Fedora KDE is probably the best KDE experience I've had, so I'm glad that it's going to get equal billing with the GNOME version going forward. Shoutout to the Fedora KDE maintainers for doing such a good job.
KDE developer myself, and happy Fedora user since 2009. Agreed, the Fedora team does a great job, also with keeping us developers happy by e.g. providing dependencies needed by the unreleased development versions.
I really like working with 'mock' and 'fedpkg'; Fedora is a modern binary distribution, of course, but source rebuilds are like the same four commands away for any package
Was just in an Apple Store yesterday mulling over whether or not to switch back to macOS after 15 years on Linux PCs.
Both MacBook Pros and Airs are nice machines, but macOS, for me, it's a huge step back.
Unfortunately the Asahi project is underfunded (likely one of the reasons the project founder/lead jumped ship recently), and as a result M4 support is likely a year+ away.
Oh wells, let's see what Dell and Lenovo have on offer this spring/summer. Should be able to get a pretty decent PC laptop for less than the $4k+ an MBP 16" with 2TB/64GB will cost.
I love the idea behind Framework, but my admittedly old one is nowhere near comparable to a MacBook. It's really unpleasant to use, feels cheap, and performance/battery life are shockingly poor on Kubuntu. It's not a patch on a ThinkPad even, much less a Mac. Have they gotten considerably better since I bought mine (end of 2022)?
Framework started selling larger batteries in 2023 (61 Whr vs the base 55 Whr), and from looking through older reviews it looks like battery life significantly improved (>25% better) with the 13th-gen Intel upgrade [1]. I've got their 13-inch AMD 7840U but can't speak to the battery life as it mostly sits docked.
Have the bigger battery, battery life is still bad.
It's just a bad laptop: has "hot bag" syndrome, speakers are terrible even with the upgraded kit, the hinge that turns the screen off is very temperamental.
Still no open BIOS, they've hired a “Linux guy” who is super condescending in their official forums and locks topics when he feels the heat.
Why? They operate via multiple subsidiaries (the EU one is registered in Eindhoven), most notably Singapore and Taiwan, and do their main manufacturing in Taiwan.
Many US companies operate via subsidiaries and manufacture their products in Asia. But that doesn’t matter if the main business is based in the US. The current US government, its seemingly random tariffs, and their plans to cut their country off the rest of the world make it hard for me to invest my money and energy into products from the US if I’m not sure if in a year from now I still will get support for them as a customer from Europe.
I got a Thinkpad T14 AMD Gen 5 a few weeks ago to use aside my MacBook Pro. Filled it up with 64GB RAM and a 2TB SSD for about 160 Euro each. In contrast to my previous Thinkpad experience 4 years ago, all the hardware just works out of the box. Even suspend/resume comes back without any devices lost, etc.
If you don't need a discrete graphics card and want maximum battery life, LG gram laptops are totally worth a look. I could easily write code and develop all day without plugging in at all.
I’d love to install Fedora Asahi Remix on my MacBook but without built-in disk encryption the whole operating system is unfortunately quite useless for me.
I've been feeling a pull towards Fedora lately away from Ubuntu, especially because there's apparently better hardware support for Framework laptops. Does anyone have experience for migrating from Ubuntu to Fedora? Package reinstallation isn't an issue for me, but wondering if anyone has some general tips for migrating everything between distributions, especially with different parent distros.
Fedora uses more stock and Red Hat is a far, far bigger contributor to Linux and OS as a whole (especially the kernel and systemd). Fedora stays more true to the only OSS ethos. IMO Fedora is the better pick.
If I had to use Ubuntu I would fight to use Debian instead.
I agree very strongly with your take. Fedora (and RHEL of course) ooze professionalism in a way that no other distro ecosystem does to me.
It's rock solid AND comes with relatively new packages, AND they are close to stock. I also appreciate their willingness to put themselves forward and show leadership when it comes to adopting (or creating) new technologies that can make the platform better. I think most professionals can agree at this point that despite little qualms and some early hiccups here and there, technologies like systemd and wayland (and others) were probably good ideas in the long run, and Fedora was consistently way out ahead in promoting and adopting them.
I also tend to trust Red Hat (and yes even IBM) more than I do Canonical for a number of reasons.
Fedora often updates kernel and that already broke laptop support (Thinkpad X1 Gen 13 bought a year ago) for me twice requiring to revert to older kernel.
Also few years ago a kernel update made a laptop that was 7 years old non-functional. Eventually I had to install Debian as lack of security updates for the kernel was very problematic.
> Canonical gives off some weird vibes and those in the know will understand what I'm talking about.
You're probably trying to write fairly and without throwing shade, but the result is this gives off vibes of FUD. Can you be a bit more specific about your issues with Canonical?
You're right and I apologize for that and don't want to discourage anybody from doing business with or working with or for Canonical.
All I'll say is that the recruitment process alone, if it's still as bad as it used to be, is a major red flag and deal breaker w.r.t what it says about the overall culture.
Maybe things have changed and so people should really take my opinions about them with a grain of salt.
If you're referring to the recruitment asking questions about your high school performance and how you ranked locally and regionally in high school in various subjects, that's still a thing. Even for positions where that shouldn't matter.
