I am planning to move to Rawhide at a certain point, on my work Laptop. I am used to working with rolling distros, but people usually say Rawhide is not for humans and they scared me off a bit. I would like to read some impressions from people using Rawhide every day, on work laptops, for a long period of time (months/years).
How often did you get some blockers that stopped you from working (KVM/Docker failing, sound not working, Laptop not booting)? What was the cause of the issue?
In 1 year of Arch I had fails only regarding to nvidia and I have a good opinion about rolling distros. Stuff failed, yes, but nothing that couldn’t get fixed with 15-30 mins of work (failed interactions between pacman and pip, minor changes to config files, outdated documentation) and nothing that did a major impact (blocking me from being able to work). I was usually upgrading on weekend, to not impact work (just in case), and some times I would also upgrade during the week if I had some relaxed day with no meetings.
Another important point for me would be to know if the dnf rollback actually works for the last upgrade, and if it is a reliable way to get your system back one version, in case something fails. I would like to do this with dnf, not with rpm-ostree, since I am on f28 now and I don’t want to go to silverblue yet.
If I do choose to go for rawhide, I would also like to know where to open bug reports and how to contribute, so please throw some links regarding that.
I would like Silverblue to adopt a rolling release model in the future, but (fedora workstation) Rawhide is the equivalent of the Sid branch of Debian and any other branch of development created for testing, so at some point you will get some kind of failure, by which your use is your responsibility. I would not compare it to Arch.
Yeah, as an Arch (mostly Antergos GNOME) user since I migrated from Fedora in April 2017, Rawhide and Sid are not suitable for daily use. When a package shows up in Rawhide, you know
It compiles,
Its dependencies compile,
It installs,
You can file bugs against it and someone will look at them and ask you to reproduce / troubleshoot.
Number four is the bottom line - if you want to help Fedora move forward, by all means run Rawhide. But if you want a “stable” rolling release, stick with openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch, Gentoo or one of their derivatives.
I switched to fedora because of SELinux. It makes me feel really comfortable to be able to confine everything with it. No distro provides anything close to it.
So, I’ve been running rawhide full time for… I don’t know, 10 years?
I think it’s perfectly usable day to day for the right kind of user, but definitely isn’t for everyone.
See: Rawhide :: Fedora Docs for a list.
These days we do more than just “it built, ship it”:
composes now fail if something is broken in any of the release blocking media, which means that doesn’t get out to users.
Openqa runs tests on every successfull compose so it’s easy to look and see if the path you care about is working or not.
dnf won’t update to packages with broken deps, so even if a new package goes out with broken deps, dnf will simply not update that tree of packages until it’s fixed.
Soon (probibly the f31 timeframe) we expect to have gating setup as well, so only packages that pass some level of automated testing land in rawhide.
Anyhow, happy to answer any questions about running rawhide…
I heard a rumour on IRC that grub has been failing badly in the last months, causing the system to be unbootable and forcing the user to use the USB stick to boot, chroot into fedora and reinstall grub. Did you hit situations like this in the last years on fedora?
Stuff like this is not a deal breaker, unless you have a meeting at 9:30 AM …
I did indeed run into that one. I can recall twice I think in the last year grub2 had some issue that rendered things unbootable. It’s definitely a good idea to have a stable release usb around to fix such things. They are usually pretty rare in my experence. The only reason grub2 has had the issues is because they are landing BootLoader Spec support, so there’s a lot of corner cases they have been sorting out. Once thats stable (as it now seems to be) likely there will be very little change in grub2.
I usually apply updates daily, after all my email is read/fires put out, so I know I have a bit of time to debug any new issues.
I use Rawhide daily… Reason I use UnitedRPMs repository stead of RPMfusion. The unique problem is the kernel; but with minors changes in the .spec; disabling some functions enabled in rawhide and we have a fast and clean kernel…
@ gun1x In UnitedRPMs you have a similar Rolling Release model. Example you have “ffmpeg 4.0.2” in Rawhide, also you have “ffmpeg 4.0.2” in Fedora 27. Short answer, We don’t need upgrade to F29 for “ffmpeg 4.0.2” . Other point, UnitedRPMs provides updated packages, each week you have updates… Other point, the project no depend of sponsors… then, exist guaranteed of take imparcial decisions, and evoids biased conflicts…
I’m using rawhide on my personal/work laptop for > 5 years everyday. It happens from time to time that grub2 breaks or FF crashes, or podman doesn’t work due to issues with SELinux, but usually all this is fixable within 15 minutes.
dnf rollback never worked for me because we do not keep multiple versions of packages in repositories (as RHEL does), because then it would be too huge. Usually it is enough to just download old version from koji.fedoraproject.org and install it (because usually you know what broke).
But if you really want such rollback mechanism, you probably want to use Silverblue
Please try to avoid spamming about project I’m not naming here. There are too few people involved there compared to RPMFusion. Anyway, this is off-topic, so please do not reply to this post.
Igor with the totally of respect; If you are applying a politic of censure, is bad. I only shared my rawhide experience; some may like it; others not… Reading the guidelines FAQ - Fedora Discussion exist contradictory items about these censure. Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree. specific
“Ad hominem attacks”
“Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content”
“Knee-jerk contradiction”
The point is, here all the questions and answers are off-topic (even admin in ask fedora recommend discuss and topics here); and generally my answer not violated nothing, is objetive and inclusive answering the question. Ironic but I never changed the discuss… Sure I will stop answer here, but I cant share or recommend the discuss site anymore to the community, LATAM and others. Isn’t a personal attack is only avoids users/community receives the same treat or write wrong here… Good luck with Silverblue, I prefer rpms in rawhide… People are inventing the wheel, when it already exists. good luck, peace.
Using Rawhide is fun only you’re “young and angry”. The latest software with buggy updates, kind of Russian roulette. You should know how to revert broken packages and basic components of Linux. Nothing super complex.
I used Rawhide around 2 years and switched to stable 'cause lack of time.
