Migrating away from Fedora, looking for advice.
I’m in the market to find a new distro that is similar enough to Fedora that switching won’t be as laborious as I’ve had it before. I keep hearing POP!_os is a good choice but I’m going to as the community what they think is good.
Personally, I use Debian, but it's a different approach from Fedora. My suggestion for you is to try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's a rolling release, which means bleeding edge software as Fedora, it's RPM based and it's easy to rollback in case of an update breaks something. As I said, not my type of distro (I want 0 breaks), but I used OpenSUSE once while distro hopping and it's a good distro.
This sounds like what I’m looking for. What is their support for steam, blender, AMD CPU/GPU support, and do they use flatpak, or is it more of an APK setup?
My computer is a Ryzen with AMD GPU as well. Drivers are embedded on kernel, so any distro should fit. Flatpak works fine too, but of course, you will need to install it and add Flathub - simple, but needed ( https://flathub.org/setup/openSUSE ). Steam runs fine, if I remember well. Blender I don't know, I never used.
openSUSE does support FlatPak, just follow the Wiki entry. There is also a wiki entry about Steam Blender is in the repositories. Also keep in mind that they stance about multimedia codecs is the same as Fedora. Please consusult this wiki entry for more information. I have to say that openSUSE Tumbleweed is a fantastic distro. It is rolling release, but it is also using OpenQA to make sure nothing breaks during updates. Hope this helps.
If you're going for a similar Fedora-like experience, with it being a rolling release that is still stable, then OpenSuse Tumbleweed is definitely you're best bet.
Now, if the rolling release nature is something you're less attached to, then some good options would be Pop!_OS (especially if you have an Nvidia card), another Ubuntu-spin like Kubuntu perhaps or even KDE Neon, and maybe Debian 12. Though for the last one, although it's a fantastic distro, it looks nice, new, and shiny now, but in 6-12 months when you're not even half way through the Debian upgrade cycle and still on old software, will that bother you? If the answer is yes, then look elsewhere. Otherwise, Debian 12 may be a good choice for you as well.
As a long time Fedora user, I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed exclusively the past few months and it has been fantastic. KDE is their flagship desktop but I believe they also provide a vanilla Gnome experience.
Solus just came out with a new image and they are 100% rolling, 100% community driven. I've happily used Solus for many years.
Solus interests me, but it was pretty much dead for a good while until very recently. I still think it's best to wait another 6-12 months to ensure that they succeed in regularly keeping everything updated before recommending it to people.
All the power was in the hands of one person who came down with serous problems. The organization has since been reformed so that can never happen again. It is now in a good place.
That same problem has happened twice with Solus though - Ikey's abrupt departure being the first.
I hope that this time the structural changes will ensure they sail on a even keel for a good while, but I remain wary.
When he left, he passed off power to a single person. When that successor left, he passed it on to yet another single person. That as always the problem. The reform never happened until this recent crisis. Now there is a lot of redundancy and assurances that nothing is left to a single person. Thankfully.
I'm going to throw my hat in the ring for Pop_OS. The company that maintains it is focused almost exclusively on desktop use so it excels at this better than many other distros that have kind of a split focus on all the things. Their power manager is the best in terms of laptop battery management if you're using a laptop. The distro is also flatpak focused. There's even a utility in startup apps by default called "Flatpak Transition" which checks for deprecated deb packages and lets you know if there's a Flatpak that satisfies it.
Updates seem to come fast but not as fast as a full rolling release. No major changes lately because, as others note, they're working on a HUGE change to the distro to make their own DE. Rumors are circling this might come with a re-base of the distro off Ubuntu. Unfounded as far as I know but it would make a lot of sense.
I've been running Pop on my desktop and laptop exclusively for going on a couple years now. Rock solid.
Any specific reason why you’d like to move away from Fedora? It’s an amazing distro, all things considered.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Fedora, but with the things they’ve done recently, I really don’t think what I want from an OS and RH wants are the same anymore. I’d prefer to separate from them while I have the opportunity before I’m invested to the point of staying because it’s too hard to migrate.
Do you live under a rock?
Suck it up and learn Debian and why .deb > .rpm.
That's funny. When the maintainer of AT&T unix's perf group was looking at a distro to clone and support, RPM>Deb was 90% why debs were excluded.
Maybe something changed dramatically since then.
You mean Adrian? He's an odd duck and I wouldn't take his choices at this level as anything other than some obscure tiny performance improvement.
My issue with RPM is even the official packages didn't put files where the standard they wrote said. Admittedly I haven't used an RPM distro in 20 years so it's possible things have changed.
I recently moved from Linux mint to opensuse tumbleweed and I've been VERY happy. Super stable. Even through multiple dist-upgrades.
I would recommend the following in descending order:
I think you'll be right at home on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I personally recommend against using Debian Testing for anything other than testing the next Debian release. It gets slower security updates, and breakages get fixed slower than just using Sid directly. Since Sid has its own securirt team and since it moves faster, breakages are fixed sooner. Even in the official documentation Debian doesn't not suggest using Testing for the same reasons.