There are no positions where it should matter. Even if there were a genuine reason to care about high school grades (there isn't), asking about relative ranking doesn't make any sense unless you have detailed knowledge of the specific school they went to. It's like asking a candidate to rank their programming ability compared to their current colleagues. What possible information could you derive from this?
> How did you perform in mathematics at high school?
Predefined answers are "Top 0.01% in the region", "Top 5% at school", "Top 10% at school", etc.
> Please share your rationale or evidence for the high school performance selections above. Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings, or recognition awards, or to competitive or selective college entrance results such as SAT or ACT scores, JAMB, matriculation results, IB results etc. We recognise every system is different but we will ask you to justify your selections above.
These are required questions. Even if I were literally in high school, I'm not sure how I would be able to answer these. "Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings" - do these exist in the US? If they do I've never heard of them.
> "Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings" - do these exist in the US?
They name a couple, SAT and ACT are still the main ones. Some states like New York have the Regents Exam which would be a statewide score. Demanding those scores is still just about the dumbest fucking thing I've seen a tech company do.
I'm willing to put up with a lot during an application process, but not Canonical's circus. If applying for a job at a company tells you anything about the company's culture then I don't think I would ever want to work there.
I find it insane that it's even a topic that people would know the answer to.
I cannot possibly tell you how my UK school ranked in the 90s, how I ranked in any subject at the school, and especially how I would have ranked regionally.
This seems like such an insane thing to even know, let alone ask.
I also had a poor experience with Canonical hiring process.
I applied for an EM role in May 2020, crickets for NINE months, then they invited me to begin the process in Feb 2021. Of course I had signed up elsewhere long before that.
Yep, hiring is hard, but how you treat applicants says everything about your culture.
One thing to note is that you have to set up codecs/video acceleration stuff manually on Fedora because of legal reasons. Here's a pretty good guide for that, it also has some suggested configuration tweaks for GNOME that make it a bit nicer to use. https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2024/10/14/fedora-starter-pack/
For those interested in the atomic versions, the Universal Blue team has variants that do all of this for you: https://universal-blue.org/
It's not really a separate distro, more like a different configuration. The regular atomic release is the "base image" with the universal blue stuff overlayed on top. You can rebase to or from a universal blue image and a stock atomic one.
FWIW, slightly less relevant to coming from Ubuntu specifically, I would use Fedora if I wasn't using NixOS. It has so many things going for it:
- A strong focus on security, one of the few distributions to use SELinux. They were very active in pushing verified boot. Early adoption of Flatpak, which has seen better and better sandboxing over time.
- Very fresh. So you get the latest & greatest GNOME, etc. and even after a release a lot of packages are actively maintained and updated. I have generally found that this leads to a more stable system, since bugs get fixed more quickly.
- Since Fedora is very up-to-date, hardware support is also very good.
- Their immutable/atomic distributions (e.g. Silverblue) are awesome. Immutable boot, atomic upgrades/rollbacks, etc.
I did tons of distro hopping a year or two ago, I landed on both Ubuntu and Fedora. One thing that I absolutely did not like about Fedora is that updates take a non-trivial time on reboot (this generally isn't a problem with Ubuntu). On the other hand, Fedora has packages newer than the last ice age. You'll probably have to use a COPR or two (the equivalent of PPAs).
Other than that, you'll just be using dnf instead of apt. Articles/answers for RHEL usually work on Fedora. You should really feel right at home.
It's also worth having a look at Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite (or universal blue, which is newer than what I've used). Installing packages at a system level is more involved (they really want you to use Flatpak and containers), but it is possible. I had a CI server spitting out my system image weekly at one point. If NixOS didn't exist I would be using this.
I don't have much respect for Ubuntu. They did a lot for bringing Linux on the desktop from zero, but I feel as though it's being held back by Ubuntu these days (especially with snaps). At least consider Debian instead.
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian about two months ago after my system crashed while trying to update. Since then, Debian has been rock-solid, running much smoother and more efficiently. No more dealing with Snap packages and similar annoyances. If you’re disciplined about not messing with the OS, keeping your files organized and backed up, and using containers, switching between distros and operating systems becomes pretty seamless.
I'm using both for several years. Fedora is lightyears ahead in quality and ease of use, but you need to install a lot of missing packages by yourself. No big deal though.
Moving between distros I usually just have files I care about like documents and music on their own drive so I don't need to worry about moving them. As for moving from Ubuntu to Fedora, there are more steps to getting non-free software/codecs/drivers working on Fedora, you will need RPM Fusion for that. There are relevant How-Tos provided by RPM Fusion and other sources for installing NVIDIA drivers, ffmpeg (non-free), and more.
It enables only a small selection of RPM Fusion as your link shows, ofc flathub gets around some of the need for RPM Fusion, like video codecs, as long as everything else your using is a flatpak (and uses the applicable runtimes).
Having all my actual files separately stored from my system files just makes so much sense. Good call. Right now they're mostly relegated to a few directories, but I'm not positive, which is part of the headache I'm worried about with a switch. Having them completely separate and symlinked is a great call.
I switched about 2 years ago using my Dell XPS 13. No hardware issues and everything is just a bit less buggy. I wrote about it back then: https://evertpot.com/switching-to-fedora/
I run Ubuntu everywhere except my Framework, because at the time Fedora was shipping a newer kernel that had better 12th Gen Intel support.
