Tempted to switch full-time to Fedora, but I got some noob questions

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I suggest you try a few more distros. Maybe in a VM to get an idea what your want.

Decide on the lifecycle you would like, stability Vs freshness, desktop environment and package manager.

Some ideas:

  • openSuse has btrfs snapshots out of the box. You can choose tumbleweed (rolling) or Leap (yearly) and rollback whenever you break something. KDE or Xfce world be my go to
  • Manjaro for me has been a reasonably stable rolling release. Couole Xfce gives you some desktop stability. You could also add snapshots.
  • Maybe kubuntu or xubuntu which has short lifecycle and makes things easy to set up.

Apologies for not reading all the post, but hope this helps.

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I performed an installation of the KDE and Cinnamon 35 GA Spins in UEFI configured virtual machines and both times they utilized GRUB post-install. Which ISOs were you installing from? The presence of grub should be enough to suppress systemd-boot, I can’t imagine Fedora installing without it.

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I think Fedora has more active services than those distros, for example most distros don’t ship with a firewall configured and running out of the box but Fedora has firewalld enabled by default.

Same. It was because I was subscribed to new posts to the #introductions tag. I don’t remember doing it manually. Maybe I misclicked it or got automatically subscribed because of something I don’t know/remember.

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Welcome to Fedora!

I was also a refugee from Arch, forced on me by my server company (Kimsufi) stopping provision of Arch in its distro list.

I had always started with a vanilla Arch install and built my system to suit myself.

Now I use Fedora, installing Fedora Minimal from the Fedora Everything netISO, I get to replicate my Arch experience, but find Fedora better in terms of “works out of the box” in many instances. In my case I add Xorg, Spectrwm and Alacritty and get everything I need from a WM set up, including some GUI programs that I use daily.

I would ignore the “Experts Only” comment against the download, you appear more than expert enough to handle this!

Now I’m not suggesting that you immediately don a hairshirt, grow a neck beard and build your complex requirements from a minimal install, life’s probably too short for that! But by starting with Fedora Everything, you can build your own set up selectively and then grow from there.

Fedora Everything is literally that… You can build the Spins, build the Labs, or combine and mix-and-match to your hearts content.

Willi Mutschler has a brilliant article on BTRFS set up, using BTRBK, across multiple disks with different speeds. He also links to some fabulous references that will help anybody new to Fedora, BTRFS and many other subjects. New to Fedora? Try his Things To Do After Install guide, which deals with starting from a vanilla Workstation install.

I hope you find these tips useful and find a welcoming “home” amongst Fedorans after your unsavoury experiences with the users of other distros.

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Hello @simplytadpole ,
Welcome to :fedora:

While GRUB may look better, and I enjoy tweaking my boot menu too, I like systemd-boot on an efi system much better since it removes the use of the GRUB filesystem(s) at boot up, using instead the info of storage gotten from the BIOS. Plus systemd-boot makes it another part of the system process, thus a system target, so a rescue mode should be easier for instance and less cryptic than dracut perhaps.
The issue you are mentioning around amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff to /etc/modprobe.d/amdgpu.confis reportedly solved for kernel 5.16 which is currently in test week https://fedoramagazine.org/contribute-at-the-fedora-linux-36-test-week-for-kernel-5-16/.
Boot up and shutdown time can vary, you’re not the first to note this with recent Fedora releases. From a personal note on my AMD based system, I find the default of some packages are more beneficial to Intel CPU’s, such as power-profiles-daemon. I have to uninstall it and install tuned which better configures my CPU for my workload ootb. But I haven’t really dug deeply into fine tuning this setup yet.

It uses zram based swap by default so yes it will appear to use more than others are on traditional disk based swap. But I agree it has become somewhat more resource hungry of late.

Fedora Linux will always keep a backup of at least one kernel, but usually three in total are available, current, last and rescue. This is configurable.

This is a big one worth a topic of it’s own, but I would start with https://fedoramagazine.org/?s=btrfs which is all the Fedora Magazine articles about btrfs with some valuable links. The subject matter covers your questions I think. In short by default Fedora Linux will make two subvolumes for a btrfs install, one mounted at / and one at /var, which includes /home. My habit has been to make / /var and /home as separate subvolumes for more snapshot flexibility. It is default CoW plus compression and uses reflink for cp.