While that's true in theory, it's still very common to run Debian Testing on a desktop in practice. For a user coming from Fedora, there would likely be culture shock from the dated packages in Stable. Using Stable with Flatpaks+Nix would be more usable, but OP's experience does not sound like it would fit well with the effort/knowledge required for this solution.
I wouldn't recommend Sid to a less-experienced user and I didn't recommend Arch for a similar reason.
If you don't recommend Sid, then Testing is out of the question. Testing is Sid, but less secure. Testing also has package freezing during the last stages of the release cycle. If you want a stable, and managed Debian, then the latest stable is the answer. If you want an cutting edge, semi-rolling release Debian, then you want Sid. Being in the middle has no advantages to the end user, and only invites complications. If something is broken in Testing, you have to wait for it to be fixed in Sid first, then trickle down to Testing at an absolute minimum. Why add an extra delay for nothing?
EDIT: offcial documentation https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/choosing.en.html#s3.1.6
Want share my 2c as I prefer testing over sid. It is balance which side you want. Sid got break more freq but also fixed more quickly. Testing has less break but fix also come slowly. For me I prefer less break. So I setup preference/policy to get testing higher than sid. This is not for breakage/fix nor security fix. This is about package available. I think Firefox is one example that testing only has esr so it will install latest from sid and most other packages still tracking testing. Again personal choices and that's beauty of Linux.
While you are always free to make your own choices, this is very bad advice for someone looking to try another distro.
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_FrankenDebian Official documentation again does not recommend mixing multiple releases like this. You would be much better off just running Sid, or Stable then using the Firefox flatpak/snap/appimage for the latest release. Debian is a long term stable distro, so if you want newer packages you are advised by the developers of said distro to just use Sid.
yeah, I agree with you, for anyone new to debian maybe should follow official suggestion. But as user using debian so long, I think I understand the risk (of course the benefit) of my setup. Maybe I will try sid someday. Have a nice day!
How stable is Tumbleweed compared to Leap? Is Leap suitable for a workstation?
It should be similar - both are stable enough for general usecase. Tumbleweed also comes with auto-snapshots and BTRFS, so you can rollback if anything breaks (I assume Leap does this too but I forget). Both are suitable for a workstation.
+1 to OpenSUSE!
I don't understand recommending an another company distro to user who is happy with using Fedora but want to change it just because it is a company distro. (They both are actually community projects but let's ignore it for the purpose of this discussion)
Because the OP specifically wanted something as close as possible to Fedora, and is moving away from Fedora because of Red Hat's antics. SUSE is not Red Hat. I don't want to impart an unfounded paranoia that all company distros are bad onto a user who may not hold that opinion.
They can decide if they accept a SUSE-related distro instead, or move onto my next recommendation, Linux Mint, if they don't.
Because the OP specifically wanted something as close as possible to Fedora, and is moving away from Fedora because of Red Hat's antics. SUSE is not Red Hat. I don't want to impart an unfounded paranoia that all company distros are bad onto a user who may not hold that opinion.
They can decide if they accept a SUSE-related distro instead, or move onto my next recommendation, Linux Mint, if they don't.
Arch BTW.
I think if you want meaningful recommendations, you have to say:
Without knowing those things, it's just going to be people proselytizing their favorite distros rather than suggesting one that will fit what you're looking for.
Also the color of his panties and his favorite soccer team.
I'm wearing black.
You should start with :
Literally any Debian distribution with the exact same window manager service you were using in Fedora would be essentially as if you never switched away at all.
Fedora is close to bleeding edge. Debian is using old relics.
If you never touch the command line yeah, but how many of us Fedora users don't do that?
I plan to move to EndeavourOS, because I cannot be bothered to install Arch and wanted something (b)leading edge, but community based. Already installed on my laptop, looking good so far.
Kind of unfortunate that there are no true community driven rpm distros :(
Can also vouch for Pop_OS .Can't tell how much having recovery partition added saved me from reinstalling os again :)
How does the recovery partition work? I mean, I always thought it was a "copy" of the iso so that you can reinstall the system without an external USB drive
Ye but if you can boot into it you can still fix main OS :) https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-recovery/
One really cool thing that you can do with the recovery partition is to reinstall but keep everything in your home directory intact. I think it's called refresh installation. Very handy to recover from a bad situation without much hassle. Imo more distros should have a recovery partition.
Ok I think it's time to create the recovery partition (I didn't create it during the installation)
That's your chance to turn away from rpm/RHEL distros and run without looking back. As last 20 years history shows, that branch of linux OS is either dying off on hands, leaving you without suport, either makes migration path complicated by a need to change distro. Like it was with centos +5..10 years, oh no ... -> maybe fedora -> oh no ... -> whatever whocares rpm pop/rocky/alma name it ... Thats it, beat it, no more this shit.
deb or any other kind linux is a way to go.