I formatted ext4 with LUKS because it's what I'm used to, but honestly Fedora has been great. Add flathub, a few gnome extensions (same ones I'd use in Ubuntu) and it's basically the same experience.
Without knowing what you're migrating I can't really speak to that. I use a pretty light toolset and heavily lean on remote dev (VS Code SSH extension).
I moved my AMD Framework laptop from Ubuntu to Fedora, no real complaints. Having the newest kernel and Mesa stuff is pretty useful if you're doing any gaming on it.
I prefer apt, but on my particular PC, Fedora is noticeably faster and more stable than Ubuntu. Not that I have system crashes, but I have smoother performance and gaming, and random GNOME apps crash much less on Fedora, so I use it. And there's no Snap -- unless you want it. YMMV.
I floated between Mint and Pop_OS for years, and now I'll probably never leave Fedora Silverblue. It's awesome. I just use different toolbox/distrobox for different things I need.
Most of my dev work is in a Ubuntu distrobox and I use mostly Flatpaks for everything else.
I was pleasantly surprised to find official cuda repositories for fedora 41 for compiling llama.cpp. If you need such specific repos, make sure fedora supports them before switching.
>> that has been a pain point for recommending Fedora to newbies.
I've been running Fedora for 20 years and I still can't navigate that part of the install process. The combination of partitions and LLVM - which I don't need - and that part of the install setup... ooof. And try to reuse anything already on disk? I never can get it.
Thank God upgrades are seamless now so I don't have to use the installer.
BTW it's just the disk layout part I have a problem with. Everything else is great.
I'm excited to see KDE promoted to being an "edition", but does anyone know what is behind this decision? It surprises me that Red Hat would take this step, since they are (seemingly) a big GNOME proponent, and I thought many of the GNOME developers work for Red Hat.
Been playing around Bluefin recently [1]. Which is based on Fedora Silverblue [2]. These are atomic OSes which seems very nice and innovative indeed.
I'm Debian user for 15+ years. But stable version is too old and testing for some reasons breaking quite often (last year I wasted more time on fixing Debian Testing after updates than my friend which uses Arch -_-). Now I'm looking for good alternatives and I think I will stick with containers rabbit hole. :)
Thanks @jcastro [3] and contributers for fantastic work! <3
Nice that people have options. Setting up a desktop on your own isn't always easy.
I tried COSMIC and was disappointed that it didn't work well on a touchscreen (a common refrain for Linux environments, and a motivator for me trying it out). Then again, it's still an alpha. Would be nice to see improvements there, but since it's from a laptop vendor, I don't have high expectations.
I think it looks good, and seems fairly modern. The settings app would probably work well on touchscreen, but I'm sure many apps wouldn't.
Definitely still in alpha.
I like the idea that it will be a bit more secure, automatically. Security needs to be taken much more seriously. Fedora Atomic means most userspace apps will be sandboxed via Flatpak, and the base system itself will be immutable.
Flatpak needs a lot more love, though. Portals aren't as good as Android or iOS or Windows capability-based permissions yet. Many important apps just request full permissions, needlessly.
Wayland has not been working for me properly though. I may give it another go so I'll be able to provide you an exhaustive list of what is not working properly, for now though, perhaps other people could chime in.
My biggest gripe with Wayland is screen sharing/remote desktop. For my desktop PC I could just install RealVNC and have access to it on any of my devices anywhere in the world. I still haven't found a good solution for Wayland. I'm using RDP right now but it really sucks in comparison so far.
Slack screen share is kind of hit and miss as well. Not to mention screen capture being less than ideal.
literally the only thing that works better (and not worse) on wayland is fractional scaling, and it is still not great :D. but thats partly how fedora drives the whole ecosystem forward
I've been super happy with Fedora since switching to it on desktop. Unfortunately I'm still biased to Debian for the server usecase. Fedora moves too quickly but RHEL (and derivatives) not supporting major version upgrades is pretty much a deal breaker. Would love a RedHat-themed distro with a ~5year support cycle with the option to do major version upgrades.
In our environments, we use Fedora. We run the package upgrades weekly in a test env and make sure the functional/integration tests pass successfully, then roll those forward to stage and prod envs. Very seldom (twice in 5 years) have we caught a problem in the lower environment that prohibited the upgrade from moving on towards prod. And in both of those instances, newer package upgrades in the test env fixed the problems within a week or two without us needing to open up an issue ourselves in the Fedora forums.
Still, after one nasty experience in 2023, we always wait six to eight weeks after a new Fedora version is released before starring to attempt one of those upgrades. This has worked spectaculary well for us. We get all the benefits of newer mainline kernel drivers for recent server motherboard chipsets and CPUs while maintaining a very solid OS. CVEs seldom even get close to us, since they are often based on much older versions of system packages.
Then CentOS would fit your server use case. The new CentOS is a rolling distro with smooth upgrades, most kernel patches don't need a reboot, live patching works.
Oops, I always get this wrong, probably because of its misleading name.
> CentOS Stream defines Enterprise Linux.
> CentOS Stream is derived from Fedora Linux. It has a new major version release every three years, and each release is maintained for five years, matching the full support phase of RHEL. CentOS Stream development is open to all, but because CentOS Stream only has updates intended for RHEL, it is maintained by the RHEL team.
