d have to think RPM Fusion is comparable to the AUR, no? I’ve never used Arch btw, but I do know Fedora pretty well.
Fusion is a managed 3rd party repo, isn’t it? AUR and copr is more individuals creating packages
Ya, RPM Fusion is handled by a 3rd party I’m pretty sure. But I was thinking more along the lines of what software is available though.
@shreddy_scientist @Kwdg you can go check out the rpm fusion repos to see what’s there. Mostly I use it for nvidia drivers and patent encumbered codecs. Historically some of the same people who work on Fedora also work on rpm fusion.
Ah ok, then there is a rough similarity yes, but the AUR is veeery broad
Just use distrobox for aur. Nowadays I use nix pkg manager for everything that’s not available
Yeah I also use nix as a kind of air alternative
It’s so easy to use
After a decade of Arch, I was ready. Moved to Nobara and then vanilla Fedora with KDE. I think it was definitely the right move for me, I haven’t found anything I couldn’t install that I used to have in Arch. No regrets.
removed by mod
I feel like installing all the codecs is a command away. Is there something else missing?
I ran Arch for years, but I eventually realized I only really enjoyed Arch from a conceptual point of view.
The big plus for me is stability. I had a few major problems pop up after an update, and while I was able to fix them easily enough, It was still annoying that I had to do it. Fedora is nice and stable while not being too far behind.
The loss of the AUR wasn’t that annoying because Fedora has the advantage of being one of the main OS’s. A lot of developers treat it as a default
I have very little experience with Arch. I ran Mint for a decade before coming to Fedora KDE for Wayland’s wider support for variable refresh rates and such.
A lot of my opinions on the matter have more to do with KDE vs Cinnamon. But as for Fedora vs Mint/Ubuntu/Debian, I have one major one: Software availability is nowhere near as good.
On Mint, a shit ton of stuff can be found in the APT repos, plus Flatpak is there. If the package you want isn’t in either of those two places, there’s probably an Ubuntu-style PPA (remember those?) or, if you’re resorting to downloading and compiling from Git, they always include Ubuntu instructions and they work.
On Fedora, the standard repos via DNF have half a moldy butt in them. They maintain their own Flatpak repository, and there’s Flathub. There have been a number of times where I’ve had to just give up having a piece of software I was used to because it’s not packaged for Fedora. Build instructions are rarely written for Red Hat/Fedora, and “Well I’ll just say DNF install instead of APT install” is usually “cannot find package.”
I’ll probably be moving on at some point, but it’s working for now.
You can use Arch inside a container. Install distrobox with the podman back end and you are golden.
there is OBS hosted by openSuSE that could maybe fill in the gaps left by AUR
Last I tried, about a year ago,
dnfhad some bug where it would load the entire package tree into memory and require more than a gig to run. Whenever I tried to update my a minimum spec VPS, the package manager would get OOM killed.
