It's Been Five Months Since I Left Ubuntu For Fedora On My Main Workstation

[sanne]

I've done a similar path. >15 years using Linux, loved SuSE, then Slackware, then Gentoo, then Ubuntu, Debian, ArchLinux and now using Fedora on my primary workstation. Still often playing with the alternatives on other systems.

I also have been skeptical about using "fedup" but the latest couples of upgrades were really smooth! I even witnessed some cases of directly upgrading from Fedora 21 to 23, never seen a problem. And dnf already replaced yum in both my fingertips and my hearth.. it's awesome as yum but feels quite a bit faster.

I would suggest to give fedup a try!

[bug77]

UBUNTU vs FEDORA vs ArchLinux

Ubuntu has some really big problems, like basic stuff, its the only package manager I know of that is unable to keep in most distron the 2 most recent kernels and deinstall the older ones automaticly, this big bug they set to WONTFIX. it costed mi a few hours of my live leading in not beeing able to login to system because harddisk was full and other problems using craciest pipe commands on the console to get rid of that garbage. yes you can live with that but some people can even live with windows thats no argument.

apt-get tells you when you have more than 3 versions of the kernel installed that you have packages that are no longer used. A simple sudo apt-get autoremove does the job.

[xeekei]

I am amused, still, but am also beginning to wonder where you will take the discussion next. Seeing how you admit of not even reading the links and that headlines matter more to you than content, I'd say you are trolling me, and you are doing it because you find the article just as boring as I did only now are you trying to get some good fun out of the comment section. Am I right? Don't answer ...

What? No. I of course read the whole article. But who actually clicks the links? They just lead back to old articles I've already read! Even if I did click them, why would I check the comments on old articles? The point is, Michael knows the amount of clicks, he knows the amount of interest. You do not. Thank you.

[bulletxt]

This article is trash. Michael, you better start to decide what audience you are targetting.

After the virtualbox trash article here we are with another one.

[Stellarwind]

I really didn't believe the auto system upgrade would work in Ubutnu when I wanted to go from 13.10 to 14.04. In the past, all the auto upgrade tool would do was take really long and then leave me with a thoroughly broken system. So, I backed up all my data and tried the auto upgrade just out of curiosity while fully prepared to do a full system reinstall. And guess what! It worked like a charm!
So, thumbs up for Ubuntu for this one!! Yeah!!

Editing sources, then #apt-get dist-upgrade worked fine for me multiple times, including 13.10 to 14.04 without any issues.
It is not a recommended way, but since I have ZFS root, I can just rollback to a state before upgrade and it saves time, since I don't need to disable/enable all the PPAs.

And Fedora must be really "great", if users like Michael are afraid to upgrade their distro... I guess I stay with Xubuntu
And his main reason for a switch was focus on Unity/Mir it seems, as if Gnome3 was any better.

[Cape]

SPOILER: i'm using ArchLinux since 2004 or something...
i find it ridiculous to hear somebody prefering an obsoleete version of his OS for "Stability". I've hardly ever find bugs pertaning to the distro that escapes the very short Arch testing channel.

So I'd like to understand if Arch maintainers are super talented or the problem with stability is endemic in the "quantized" update system.


Also: i find it ridiculous that managing the packs of a system is sooo complicated that an upgrade can brake your system. Is it really true?

[Rabin]

I never did it on my Laptop, but if U use LVM/Btrfs you can create a snapshot and then run the update, and in case you get a unbootable system, just rollback to the snapshot.

I'm also a Fedora user, and was able to upgrade with Fedup from F21->F22, without any problems.

[blackiwid]

I never had any issues with updating systems if I made no big mistakes by myself, maybe you all install many proprietary drivers/software or change something around or have very strange hardware setups, but so far most updates worked pretty well, ofc some small minor issues that I had to fix after it happend somethimes. Even if a system would not boot its not that you only option is to format the harddisk.

But I had problems with the old notebook of my brother, a thinkpad x121e something was extremly fishy with that uefi/bios, I run multiple times in it not wanting to boot and any attempt to make it bootable with rescue cds did just fail.

on my pc FC19 to FC20 to FC 21 without issues same on server over fedup, my dad fc20 to fc21 to fc22 no problems brother 20 to 21. I switched earlier in the fc19 timeframe away from ubuntu to fedora and I updates also like 5 releases without problems even beta and alpha releases. (btw there you should make a difference ubuntu is extremly outdated shit so a alpha is still pretty solid.