I'm still hopeful that RHEL will find a way to integrate dnf system-upgrade in the future, but it's not a trivial undertaking. As long as the transaction can resolve cleanly, it's technically possible to do. But it doesn't mean you'll have a properly configured system when it boots up. Tools like leapp and its derivatives (ELevate) do a bit more under the hood work to ensure a complete upgrade. Fedora itself only ever supports and tests up to a two version bump for system upgrades, e.g. 40 -> 42, 41 -> 43, etc. RHEL major releases are jumping (at minimum) six Fedora releases.
FC1 (i think? or like a pre-release beta version?) was the first time I saw that sweet, sweet, slick gnome UX and magical font rendering and mouse acceleration. I remember exactly where I was too - Birks halls at Exeter uni, spring 2003, on my mate Benji's Samsung laptop. It looked so amazing. He was so proud of it. I told him it looked shit and that I was sick of rpm and that he was a noob and that I was more than happy with my slackware makefiles and my KDE / enlightenment setup that I was still too afraid to upgrade to slack 8.
One of the very few things I remember from that year, and yet I remember it in such detail. I'm really not sure how to feel about that.
(but yeah, I've been rocking fedora full time since fc16 or so and haven't looked back, it's amazing)
I've been using Fedora 42 since it branched, it has been quite nice; I haven't encountered any breaking bugs with it. Has gnome 48 which comes with HDR support. Hope that chromium can get support for it soon, MPV can already do it apparently, but haven't tried it; games have been hit & miss for it, but I presume those will get ironed out over time.
I'm not sure they'll publish it in the windows store, you'll have to import it yourself. I've usually cobbled one together from their container rootfs. This tarball saves me some hassle
I’ve been using Podman on Fedora on Lima (Mac OS) with rootless containers based on Fedora rather than from Docker Hub for fullstack web dev. I’m ready to use Rocky Linux or RHEL for some production stuff if I find it more suitable for something and have used Rocky Linux a fair bit. I’ve really grown to like Fedora and have switched to it from Ubuntu. They have systems for building OCI images that are interesting and useful, and related to buildpacks. https://src.fedoraproject.org/container/s2i-base
Been a happy Fedora Desktop user since switching from 20+ years of Windows last year. Had a few hiccups at the start of last year with NVIDIA drivers in Wayland but that's since been resolved with Explicit sync support.
Happy there's been no signs enshittification of Fedora from Redhat, it's a just a clean polished well maintain modern distro, great option if you're a dev switching from Windows.
Gah! Why did they name their installer Anaconda? That name is already totally overloaded by the python Anaconda, which I notice now bills itself as "The Operating System for AI".
That's like naming your programming language "JIT", or "Compiler" or..."Hack".
UPDATE: as others have pointed out, I've got it backwards. RedHat had the name first. So, criticism retracted and redirected at the other Anaconda.
And 1999 is just how far the Git history (imported from CVS, the project kinda skipped subversion directly to Git) goes. - The first commit is from April 24 1999 and says: "the very start of a gui frontend for anaconda":
This kinda implies that Anaconda was in existence for some time back then & what was tracked in the newflangled change tracking software was the fancy new graphical UI. :)
I have not really looked further if perhaps the backend was imported later on or just grew from the GUI - but the same codebase, with continous 27 years of history is what installs the Fedora 42 Beta today. :-)
Fedora KDE is probably the best KDE experience I've had, so I'm glad that it's going to get equal billing with the GNOME version going forward. Shoutout to the Fedora KDE maintainers for doing such a good job.
KDE developer myself, and happy Fedora user since 2009. Agreed, the Fedora team does a great job, also with keeping us developers happy by e.g. providing dependencies needed by the unreleased development versions.
I really like working with 'mock' and 'fedpkg'; Fedora is a modern binary distribution, of course, but source rebuilds are like the same four commands away for any package
Asahi also has the 42 Beta available today: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-asahi-remix-42-...
Notably with FEX support for running x86 binaries. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FEX
Was just in an Apple Store yesterday mulling over whether or not to switch back to macOS after 15 years on Linux PCs.
Both MacBook Pros and Airs are nice machines, but macOS, for me, it's a huge step back.
Unfortunately the Asahi project is underfunded (likely one of the reasons the project founder/lead jumped ship recently), and as a result M4 support is likely a year+ away.
Oh wells, let's see what Dell and Lenovo have on offer this spring/summer. Should be able to get a pretty decent PC laptop for less than the $4k+ an MBP 16" with 2TB/64GB will cost.
If you have a perksatwork account, you can get a thinkpad with those specs for about $1.2k. During national holidays it goes for under $1k.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/le...
Might be worth taking a look at https://frame.work/.
Until now I'd only heard of Framework laptops, but am blown away by the build-your-own process -- incredible, spec the machine just as you want it.
Going to dive into the details now, thanks...
I love the idea behind Framework, but my admittedly old one is nowhere near comparable to a MacBook. It's really unpleasant to use, feels cheap, and performance/battery life are shockingly poor on Kubuntu. It's not a patch on a ThinkPad even, much less a Mac. Have they gotten considerably better since I bought mine (end of 2022)?
Framework started selling larger batteries in 2023 (61 Whr vs the base 55 Whr), and from looking through older reviews it looks like battery life significantly improved (>25% better) with the 13th-gen Intel upgrade [1]. I've got their 13-inch AMD 7840U but can't speak to the battery life as it mostly sits docked.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-framework-lap...
