Should I switch from Ubuntu to Fedora?

I am currently using Ubuntu, and it is pretty good. It had some stability issues regarding my Nvidia GPU and audio, but that’s been fixed with some tinkering. There’s still some small annoying bugs though, mainly tied to the custom GNOME and resizing windows and stuff like that being occasionally glitchy.

I’ve heard some really good things about Fedora, but I’m still not totally sure if I should switch. I’m mainly looking to get rid of snaps, while getting a reliable system. I would use either Pantheon desktop environment or GNOME if there are issues with Pantheon. I already installed Fedora in a VM, but it would be silly to make conclusions from that, since it has limited hardware capabilities and there is no way to test the compatibility with my GPU.

So, since I can’t fully test out the system myself, either because of limited VM capabilities, or because stability issues might take months tto appear, here’s a list of things I was hoping I could get answers for:

  • Compatibility with Nvidia cards, as I already mentioned

  • Gaming. I’m not gonna be running AAA games on my linux system, since I do have a windows dual boot for that, but it would be nice to not have to restart if I want to play some Binding of Isaac or CS:GO. Also it would be very important for proton to be supported, because if it isn’t, then I can’t use my xbox controller to play games.

  • How stable is Fedora in your experience?

  • Is there actually performance differences? Are snaps really that much slower?

  • How steep is the learning curve? I only ever used Debian based systems, Manjaro for a little bit, but I never used a Red Hat distro. Adding onto that, in case there is a problem, how much support is there online?

  • Is using multiple destop environments actually viable? For me it’s important how my desktop looks, and it would be a bonus if I could use a DE like Pantheon instead of the default GNOME. I know stuff like this can cause issues in Ubuntu, which is why I’m asking this question.

Please answer any questions you can, an answer to even one of these would be very helpful. Thanks!

Out of the box you will be using open source drivers. Lots of people are using the proprietary drivers but it will definitely take reading a guide and following it to get it all setup.

Yes, there should be no issues with gaming.

If by stable you mean “not crashing”, I would say very very stable. All Linux is stable in my opinion.

Very minor in most cases.

They can be slower. Especially during startup. That being said, don’t expect night and day differences.

Whenever you switch distros there is learning curve. Between Ubuntu and Fedora I would say that the learning curve is less than your example of switching from Ubuntu to Manjaro.

There are people to help here on the forums. There is also an active reddit community.

As for documentation, there is vastly less documentation available than for Ubuntu. It is fairly sparse.

If you mean, multiple desktop environments on the same install, it is possible but it isn’t easy or trouble-free. I don’t recommend it unless you know what you are doing and are willing to troubleshoot through some minor issues.

If you mean, installing a different DE, there are Fedora spins that offer various DEs out of the box. Switching DEs is possible but not something I would say is “easy”.

I am not sure what the state of Pantheon support for Fedora is.

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

Gnome-software also allows installation of Nvidia drivers from what I know, but I’ve not used that method of doing it myself yet.

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You should not switch, but you could, as I did.

To add to the other replies, my reason for switching was that Fedora offers a default experience that is much more close to what I want. The fact that actually caused me to move is that my upgrade to 22.10 went bad, and a fresh install revealed issues with nautilus. As half year ago, I was heavily impressed after trying a live session of Fedora, I decided to move for my working machine to a beta version (Fedora 37 is still beta thus far).

Stability? Excellent thus far on this beta! You say “stability issues might take months to appear”: certainly, as with Ubuntu. And updates may break things. Still, like Ubuntu, Fedora is a solid, professional, company backed distribution. Do not expect more issues with Fedora than with Ubuntu. Perhaps even less, because they do less customization on the upstream desktop environments.

Performance differences? I am booting few second slower (7 seconds instead of 5-6). System performance: fully snappy, and any comparison here with Ubuntu (also on Wayland) would be subjective. Snaps still tend to be slower in startup than flatpaks, but much progress has been made. On Ubuntu installs, I always moved from snap to flatpak, in Fedora flatpak is there by default. Another reason why it actually fits me better. Also that here, Firefox is available as a standard rpm, whereas on Ubuntu, I had to move from the snap to the Mozilla ppa. Little detail: where I had to compile a newer version of ydotool on Ubuntu (even on 22.10!), In Fedora, the standard repositories feature the latest ydotool.

How steep is the learning curve: if you have already used a debian system, then an arch based system probably not that much. Once you are past the graphical login screen: almost nothing. Fedora is a very different distro, so here and there it is also set up differently. Support on line is decidedly less extensive than for Ubuntu and debian based distros.

Is using multiple destop environments actually viable? It is equally viable as on Ubuntu. Similar issues, never severe though, may pop up when installing different DE’s simultaneously.

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Fedora is stable, easy to use, nothing complicated being an extension of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or different but same family CentOS Stream … the reference platform for NVIDIA or INTEL software is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as for Microsoft apps and access to Azure cognitive services. Snap is simply an extension of Flatpak launched by Red Hat being containerized apps to reduce dependencies versioning. BTRFS is a good file system including storage device management. Going further try RHEL or CentOS combining with IBM Cloud cognitive services … explore OneAPI, deep learning frameworks from NVIDIA.