If they call in the redhat world something not stable give its very likely if not guaranteed to be completly broken. If you are using something productive you never touch even betas or even release candidates. And thats than maybe the problems michael had with his attempt to switch to the development brach.

To the asked request of a ubuntu fedora comparsion, I made a personal test for myself, more to be clear if I like archlinux or fedora more but still with ubuntu in mind.

UBUNTU vs FEDORA vs ArchLinux

Ubuntu has some really big problems, like basic stuff, its the only package manager I know of that is unable to keep in most distron the 2 most recent kernels and deinstall the older ones automaticly, this big bug they set to WONTFIX. it costed mi a few hours of my live leading in not beeing able to login to system because harddisk was full and other problems using craciest pipe commands on the console to get rid of that garbage. yes you can live with that but some people can even live with windows thats no argument.

In general fedora and Archlinux are pretty close I guess Systemd made that partialy happen, the wiki from arch is better, the missing nativ doku on fedora is maybe the biggest issue fedora has, then for me some softwareversions did matter, mesa kernel and kodi or at this time xbmc did matter for me much. Because I use amd radeon driver mesa 9.2rc1 I think the first version that made vdpau possible with the radeon driver came months out befor it came on archlinux, because they only deliver full releases. I tried the AUR for small packages it works but for such big things it often fails after hours of compiling. I had another moment where a newer kodi version was in fedora, in generall I had here better experience.

Also gnome feels more tuned or more home in fedora difficult to explain, I think it runs better in fedora. So that makes me slightly recommend fedora over archlinux. Ahh and the commitment to free software Archlinux dont care thats a plus for me coming from ubuntu that gone completly at least nuts if not evil with lisenses and "steeling" money from music player authors and stuff like that.

to say more about ubuntu vs the other 2, it needs a ppa for profile-sync-deamon maybe in ssd times not that important anymore but still it reduces the writecycles of your ssd and make it more longlifable, the ppa is not so big of a problem but you have to now about it and in other distries especialy archlinux you find that easily linked in the general optimasion guide in the wiki.

ppas suck to have 5 to 20 ppas just sucks, in fedora you seldom need something similar, because you have very current versions in the main repos and with the one universe like repo called rpmfusion you have more or less everything.

the gnome experience in ubuntu was shity at the time I switched I needed 2 ppas to make a fully new gnome happen with newest nautilus and everything, but still I could not test the first version of boxes because it did not come for ubuntu even not in a ppa.

even yum feeled to me more mature and faster than apt, pinnig of some apps worked pretty well in fedora never did in debian or ubuntu for me.

the one not so gooe experince I had was with the gnome 3.14 copr, there was no general way to deinstall it, the idea was most likely to keep it and if you update to fedora 21 it gets overrdden by the normal versions, but it made somehow problems on my pc so I wanted to get rid of it, took me a while to hund down every package and downgrade it over yum...

Another small thing that fedora and archlinux makes better in my oppinion is that they use ramfs for /tmp

In general Debian and Ubuntu package philosophy is serverfocused. keep everything extremly old to make it testet, ubuntu kind of made a good mix with a solid (server) base and fresh gnome packages. No with ditching gnome, its old from bottom to top... unity dont get updates for years, so if you read changelogs its like (nothing changes at all for several releases) and maybe gnome was not the perfekt at the start and the same was true with unity, but at least makes constant improvements unity got frozen in its garbage state.

it makes no sense to even waste 1 hour even if the update works flawless of a distri just to get a new firefox and libreoffice and maybe a new kernel. its okish for heavy proprietary driver users but for free driver users you want pretty current kernels and mesa and co. and thats not what you get in ubuntu but of course you kind of can fix that with ppas but I prefer official packages over ppas any day.

sorry for my maybe biased tone but apart from that you find many facts in this section which you rate/weighten that yourself of how importants the points are for you.

[mark45]

That many monitors on the desktop gives the impression you're a super genius like Einstein.

[sdack]

Actually, I didn't go back and check. And you appear neither calm nor amused; more like insulted that he doesn't like Ubuntu.

And who cares about how many comments an article has? Clicks matter.

I am amused, still, but am also beginning to wonder where you will take the discussion next. Seeing how you admit of not even reading the links and that headlines matter more to you than content, I'd say you are trolling me, and you are doing it because you find the article just as boring as I did only now are you trying to get some good fun out of the comment section. Am I right? Don't answer ...