Have the bigger battery, battery life is still bad.
It's just a bad laptop: has "hot bag" syndrome, speakers are terrible even with the upgraded kit, the hinge that turns the screen off is very temperamental.
Still no open BIOS, they've hired a “Linux guy” who is super condescending in their official forums and locks topics when he feels the heat.
Stay far away.
I love my Framework 14. I'm absolutely sticking with this company for all future PCs.
I’d love to try out their products, but as an European it could become a problem in the near future that they’re an US-based company.
Why? They operate via multiple subsidiaries (the EU one is registered in Eindhoven), most notably Singapore and Taiwan, and do their main manufacturing in Taiwan.
Many US companies operate via subsidiaries and manufacture their products in Asia. But that doesn’t matter if the main business is based in the US. The current US government, its seemingly random tariffs, and their plans to cut their country off the rest of the world make it hard for me to invest my money and energy into products from the US if I’m not sure if in a year from now I still will get support for them as a customer from Europe.
I got a Thinkpad T14 AMD Gen 5 a few weeks ago to use aside my MacBook Pro. Filled it up with 64GB RAM and a 2TB SSD for about 160 Euro each. In contrast to my previous Thinkpad experience 4 years ago, all the hardware just works out of the box. Even suspend/resume comes back without any devices lost, etc.
ThinkPad P1 is fine, if Intel chipset works for you.
Great keyboard and touchpad and nice display.
If you don't need a discrete graphics card and want maximum battery life, LG gram laptops are totally worth a look. I could easily write code and develop all day without plugging in at all.
Don’t forget to make a donation to Asahi, maybe it will be ready in time for your next laptop.
I’d love to install Fedora Asahi Remix on my MacBook but without built-in disk encryption the whole operating system is unfortunately quite useless for me.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39941021
There is a link to the blog post about how to enable disk encryption after installation.
The only issue with that is that the boot chain is not verified, and you are not protected against evil maid attack.
Its fedora based right ? , You can just encrypt /home, its stupid easy.
I've been feeling a pull towards Fedora lately away from Ubuntu, especially because there's apparently better hardware support for Framework laptops. Does anyone have experience for migrating from Ubuntu to Fedora? Package reinstallation isn't an issue for me, but wondering if anyone has some general tips for migrating everything between distributions, especially with different parent distros.
Fedora uses more stock and Red Hat is a far, far bigger contributor to Linux and OS as a whole (especially the kernel and systemd). Fedora stays more true to the only OSS ethos. IMO Fedora is the better pick.
If I had to use Ubuntu I would fight to use Debian instead.
I agree very strongly with your take. Fedora (and RHEL of course) ooze professionalism in a way that no other distro ecosystem does to me.
It's rock solid AND comes with relatively new packages, AND they are close to stock. I also appreciate their willingness to put themselves forward and show leadership when it comes to adopting (or creating) new technologies that can make the platform better. I think most professionals can agree at this point that despite little qualms and some early hiccups here and there, technologies like systemd and wayland (and others) were probably good ideas in the long run, and Fedora was consistently way out ahead in promoting and adopting them.
I also tend to trust Red Hat (and yes even IBM) more than I do Canonical for a number of reasons.
Fedora often updates kernel and that already broke laptop support (Thinkpad X1 Gen 13 bought a year ago) for me twice requiring to revert to older kernel.
Also few years ago a kernel update made a laptop that was 7 years old non-functional. Eventually I had to install Debian as lack of security updates for the kernel was very problematic.
It is true that Fedora tends to run recent kernels and so that's definitely something folks should be aware of.
Fedora updates kernel to the latest version typically within 6-8 weeks from the release.
> Canonical gives off some weird vibes and those in the know will understand what I'm talking about.
You're probably trying to write fairly and without throwing shade, but the result is this gives off vibes of FUD. Can you be a bit more specific about your issues with Canonical?
You're right and I apologize for that and don't want to discourage anybody from doing business with or working with or for Canonical.
All I'll say is that the recruitment process alone, if it's still as bad as it used to be, is a major red flag and deal breaker w.r.t what it says about the overall culture.
Maybe things have changed and so people should really take my opinions about them with a grain of salt.
If you're referring to the recruitment asking questions about your high school performance and how you ranked locally and regionally in high school in various subjects, that's still a thing. Even for positions where that shouldn't matter.
There are no positions where it should matter. Even if there were a genuine reason to care about high school grades (there isn't), asking about relative ranking doesn't make any sense unless you have detailed knowledge of the specific school they went to. It's like asking a candidate to rank their programming ability compared to their current colleagues. What possible information could you derive from this?
Example application: https://canonical.com/careers/4676649/application
> How did you perform in mathematics at high school?
Predefined answers are "Top 0.01% in the region", "Top 5% at school", "Top 10% at school", etc.
> Please share your rationale or evidence for the high school performance selections above. Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings, or recognition awards, or to competitive or selective college entrance results such as SAT or ACT scores, JAMB, matriculation results, IB results etc. We recognise every system is different but we will ask you to justify your selections above.
These are required questions. Even if I were literally in high school, I'm not sure how I would be able to answer these. "Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings" - do these exist in the US? If they do I've never heard of them.
> "Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings" - do these exist in the US?
