I was on Ubuntu for a year. No major issues, although I used the interim releases, which are supposed to be less solid than LTS. Then, a couple of months ago, I decided to switch to Fedora, just out of curiosity. Many people stated how Fedora is rock solid, Fedora is the new Ubuntu, etc. First some rpmfussion updates broke mesa, then the ostree update broke Flatpak, and recently there was a broken kernel 6.3.11 update that affected some AMD users. A few days ago, I updated my kernel to 6.3.12, and I got frequent freezes on boot. Other users are also reporting such issues. So now I boot with an older kernel. Which is not optimal. There is no LTS kernel on Fedora, the old kernel version doesn’t receive security updates. Was it always like that, or it’s an unusual bad phase.
You want an honest answer? Fedora was never that great to begin with and went down quite a bit in quality since the whole patent debacle. I had to switch distros when Mesa was constantly breaking. Also, untested kernel updates would remove HDMI audio (and despite a fix being available they waited a crazy long time to push it) among many other things
Tumbleweed is just plain better.
Fedora was never that great to begin with
I always just found it to be really, really, ridiculously slow. I swear DNF might rival Windows in terms of update slowness and it seems to permeate the whole system.
How does Tumbleweed compare to Fedora for you? The Mesa situation is also the driving force behind me looking for alternatives.
No issues at all, packman (the rpmfusion equivalent) is much more in sync with official repos and so I never had to wait until mesa caught up or anything. Also, Tumbleweed is feature packed and offers a much better experience than Fedora.
I’ve been using Fedora and haven’t encountered any of the issues you mentioned. To me it’s always been rock solid.
Very strange, I am using Fedora as my daily-driver since about 6 months now, and I had none of the issues you mention. Rock solid experience so far.
The fedora 37 and 38 livecds have a bug that prevents them from being bootable. So when I wanted to install fedora on my laptop I had to start with 36 then upgrade to 37 then to 38. No other distro has had this problem.
I had tough times trying to install fedora 38 kde spin.
If you want to continue using Fedora try Kinoite or Silverblue. With their immutability and ease of rollback, I’ve really enjoyed using Fedora again.
Fedora Silverblue is basically my ideal distro. Used it for the past two years on all my machines.
Shame about the telemetry stuff and RHEL bullshit… Jumped to Debian 12 and haven’t looked back.
I personally found Fedora to be rock solid, and along with Ubuntu provided the best hardware support out of the box on all my computers - though it’s been a couple of years since I used it. I did end up on Ubuntu non-LTS in the end as I now run Ubuntu LTS on my servers and find having the same systems to be beneficial (from a knowledge perspective).
I always found Fedora to be a little unstable for my work use. I switched to CentOS because of that, and that was truly rock solid. I even used CentOS Stream for a while (but switched to Alma and Rocky eventually).
I’ve been using fedora since 32 and I’d say this is a bad phase. I have heard time and time again that opensuse is more stable tho
Fedora 30 - 36 were phenomenal releases and I mostly used them, recommended them elsewhere.
I had to start using the Spins because the default GNOME desktop is just becoming unusable. Stripping functionality to make it prettier, not fixing longstanding issues.
Then Fedora had that kerfuffle with the licensing issues with codecs, and I couldn’t play a certain type of HEVC video that the vast majority of my video library is encoded in.
Then, more recently, I had issues with Python in their repos. That was the last straw. I’ll definitely check it out again in a few years to see if they’ve fixed a lot of these problems, but I wouldn’t recommend the distro in its current state.
