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Finally done with the distro-hop: My return to Fedora (unknownuniverse.uk)
submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@infosec.pub to c/linux@programming.dev
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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.

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[-] dlsloop@lemmy.zip 29 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 day ago

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!

[-] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 3 points 1 day ago

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

[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I was interested in Pika, but I took the leap and just went straight Debian. I'm happy.

[-] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 1 points 1 day ago

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

[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] cecilkorik@piefed.ca 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] v3ctors@piefed.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 day ago

Did the same. We’re a mostly fedora shop these days. Debian based for servers.

[-] homes@piefed.world 2 points 1 day ago

Why use Debian for servers over Fedora?

[-] nykula@piefed.social 1 points 17 hours ago

Not that difficult to configure this by hand, but I like Debian's dropbear-initramfs package for remote unlock.

[-] eurodyne@piefed.world 9 points 1 day ago

Recently switched to Fedora myself, and I could not be happier ❤️

[-] ProbablyUnwise@anarchist.nexus 2 points 1 day ago

I haven't done any distro hopping since I tried CachyOS.

[-] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Tried Fedora Silver blue or universalblue spins? Unless you do serious embedded development work (which takes more setup on atomic distros), then I have experienced that it is less work in general in setup and upkeep.

[-] j3tt@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah, Silverblue is nice; not my main distro, though. I came from many years of Gentoo on almost all machines I had. Debian stable is currently the most practical for me.

The immutable variant of Fedora is nice for the low maintenance computers, although I needed to get my head around podman to not overuse rpm-ostree. So far so good. I think it will not replace the distro on my main machine, but I see the way it works as a general potential future. An immutable variant of Debian stable would be something I'd consider switching for.

[-] ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I started with RedHat 2.0 and CDE, then spent almost 30 years jumping around including almost a decade on Arch BTW, and now I'm back at Fedora and Plasma. Something catastrophic will need to happen to knock me off it.

The circle of life.

[-] FuyuhikoDate@feddit.org 4 points 1 day ago

Just read the title and made me realized I use 4 different OS....

Main pc: cachyos Steamdeck: steamos Tiny server: Ubuntu server RaspberryPi: dietpi

I mean yo could say two if you just say "2 arch based and two Debian based"

But never thought about it.

[-] rozodru@piefed.world 5 points 1 day ago

I'm actually switching from Fedora today. miserable experience.

[-] CountVon@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 day ago

Care to elaborate? Not saying I doubt you, it's just the polar opposite of my experience and I'm curious why that is.

[-] Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

Yeah wondering what could have possibly made it miserable

[-] rozodru@piefed.world 5 points 1 day ago

i don't know if it was just the hardware I had it on or what but had to reinstall it a couple times as for whatever reason the desktop manager kept breaking, it wouldn't kick over to a TTY when hitting ctl+alt+f2, it decides on a whim when it will or won't display the grub menu, audio issues as well as AMD GPU issues of all things which I found weird, random kick outs back to the desktop manager or just straight up crashing (using Fedora KDE which I wish I picked a different "spin") and I found it sluggish as well as dnf being slow regardless of the fact I edited the dnf.conf to set install_weak_deps to false, max parallel downloads to 10 and fastestmirror to true.

Sorry but I just don't like it. Not to say I think it's a bad distro it's just clearly not one for me.

[-] CountVon@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Oof, yeah, that sounds painful. It does sound like some kind of hardware-related issue, maybe the default settings in the Fedora kernel are seriously aberrant when mixed with one or more of your hardware components? Given the broad range of issues (GPU, network speed, audio), I'd be inclined to suspect the problem was related somehow to something core/common like CPU or mobo. Almost certainly not a pure hardware fault, given the problems didn't follow the hardware when you changed distros.

Sorry but I just don't like it. Not to say I think it's a bad distro it's just clearly not one for me.

I totally get it. Doesn't take much of that kind of frustration to leave a bad taste in your mouth. I had some perplexing intermittent lockup issues years ago that turned out to be BTRFS, or at least the issue went away when the VMs were rebuilt with a different root FS. I'm still leery of BTRFS, even though it was a fairly esoteric stack (SLES, ESX, NFS datastores served from a ZFS-backed storage server), so entirely possible the fault didn't lie exclusively with the filesystem. But I still avoid it, just because I've been burned once.

[-] rozodru@piefed.world 2 points 1 day ago

Well to follow up I decided that this could potentially be more of a me problem than a fedora one. And actually...it was a KDE problem. I decided to switch to a basic WM, DWM, on it and low and behold all my problems just vanished. no crashing, switching to a TTY suddenly started working, audio and video was fine, no kick backs to the login screen. hell even something that SHOULD be unrelated as DNF suddenly improved.

So I'm not sure if I just got a wonky KDE install or an update went wrong with it but I'm more than happy to ditch KDE to keep using Fedora. I'd reinstall with a different spin but honestly at this point I spent a week or so setting this up i'll just keep using the KDE version without the KDE. I'd like to switch the DM to something other than Plasma Login Manager but at this point I'm not sure if that's a can of worms I should attempt to open.

So a question would be, is it a good idea to keep using Fedora KDE without using KDE? I'd just hate to update a system for something that I'm not going to use. Or would I just be better off reinstalling Fedora with a basic spin or a WM focused one.

[-] v3ctors@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 day ago

Add the repos for RPM fusion.

[-] rozodru@piefed.world 3 points 1 day ago

I already have them, didn't improve anything.

[-] v3ctors@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago

Fair enough.

[-] AsSaMiTa@tardigram.com 5 points 1 day ago

It shows you haven't tried Void Linux. 🤪

[-] insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafe 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

OP posted to this sub with an article about void 17 days ago. OOP, sure maybe.

I'm trying Void on old hardware and it feels pretty usable. Package availability still an issue*. I've also noticed some dependencies not getting added (git not included with programming lang that needs it for its package manager, installed archive manager engrampa and it couldn't actually open zips until I added another package for that). I'll probably keep this on my old machine just for testing musl compilation.

* appimages might help, other solutions with redundancy not so much with extra downloading

[-] AsSaMiTa@tardigram.com 1 points 1 day ago

Yes, the installation is similar to Arch, it gives you the versatility to do an installation however you want without software blobs.

[-] insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 day ago

I like that Void seems to better handle less frequent updates than Arch, but my point is that the package system seems to be a bit of a step backwards. (which to be fair doesn't seem like anything unique to Void, optional dependencies is commonly not a thing or is inconvenient like OpenSUSE's patterns)

[-] eta@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago

I have looked at Void a little but honestly the handling of the package manager and even it's name just throw me of for some reason. Why do you like it?

[-] AsSaMiTa@tardigram.com 2 points 1 day ago

Precisely, the package manager is one of the best things about it. Quite fast. I like it because it doesn't have systemd and it's one of the few distros left with a Unix philosophy. A very well-made distro.

[-] mycodesucks@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

M'linux

[-] homes@piefed.world 2 points 1 day ago

I recently switched to Fedora after using PopOS for years. I like it because it’s just less… fiddly? Like, I don’t like COSMIC because it just doesn’t feel ready yet, and I honestly prefer DNF over APT. It has a very ‘set it and forget it’ sort of feel, which is great for a server.

this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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