They name a couple, SAT and ACT are still the main ones. Some states like New York have the Regents Exam which would be a statewide score. Demanding those scores is still just about the dumbest fucking thing I've seen a tech company do.
I'm willing to put up with a lot during an application process, but not Canonical's circus. If applying for a job at a company tells you anything about the company's culture then I don't think I would ever want to work there.
I find it insane that it's even a topic that people would know the answer to.
I cannot possibly tell you how my UK school ranked in the 90s, how I ranked in any subject at the school, and especially how I would have ranked regionally.
This seems like such an insane thing to even know, let alone ask.
I also had a poor experience with Canonical hiring process.
I applied for an EM role in May 2020, crickets for NINE months, then they invited me to begin the process in Feb 2021. Of course I had signed up elsewhere long before that.
Yep, hiring is hard, but how you treat applicants says everything about your culture.
exactly same sentiment here
One thing to note is that you have to set up codecs/video acceleration stuff manually on Fedora because of legal reasons. Here's a pretty good guide for that, it also has some suggested configuration tweaks for GNOME that make it a bit nicer to use. https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2024/10/14/fedora-starter-pack/
For those interested in the atomic versions, the Universal Blue team has variants that do all of this for you: https://universal-blue.org/
It's not really a separate distro, more like a different configuration. The regular atomic release is the "base image" with the universal blue stuff overlayed on top. You can rebase to or from a universal blue image and a stock atomic one.
FWIW, slightly less relevant to coming from Ubuntu specifically, I would use Fedora if I wasn't using NixOS. It has so many things going for it:
- A strong focus on security, one of the few distributions to use SELinux. They were very active in pushing verified boot. Early adoption of Flatpak, which has seen better and better sandboxing over time.
- Very fresh. So you get the latest & greatest GNOME, etc. and even after a release a lot of packages are actively maintained and updated. I have generally found that this leads to a more stable system, since bugs get fixed more quickly.
- Since Fedora is very up-to-date, hardware support is also very good.
- Their immutable/atomic distributions (e.g. Silverblue) are awesome. Immutable boot, atomic upgrades/rollbacks, etc.
I did tons of distro hopping a year or two ago, I landed on both Ubuntu and Fedora. One thing that I absolutely did not like about Fedora is that updates take a non-trivial time on reboot (this generally isn't a problem with Ubuntu). On the other hand, Fedora has packages newer than the last ice age. You'll probably have to use a COPR or two (the equivalent of PPAs).
Other than that, you'll just be using dnf instead of apt. Articles/answers for RHEL usually work on Fedora. You should really feel right at home.
It's also worth having a look at Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite (or universal blue, which is newer than what I've used). Installing packages at a system level is more involved (they really want you to use Flatpak and containers), but it is possible. I had a CI server spitting out my system image weekly at one point. If NixOS didn't exist I would be using this.
I don't have much respect for Ubuntu. They did a lot for bringing Linux on the desktop from zero, but I feel as though it's being held back by Ubuntu these days (especially with snaps). At least consider Debian instead.
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian about two months ago after my system crashed while trying to update. Since then, Debian has been rock-solid, running much smoother and more efficiently. No more dealing with Snap packages and similar annoyances. If you’re disciplined about not messing with the OS, keeping your files organized and backed up, and using containers, switching between distros and operating systems becomes pretty seamless.
I'm using both for several years. Fedora is lightyears ahead in quality and ease of use, but you need to install a lot of missing packages by yourself. No big deal though.
Ubuntu became a huge clusterfuck
Moving between distros I usually just have files I care about like documents and music on their own drive so I don't need to worry about moving them. As for moving from Ubuntu to Fedora, there are more steps to getting non-free software/codecs/drivers working on Fedora, you will need RPM Fusion for that. There are relevant How-Tos provided by RPM Fusion and other sources for installing NVIDIA drivers, ffmpeg (non-free), and more.
I believe these days the "extra steps" amount to just clicking an option box to allow third party repositories during install.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/workstation-working-gro...
It enables only a small selection of RPM Fusion as your link shows, ofc flathub gets around some of the need for RPM Fusion, like video codecs, as long as everything else your using is a flatpak (and uses the applicable runtimes).
Having all my actual files separately stored from my system files just makes so much sense. Good call. Right now they're mostly relegated to a few directories, but I'm not positive, which is part of the headache I'm worried about with a switch. Having them completely separate and symlinked is a great call.
I switched about 2 years ago using my Dell XPS 13. No hardware issues and everything is just a bit less buggy. I wrote about it back then: https://evertpot.com/switching-to-fedora/
I run Ubuntu everywhere except my Framework, because at the time Fedora was shipping a newer kernel that had better 12th Gen Intel support.
I formatted ext4 with LUKS because it's what I'm used to, but honestly Fedora has been great. Add flathub, a few gnome extensions (same ones I'd use in Ubuntu) and it's basically the same experience.
Without knowing what you're migrating I can't really speak to that. I use a pretty light toolset and heavily lean on remote dev (VS Code SSH extension).
I moved my AMD Framework laptop from Ubuntu to Fedora, no real complaints. Having the newest kernel and Mesa stuff is pretty useful if you're doing any gaming on it.
