I’ve been using Debian-based distros most of my adult Linux life, but I read recently that KDE has a better experience on Fedora than Kubuntu, so I want to try it out.

I already know that I won’t be able to use apt, but what other differences should I expect with fedora?

The do not have an LTS release? What is upgrading like? When should you upgrade if you want stability?

  • jrgd@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    My set of recommendations:

    RPMFusion is recommended to add to your system. It’s the best way to use Steam, certain drivers (nvidia, v4l2loopback, etc.) as needed.

    SELinux is present, but the default policy sets are unlikely to impede your usage. The SELinux applet (seapplet) is a useful tool for diagnosing on the very rare chance you’re finding permission denied somewhere that cannot otherwise be explained.

    If you pull most of your software as flatpaks from Flathub already, your day-to-day experience won’t be much different from Debian.

    Fedora’s equivalent to LTS releases would be the downstream LTS releases provided by Redhat, RockyLinux, AlmaLinux, and others. They don’t have the same package sets as base fedora, and may need extra repositories to get some of the less essential, but ‘core’ software back. Ultimately not much of a reason to run them on a desktop workstation for personal use.

    Upgrading is pretty seamless. It’s as easy as graphical updates now or otherwise using the system upgrade module in dnf. I generally have the policy of waiting 2-4 weeks for any minor bugs that made it into a new release to settle. I have been expediting my upgrades for the past few releases in order to catch bugs before friends and family upgrade their machines and haven’t found any large problems regardless.

    Fedora doesn’t inherently expect a system to upgrade forever without maintenance, with 5 years being a typical target for things that may break. With that said, it is good to read the release notes before upgrading to the next edition, as there can rarely be something (like the recent recommendation and changed default for a larger /boot partition) that may require maintenance on a long-term system before upgrading. That said, you do have time to hold off on upgrading the distro, as the general lifetime of each release is ~13 months, giving 1 month overlap into a release two releases ahead. For instance, Fedora 43 will still be maintained up to a month into Fedora 45’s release.

    • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneOP
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      1 day ago

      Here is what I’ve done so far with RPMFusion.

      1. Installed and configured the repositories via the graphical method on this page: https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration
      2. Add app metadata to Discover via the “AppStream metadata” section. I only needed the first command, AppStream metadata.
      3. Followed the instructions on https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia
      4. Installed Steam via Discover, button says “Install From Fedora Linux.” I guess this is --a flatpak-- included in one of the repositories? It is hard to tell what is going on under the hood.
      5. EDIT: Added Flathub (was not enabled by default). Now, flatpak results show up in Discover.
      flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo  
      

      My impression of dnf so far is that the fact that it defaults to (y/N) and asks you more often for confirmation is unfortunate, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

      Just an aside, I’ve already gotten the “Oops, we’ve encountered a problem” message, but it disappeared too quickly for me to tell what it was about. Also the start menu doesn’t open any more. (EDIT: Now it works again). So that’s weird. My two monitors were working fine at first, but now I am getting, “Couldn’t apply display configuration: Position of output HDMI-A-1 is negative, that is not supported.”

      So it looks like installing Fedora/RPMFusion is not without its speedbumps, but overall pretty easy!