What brought you to fedora?

The Water Cooler
,
157

What brought me to fedora?

Selection process, I guess. I’ve gone through tens of desktop distros/DE combinations in about a year in an attempt to find a Windows desktop alternative. I initially ignored Fedora because I ran Ubuntu and Debian servers so I was more familiar with that side of things and I didn’t feel like learning much new stuff.

But I kept hearing good things about Fedora and yup, it’s by far the best. I like KDE Plasma and KDE applications and Fedora 41 offered most recent version plus latest NVIDIA drivers installation was a breeze, compared to most other distros that often make it hard, latest drivers are simply available from a repository, no voodoo required. Same goes for Steam.

Though, it seems I suffer from the NVIDIA curse and Plasma, Wayland and NVIDIA don’t mix too well even on latest Fedora :frowning:

I’ll keep running Fedora 41 on a spare PC in hopes that Plasma 6.3 will improve things in February and perhaps Wayland and NVIDIA will get a patch by then.

Both Fedora and KDE forums seem to be mostly free from the usual bickering present on Linux forums that can be quite discouraging for a Windows user wanting to switch to Linux.

Yes, this! Exactly.

4 Likes
158

I came to Fedora Rawhide from Arch with Cachyos repos added. I’ve also tried Opensuse Tumbleweed (and Ubuntu). I have nothing bad to say about my prior systems, but I prefer Rawhide. I run CPU intensive tasks, but I am not a gamer and I no longer need to use CUDA – so the non-proprietary stock/default Nvidia drivers are fine for me. I like Rawhide’s latest kernels and software (often the most recent available anywhere) and I think v3 optimization is fine for my use case. Overall, I have been really impressed with the quality control over Rawhide’s rolling distribution. I’ve had no issues (although happy to report a bug if I ever experience one!). I sense the staff/resources behind Fedora are very good and are better integrated than other operating systems (e.g., Arch). Btrfs with btrfs-assistant is nice and the lynis audit score of 69 seems decent. Overall, Rawhide just seems like a really well put together and maintained system with a good community and information resources available with a simple Google search. Rawhide has actually caused me to switch from being a KDE guy to using Fedora’s default Gnome Workstation version. I have come to appreciate its simplicity and I feel it has fewer issues than the KDE spin. I put together a blog page with some notes for myself as I installed it (all post the stock installation process) in case anyone else finds it helpful: https://archsetup.blogspot.com/2024/10/quick-fedora-install.html

159

Not competent enough to daily arch but want the lastest software. While debian and ubuntu base was nice and easy going, got bored with it. I been diehard distrohopping for a year or so, with all the popular choices; mint, lmde ubuntu, debian, mx, arch, manjaro. Always that little something that was bothering enough to not keep it installed.

The polish and sane defaults that go into fedora as a product are all around evident. If you told me this came with my laptop I wouldn’t doubt it.

1 Like
160

Well Recently two big things. Number 1 Bazzite, It’s just about the perfect Gamer OS. I got a mini PC and the only fuss it gave me was with Secure Boot (not really Bazzite’s fault there). Now I basically have my own Steam Machine.

Number 2 is my Framework 13 laptop I got about a year and a half ago. I started out trying all kinds of distros, other than Ubuntu and Fedora. I just felt like being a rebel and not just doing what Framework tells me to do. I will give some props to Endeavor OS though other than the occasional update braking things, it was quite nice. But after about a year of service, I kinda got tired of the paranoia I would experience every time I typed pacman -Syu. So I though, hay why don’t I just take Framework’s advice and try Fedora. And I gotta say I kinda wish I did from the start. Everything just works. It has by far the best KDE experience I’ve had on the hardware. It has the best Bluetooth support, even the fingerprint reader work out of the box.

So yeah I’ve been turning into a bit of a Fedora fanboy as of late!

3 Likes
161

Back when hamsters powered PCs I heard about this linux thing, tried RedHat6, and had a horrible experience (it ran, but at glacial speeds). After a couple years it forgot its password (which was “password”), and that was the end of that.

Next was Mandrake 7.2, with KDE 2.0. Much nicer, not complete enough for everyday, but I can see the promise in it.

Somewhere in here was an archaic Ubuntu, which I loathe to this day.

Fast-forward to Win10, which caused a burning desire to reach through my monitor and force-choke a UI developer. Thus propelled, I trawled through all of Distrowatch, tried every distro known to man, and it soon became apparent that 1) I greatly preferred KDE, and 2) I disliked Debian and all its kin, and 3) all the distros I liked were in the Mandrake/RedHat ecosystem.

Eventually I settled on PCLinuxOS, which I use to this day, but it’s basically a one-man-band, and I’d seen other small distros disappear, so… figured it behooved me to have a backup from among the big-and-solid. And the only other distro I’d kept (and kept updated) from my many experiments was… Fedora32. Fewest cranks, most complete, and most likely to stay that way.

It is now Fedora41, it has gotten better over time, and it remains a solidly professional OS. It’s not my daily driver, but it has become a system I use for Real Work. I can expect it to be here in a year, or a decade, without making radical changes along the way. And that has real value.