There is always (Open)SUSE in that branch as well
Argh, tired of that rpm'ers shit – paths differ, config locations differ, you got to learn relearn on each swich again.
As for deb distros, they been for me more stable in that concern – life long know-how reusability, muscle memory, old notes of shell snipets still valid. Decade old servers, current ones, LTS (long term support) desktop distro or last dev edition don't difer much from point of view of fs organization and if differ at anything these are small evolutionary changes. My main argument reusability of know-how and "muscle memory" between desktop and servers and during the years, and growing reusable know-how during the years on top of that.
I regred for still having to suport several old centos servers during the last decade. Still regret of having to do lots of co-hosted old projects migrations from one of these – for lost time, money.
Have never regreted for any debian based one during the last 20 years. Have switched desktops ~10 years ago too. Before, been hardcore rpm distros fan – desktop: fedora, later suse; servers: centos, sometimes fedora. Lucky to have used deb distros for servers too, that made at least part of the bussiness stay stabile.
I've been using Pop! for years, having been a user of Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint previously. It pretty much just works as far as I can tell. Are there specific things you're looking for?
Since I can’t edit my post (not sure why, just can’t) this parent post should help people.
My leaving Fedora and by extension RH, mostly is about not supporting in any meaningful capacity any associated with RH. My hope is to find something similar to Fedora, I’m getting a lot of recommendations about OpenSUSE tumbleweed and endeavorOS. Since my setup is AMD CPU/GPU it seems while not the perfect choice POP!_OS isn’t for me. I think as long as the distro supports vanilla Gnome or as close as possible would be great.
I may be misreading this, but POP!_OS will work more than fine on an AMD CPU/GPU, as will any modern Linux distro. However, for people that Nvidia's proprietary drivers, POP!_OS also has pretty good integration out of the box that sets them apart from other distros (likely because the developer, System76, also makes laptops with Nvidia GPUs).
That being said, I've been on EndeavourOS for the past year and a half and I really like it so far. It's basically just arch but with a GUI installer and some extra theming/add-ons, which personally has worked great for me.
Without saying why you are leaving Fedora, it's not really possible to advise you... whatever we recommend may have the same mystery issue you are trying to escape.
Im guessing its related to recent Red Hat antics.
Nobara?
Still fedora based
Hence the question mark. OP gave no reasons as to why not Fedora.
Pop OS is not a bad choice. Only thing about it is the version of Gnome it has is a little old and it will stay that way until they come out with their own Rust-based DE.
Yeah, the current gnome outclass PopOs since they are working on Cosmic, the rust DE.
Their blog talk about cosmic a lot. Imho, it will be released the next month as beta public. Then they will release it next year.
https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-de-tiling-redesign-and-libcosmic-rebasing
What's the time line on that?
Iirc they said around the time of the next LTS release. So 24.04.
I just installed Endeavour, and so far I like it because I didn't need to do anything tedious to get my wifi card.working
Seems like we're looking for the same thing, it's a a shame.
I used Debian before, and I'm likely going back. Since Debian 12 uses the 6.1 Kernel, it's new enough for me.
I used Debian full-time eons ago, but last time I tried in 2019, it was a dog of a desktop OS to me compared to Fedora. It works fine as a server, but it's simply not a great desktop.
In a similar situation. I've been looking at open suse tumble weed and endeavourOS.
Installed pop on my wife's computer last week and I'm pretty impressed, I'm not the biggest gnome fan though so I don't think it would be for me.
I'm wondering if Universal Blue will be impacted if Redhat pulls a CoreOS move on Fedora. If not, that'd be quite a seamless switch.
I like Manjaro Gnome. I changed the maui shell for the gnome shell and everything is looking great, and as close to vanilla gnome as possible (which is what I liked from Fedora :P) is not the same package system, but is very neat ;)
I settled on PopOS, easy to use, just working OS
Consider PCLinuxOS. 'PLOS' has the same look and feel of the ent Linuxes, but
as a child of mageia/mandriva from mandrake and conectiva, it's derivation from RH is super long ago so it's closer to rhel5 for well-built well-tested tools.
it has maaaaassive lib/app support range, like Axel Rose's vocal range compared to EL's Bruce Springsteen. No stream or other crap shenanigans aside from etc/alternatives.
No systemd. Weird how startups are fast and reliable
It can yum cron like a badass.
Caveats:
I'm on Debian at the moment.
Which DE do you use? Sadly, on KDE Debian is quite bloated but there's a trick, I deselected KDE when installing Debian.
Naturally, I booted into a blackscreen but after entering my credentials I ran the following command:
sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktopI rebooted into a beautiful and minimal Plasma desktop, it doesn't even have a calculator but it still comes with a few questionable applications installed. From there I just set up flathub and I'm all flatpak.
I used this page, check the page for your favorite DE/WM: https://wiki.debian.org/KDE
I am considering Mint Debian version. Dtable and up to date desktop environment with flatpacks.