Not true, as noted elsewhere here, you do upgrades from one to the next as it get’s released, plus there are updates in between releases. The time it takes is usually not that bad in my experience.

dnf info --installed maybe.
There is a renewed/greater focus on Gaming, to answer somewhat your questions around it. I think the sig is getting revived and that would be a good group to get those answers from since it will be foremost on their minds likely. Again there may be some answers in recent Magazine articles https://fedoramagazine.org/?s=gaming

“Fear is the great mind killer” according to Muad’dIb. Bring on the ‘Wall o text’, though in truth, these questions are much more appropriate for discussion.fedoraproject.org since they are very likely already answered there.
Happy Linux life!

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No, actually “update” and “upgrade” are the same in dnf. I know Gnome will prompt you once a new release is out to upgrade versions but I’m not sure about other desktops, but if you upgrade from the command line (my preference) you can install the system-upgrade dnf plugin:

dnf install system-upgrade

And then use it to download the packages of the new release:
dnf system-upgrade download --releasever <new version>
dnf system-upgrade reboot

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Maybe shorter posts would be easier to digest for others, and in so doing force you to pinpoint your important issues :slight_smile:

I switched full-time to fedora 4 years ago and have not regretted a day. After 15 years of apple i was not able to support that ecosystem anymore and tried out several distros over a years. Including arch based and suse tumbleweed. All managed to crash my system after a while, or not get some things to work.

Fedora has rock solid upgrades, very safe because they do after boot while you’re not logged in. Anything i ever wanted was available, sometimes with a little effort, though that is getting less with flatpacks.

By now i converted about 5 of our company and friends computers, all good.
I also run virtual machines on a server with kvm, super.

I really write this as a thanks to fedora and all the people doing such a great job!

Torsten

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@simplytadpole The main reason why I leant toward Fedora in the first place is the leading edge mindset (compared to bleeding edge): https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/r5523h/bleeding_edge_and_leading_edge/

That and the vanillla GNOME experience, I like vanilla :wink:

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kernels are stored 3 different versions at max, not including custom ones. For example if you had custom and fedora versions of kernel for a long time you will have 6 versions, out of which 3 is latest custom and 3 latest fedora

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I didn’t have a thorough checklist to go through before I became a full-time Fedora Linux user. I realized benefits In terms of the ‘out of box’ experience of the Fedora Linux (workstation and server) like;

  • Built-in tools/protocols (terminal, firewalld, Cockpit, GNOME sharing, and many more) save time in installing and configuring/beautifying
  • Package manager (dnf. rpm/ostree) takes care of dependency.
  • Domain-specific variant (labs): Python Classroom and more

If something does not just work as expected, I learned why it behaves differently from other OS (like zram, firewalld defaults).

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That’s outdated experience, these days dnf is nearly as fast as apt. (Though not, in my experience, as fast.) dnf does have the advantage, though, that Fedora packaging errs towards inclusion, rather than exclusion, of related packages. By default when you install something, you will also get all of the optional dependencies it supports. (That can be changed, of course, but it’s the default for a reason:) I can’t count the number of times I’ve been supporting someone using a Debian distro, and the problem turned out to be that they didn’t have some component of what they were using installed (think like Qt, Python packages, etc.), simply because when they installed The Thing™, apt gave them no indication that it wouldn’t be fully functional unless they also installed this other thing with a terrifyingly obscure name. When those same things are packaged for Fedora, typically anything that can be used with a given package is made at least a weak dependency — assuming it’s even broken out at all, which if they’re very tightly coupled it may not be. Debian seems to package anything separately that can be separated, Fedora tends to be slightly less granular — for the better, IMHO.

…But coming back to the original point, dnf is plenty fast these days. Deltarpms, OTOH, have extremely questionable utility They’re fundamentally a tradeoff: meager bandwidth savings in exchange for significantly more CPU cycles consumed during the package transaction. These days that’s a really terrible trade. I’d love to see the back of them.

As a general statement about gaming: Ubuntu is generally considered the flagship distro for gaming on Linux, and not without reason. Fedora is a true libre distro, proprietary codecs and software are generally restricted from being packaged in the official distro packages. Yes, there’s rpmfusion for that stuff, but that’s a volunteer effort on top of this volunteer effort, and still does not cater to the crowd who prefer to view Linux as a Windows-alternative OS where proprietary and free packages are given equal footing, attention, and support. Ubuntu does cater to that crowd, and they’re welcome to it.