So… that is what brought me to Fedora.

1 Like
162

The atomic variants. Past the initial learning curve, Silverblue is basically a set and forget OS.

163

I’ve tried many of Linux distributions in my sort 7 years of Linux. And I didn’t really like any distribution, I’m going to be real I still don’t really like many of them.

But I’ve used and tried basically almost everything at this point.

Eventually Kubuntu on my laptop messed up for some reason I can’t remember why, and I just installed Fedora since it is basically the only distribution that I haven’t given a real try and I have had Oracle Linux on my server for a few days before that and I was really liking it, and Oracle Linux and Fedora are kinda similar in my mind so why not. Anyways it turns out I really like Fedora, and Fedora derivatives, and I don’t have many complaints about it.

2 Likes
164

I’ve been using Linux since the 90s, and I’ve tried Mandrake, Debian, and Arch. I finally found what I was looking for in Fedora 36. It’s a stable system, but it’s also updated regularly.

  • Its interface, despite some issues that Gnome ignores (I guess for resources), is simple, which helps my visual impairment. I experimented with KDE, but I just couldn’t get the hang of it. It tends to crash on me, and I’m not a fan of customizations. To me, it feels like a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces that just don’t fit.

  • It’s great to see it working so well on both my laptop and desktop, and I really like how it’s a lot more up to date. I should mention that I haven’t used NVIDIA in years.

  • The community is so welcoming and collaborative, making me feel right at home.

I’m already on version 42, and I’m looking forward to exploring many more versions and contributing something to the community.

4 Likes
165

Hi Quijote,
If you need a hand getting started as a contibutor, come and visit the Join SIG.

You can follow the links from Untitled :: Fedora Docs

Welcome,
Mat

2 Likes
166

Me too! (SoftLanding '92) - but I got into RH early and Fedora from the beginning and pretty much stuck with it . .

You are prob about the same vintage as me from your photo . .

1 Like
167

Atomic Desktops.

169

Thank you very much, I have that page on my to-do list, but the truth is that I suffer from impostor syndrome and I don’t see myself capable. Still, I’ll be there before 43 and if I have any doubts I’ll come to you.

2 Likes
170

Thanks for the welcome, I envy the constant people … and if we will be of similar times. 50’s?

171

The ability to have a non-immutable distro with GNOME Vanilla out-of-the-box perfectly functional and without unnecessary pre-installed packages and applications; and the fact that it works like a modern operating system without having to get lost in lengthy and complicated configurations.

However, I would like it to be more timely with updates and for this timeliness to be the same for all packages; unfortunately, as of now, this is not exactly the case. I would also like it to be rolling and not fixed (this would eliminate the problem of versions lagging behind with updates).

2 Likes
How to get closer to upstream versions for official fedora packages
How to get closer to upstream versions for official fedora packages
172

6 posts were merged into an existing topic: How to get closer to upstream versions for official fedora packages

178

11 posts were split to a new topic: How to get closer to upstream versions for official fedora packages

179

No, that is an old photo - I am 73 now - but working on some radical life extension projects!

4 Likes
180

For me it was the RPM package management. I started out with Ubuntu. I quickly fell in love with Ubuntu’s brown themes. They felt African and that resonated with me. However, I needed a way to reinstall downloaded packages (a local repository). APT had a complicated way of doing it.

So I tried Fedora and found that local repositories were far easier to create and maintain with YUM/RPM (now DNF). I didn’t go back to DEB-based Linux again. You can get more about this shift here

1 Like
181

Windows ME and how crash prone it was. Ended up returning it, got a refund and they were selling box sets of Red Hat and SuSE in the OS isle. I’m pretty sure it was Red Hat 6.something I picked up. Used that for a few years, learning a lot. Ended up bouncing to Ubuntu for a few years and experimenting with different distros. Ended up back on Fedora around 10 or 11. Been using Red Hat / Fedora systems ever since. I’ll occasionally spin up other distros in a VM to see what’s going on there, but I’ve never been compelled to install any of them on bare metal in my home environment.

182

The problem wasn’t WinME as such, it was the then-newfangled System Restore. Disable that, and (given sound hardware and drivers) WinME would never crash again. It still had Win9x’s resource heaps limitations, but unlike 9x, when you closed a program ME would completely recover those resources, so it didn’t “leak”. I ran it for a while, and doing the heavy lifting, mine had an uptime record of two years and was only retired because XP was so much better (and there, System Restore worked).

Funny story: I was at some tech expo, and here’s the Microsoft rep demo’ing the shiny new System Restore. Nifty function, but then I asked him, “What happens if you try to restore to a date before you installed it?” He says, “I don’t know, let’s try it…” and it completely nuked the system. Ooops. But that’s why the release version wouldn’t let you do that. :smiley:

Concurrently I had RH6 installed on another box, and it was… dreadful, in every way possible. But the interest never went away, and here I am today, with Fedora humming happily along.

1 Like