I prefer apt, but on my particular PC, Fedora is noticeably faster and more stable than Ubuntu. Not that I have system crashes, but I have smoother performance and gaming, and random GNOME apps crash much less on Fedora, so I use it. And there's no Snap -- unless you want it. YMMV.
I floated between Mint and Pop_OS for years, and now I'll probably never leave Fedora Silverblue. It's awesome. I just use different toolbox/distrobox for different things I need.
Most of my dev work is in a Ubuntu distrobox and I use mostly Flatpaks for everything else.
For those who have heard of Bazzite, the frontrunner in gaming/home theater Linux distros, it's based on Silverblue.
I'm actually using a customized version of Universal Blue that Bazzite is also based on. Very slick setup
I migrated and noticed nothing. About all I can think of is I type 'sudo apt xxx' all the time.
I was pleasantly surprised to find official cuda repositories for fedora 41 for compiling llama.cpp. If you need such specific repos, make sure fedora supports them before switching.
> Web UI is now default for Fedora Workstation: This new web-based UI for the OS installer is now default for Fedora Workstation in F42 Beta. ....
How times have changed, even OS installers.
Excited that the partitioning portion of the installer is reworked - that has been a pain point for recommending Fedora to newbies.
Really excited that the KDE version is ascended from spin to Edition! That's what I use for my desktop at home.
>> that has been a pain point for recommending Fedora to newbies.
I've been running Fedora for 20 years and I still can't navigate that part of the install process. The combination of partitions and LLVM - which I don't need - and that part of the install setup... ooof. And try to reuse anything already on disk? I never can get it.
Thank God upgrades are seamless now so I don't have to use the installer.
BTW it's just the disk layout part I have a problem with. Everything else is great.
I'm excited to see KDE promoted to being an "edition", but does anyone know what is behind this decision? It surprises me that Red Hat would take this step, since they are (seemingly) a big GNOME proponent, and I thought many of the GNOME developers work for Red Hat.
Been playing around Bluefin recently [1]. Which is based on Fedora Silverblue [2]. These are atomic OSes which seems very nice and innovative indeed.
I'm Debian user for 15+ years. But stable version is too old and testing for some reasons breaking quite often (last year I wasted more time on fixing Debian Testing after updates than my friend which uses Arch -_-). Now I'm looking for good alternatives and I think I will stick with containers rabbit hole. :)
Thanks @jcastro [3] and contributers for fantastic work! <3
[1]: https://projectbluefin.io/ [2]: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/ [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38992292
Excited about the new COSMIC spin, and remain excited about the progression of the existing Atomic desktop spins.
Nice that people have options. Setting up a desktop on your own isn't always easy.
I tried COSMIC and was disappointed that it didn't work well on a touchscreen (a common refrain for Linux environments, and a motivator for me trying it out). Then again, it's still an alpha. Would be nice to see improvements there, but since it's from a laptop vendor, I don't have high expectations.
I think it looks good, and seems fairly modern. The settings app would probably work well on touchscreen, but I'm sure many apps wouldn't.
Definitely still in alpha.
I like the idea that it will be a bit more secure, automatically. Security needs to be taken much more seriously. Fedora Atomic means most userspace apps will be sandboxed via Flatpak, and the base system itself will be immutable.
Flatpak needs a lot more love, though. Portals aren't as good as Android or iOS or Windows capability-based permissions yet. Many important apps just request full permissions, needlessly.
Wayland has not been working for me properly though. I may give it another go so I'll be able to provide you an exhaustive list of what is not working properly, for now though, perhaps other people could chime in.
What doesn't work properly?
My biggest gripe with Wayland is screen sharing/remote desktop. For my desktop PC I could just install RealVNC and have access to it on any of my devices anywhere in the world. I still haven't found a good solution for Wayland. I'm using RDP right now but it really sucks in comparison so far.
Slack screen share is kind of hit and miss as well. Not to mention screen capture being less than ideal.
Install xorgxrdp-glamor and openh264. That will give you GPU-accelerated UI rendering and a much faster video stream.
https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/01/05/1730#h-264-strea... (these packages have already been mainlined, I think)
literally the only thing that works better (and not worse) on wayland is fractional scaling, and it is still not great :D. but thats partly how fedora drives the whole ecosystem forward
not sure why youre being downvoted, wayland as default is probably the biggest thing to flag for new users coming from any other distro
I've been super happy with Fedora since switching to it on desktop. Unfortunately I'm still biased to Debian for the server usecase. Fedora moves too quickly but RHEL (and derivatives) not supporting major version upgrades is pretty much a deal breaker. Would love a RedHat-themed distro with a ~5year support cycle with the option to do major version upgrades.
In our environments, we use Fedora. We run the package upgrades weekly in a test env and make sure the functional/integration tests pass successfully, then roll those forward to stage and prod envs. Very seldom (twice in 5 years) have we caught a problem in the lower environment that prohibited the upgrade from moving on towards prod. And in both of those instances, newer package upgrades in the test env fixed the problems within a week or two without us needing to open up an issue ourselves in the Fedora forums.
Still, after one nasty experience in 2023, we always wait six to eight weeks after a new Fedora version is released before starring to attempt one of those upgrades. This has worked spectaculary well for us. We get all the benefits of newer mainline kernel drivers for recent server motherboard chipsets and CPUs while maintaining a very solid OS. CVEs seldom even get close to us, since they are often based on much older versions of system packages.