Not to say that you can’t game on Fedora. You can. But it’s not the distro of choice for either game developers or gamers, and that’s fine as it’s not trying to be.

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My go-to example for this insanity:

Using applications built with Qt5, the framework File, Font, and Color choosers are supposed to be the OS-native dialogs by default, with a Qt-standard implementation being shown only as a fallback or if the developer explicitly disabled native dialogs.
(I always disable the native color dialog in my code, because the GNOME color picker is pathetically terrible. The thing is an insult to the very notion of a color-selection tool. Qt’s standard implementation, OTOH, is relatively inoffensive.)

On Fedora, default-native dialogs have always worked out of the box, and you couldn’t not have the necessary components installed because they were part of the base Qt package itself.

On Debian-derived distros, a few years back it was still very possible (and depressingly common) to end up with a Qt install that worked mostly-fine, except that it only used Qt’s standard dialogs instead of the native ones. The reason invariably turned out to be that the user’s Qt install (usually as dependencies of some application) had neglected to pull in the necessary platform theme plugin. That was relegated to its own separate package named — I sh*t you not — “libqt5libqgtk2”.

I am happy to say there are no packages with line-noise names like that in Fedora’s package collection. Even if that plugin were a separate Fedora package, it would’ve been named something like qt5-gtk2-libs or qt5-plugin-qgtk2. (But it never was a separate package, because what advantage is there to ever NOT installing that < 400KB plugin??? It can always be disabled by configuration, if the functionality isn’t desired.)

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The importance of this cannot be overstated!

As I indicated above, I like to keep my Fedora install lean and mean, but in just 12 months with Fedora I can cite cases where I have tried to minify, only to find that a week, or a day, or an hour later I was installing exactly those supporting packages I had earlier discounted.

Now I just go with the Fedora flow and install everything that is offered with a new package… those packages were included for a reason and Sod’s Law says that you are going to find out that reason sooner rather than later.

I am very impressed with Fedora, but more importantly, I really like Fedora and the more I explore, the more I like about it. In fact, my only real complaint would be that the documentation could best be described as “patchy”. But I note that there is a new initiative (working with Centos) to rectify this and I think better documentation encourages more users better than any other feature about a distro!

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Well, that was an interesting read. Like others, I got a message about this new tread, clicked on it, and read it.

An edited version for new comers, like me (from Mint), is indeed welcome, but that is for another topic.

Either way, thanks for asking and answering, it was very helpful.

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This can also be extremely irritating in some cases. GNOME Tour, for example, comes installed by default, and gets reinstalled with every single GNOME update. Adding exclude=gnome-tour (or any other package) (if it’s just a couple of packages that keep reinstalling themselves) or install_weak_deps=False (if you never, ever, want to deal with weak dependencies) to /etc/dnf/dnf.conf helps with those situations.

Glad F36 will make this a thing of the past if everything goes right.

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Sorry for not responding for so long, I had to be taken to the hospital (I likely got infected).

Thanks for all the help, people c: I again apologize for drowning everyone in a huge wall of text, I tend to be hugely anxious and scared of committing myself to new things…

I installed them from spins.fedoraproject.org, which is an official download place, so I’m confused why it didn’t work.

I asked someplace else, and was told that apparently GRUB on Fedora is configured to look exactly like systemd-boot. Moreover, I was also told that it’s apparently not possible to customize GRUB’s appearance on Fedora because that would break it. Are those true? I mean, I understand that it’s such a minor thing, but I tend to care a lot about eyecandy for some reason. ^^’

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I cannot personally attest to breakage caused by GRUB2 theming as I’ve never done it. You can always spin up a Fedora VM and try modifying the GRUB menu there and see what happens before deploying to baremetal. I’m aware of the GRUB interface appearing differently on other distributions, but it’s always looked like this to me when using Fedora and RHEL (circa 2014 when I started). I believe that’s due to the GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console" line the /etc/default/grub, but I’m not 100% certain of that as searching online produces conflicting reports on success rates for commenting that out to enable a theme.

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Suggested flavor would be … xfce! It’s extremely lightweight and also, is a viable option for giving life to old equipment.

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Theming is still possible, it’s just configured in the /etc/default/grub file. After that, you regenerate the grub config by doing grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.

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Yeah as @ngompa said, it is possible to theme grub2 on Fedora Linux. Here is a link to something I was looking at https://github.com/vinceliuice/grub2-themes, seems interesting and has some links at the bottom of the readme for the grub2 docs on this topic