Then CentOS would fit your server use case. The new CentOS is a rolling distro with smooth upgrades, most kernel patches don't need a reboot, live patching works.
CentOS is not a rolling release. It has major versions and EOL dates.
Oops, I always get this wrong, probably because of its misleading name.
> CentOS Stream defines Enterprise Linux.
> CentOS Stream is derived from Fedora Linux. It has a new major version release every three years, and each release is maintained for five years, matching the full support phase of RHEL. CentOS Stream development is open to all, but because CentOS Stream only has updates intended for RHEL, it is maintained by the RHEL team.
I'm still hopeful that RHEL will find a way to integrate dnf system-upgrade in the future, but it's not a trivial undertaking. As long as the transaction can resolve cleanly, it's technically possible to do. But it doesn't mean you'll have a properly configured system when it boots up. Tools like leapp and its derivatives (ELevate) do a bit more under the hood work to ensure a complete upgrade. Fedora itself only ever supports and tests up to a two version bump for system upgrades, e.g. 40 -> 42, 41 -> 43, etc. RHEL major releases are jumping (at minimum) six Fedora releases.
https://almalinux.org/elevate/
Using Fedora 3 as my first linux distro makes seeing this nostalgic.
I remember the thrill of installing FC4 on my then-new laptop entering college...
(and have been running fedora ever since...)
Fedora Core 6 here!
FC1 (i think? or like a pre-release beta version?) was the first time I saw that sweet, sweet, slick gnome UX and magical font rendering and mouse acceleration. I remember exactly where I was too - Birks halls at Exeter uni, spring 2003, on my mate Benji's Samsung laptop. It looked so amazing. He was so proud of it. I told him it looked shit and that I was sick of rpm and that he was a noob and that I was more than happy with my slackware makefiles and my KDE / enlightenment setup that I was still too afraid to upgrade to slack 8.
One of the very few things I remember from that year, and yet I remember it in such detail. I'm really not sure how to feel about that.
(but yeah, I've been rocking fedora full time since fc16 or so and haven't looked back, it's amazing)
How did you forget the hotdog on boot ?
I've been using Fedora 42 since it branched, it has been quite nice; I haven't encountered any breaking bugs with it. Has gnome 48 which comes with HDR support. Hope that chromium can get support for it soon, MPV can already do it apparently, but haven't tried it; games have been hit & miss for it, but I presume those will get ironed out over time.
Good work! Looks like one heck of a release!
FYI they now build WSL tarballs!
https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/42_Beta-1.4/Conta...
Excellent! So no more Whitewater Foundry?
I'm not sure they'll publish it in the windows store, you'll have to import it yourself. I've usually cobbled one together from their container rootfs. This tarball saves me some hassle
I’ve been using Podman on Fedora on Lima (Mac OS) with rootless containers based on Fedora rather than from Docker Hub for fullstack web dev. I’m ready to use Rocky Linux or RHEL for some production stuff if I find it more suitable for something and have used Rocky Linux a fair bit. I’ve really grown to like Fedora and have switched to it from Ubuntu. They have systems for building OCI images that are interesting and useful, and related to buildpacks. https://src.fedoraproject.org/container/s2i-base
Been a happy Fedora Desktop user since switching from 20+ years of Windows last year. Had a few hiccups at the start of last year with NVIDIA drivers in Wayland but that's since been resolved with Explicit sync support.
Happy there's been no signs enshittification of Fedora from Redhat, it's a just a clean polished well maintain modern distro, great option if you're a dev switching from Windows.
Gah! Why did they name their installer Anaconda? That name is already totally overloaded by the python Anaconda, which I notice now bills itself as "The Operating System for AI".
That's like naming your programming language "JIT", or "Compiler" or..."Hack".
UPDATE: as others have pointed out, I've got it backwards. RedHat had the name first. So, criticism retracted and redirected at the other Anaconda.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaconda_(installer) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaconda_(Python_distribution) , the installer dates to 1999 and the python distro dates to 2012. So yes, the name is overloaded, but the installer came first, and came first by a lot.
And 1999 is just how far the Git history (imported from CVS, the project kinda skipped subversion directly to Git) goes. - The first commit is from April 24 1999 and says: "the very start of a gui frontend for anaconda":
https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/commit/785d44bf73ccc...
This kinda implies that Anaconda was in existence for some time back then & what was tracked in the newflangled change tracking software was the fancy new graphical UI. :)
I have not really looked further if perhaps the backend was imported later on or just grew from the GUI - but the same codebase, with continous 27 years of history is what installs the Fedora 42 Beta today. :-)
OK, managed to dig up even more Anaconda history, including origins of the name: https://anaconda-installer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.ht...
Interesting that that says
> So the Anaconda code base that we all started with began in 1999 or so
which implies that the pre-vcs history is pretty short.
Ah, okay. Criticism retracted from RedHat and redirected at (python) Anaconda.
You should be asking why the python Anaconda overloaded a term already being used by the Red Hat installer.
Their installer predates the python Anaconda before then a decade, before Python was even remotely as popular as today.
But you're totally right, they obviously should have been more prescient and named it something else.
Yes. Also Python itself was first released in 1991. The name "Python" had been in use in the CMUCL compiler for 6 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Common_Lisp#History
Certainly the Python trademark is sketchy.
Leave it to Meta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language)