Linux 4.16-rc5 Kernel Released

[Jabberwocky]

What is your new favorite?

Fedora, but it's still on trial. I'm not ready to say that it's officially my favourite yet. I don't like to wait very long for new software, that's why Ubuntu was my favourite. It had the latest software and it provided it on a reasonably stable OS, while still being easy to install / use. Fedora made it easy to test Wayland while still giving me the ability to select/run X11 using GUI options, just as one example. It took very long for other distributions to release Wayland based DE by default, a lot of them still don't do that. I also liked playing with fedora atomic for studies. I've been testing core 25-28(rawhide). I would like to test Suse tumbleweed, but unfortunately don't have the time at the moment.

My dev laptop and one of my servers crashed frequently on Ubuntu 16.04/16.10/17.04/17.10. The problem with the laptop was the iGPU (kabylake) and the server had a problem with Ubuntu's kernel/nouveau package combined with Geforce 710 (GK208-301-A1). Both systems was not easy to debug as there was not any useful errors in system logs and crashes happened randomly. Both systems ran without problems on Fedora. These are experiences from the past year.

I still have Ubuntu and Arch systems, that probably won't change in the next few years. It's a lot of overhead to learn and remember all the different application interfaces, but then again I also use OS X (with gawk/gsed/...) and Open/Free BSD from time to time. When I'm retired I'm going to write an application/shell that maps a universal command interface to the OS specific commands.

[blueweb]

Fedora, but it's still on trial.

How do you find the impact of switching from deb to rpm? The repositories are probably the biggest reason why I've stayed with Ubuntu or Ubuntu flavor distros.

[davidbepo]

this release doesnt boot on my ryzen 5 2400g , i think is due to a supposed hang fixes that landed in this rc
does anybody know where to file the bug

[Jabberwocky]

How do you find the impact of switching from deb to rpm? The repositories are probably the biggest reason why I've stayed with Ubuntu or Ubuntu flavor distros.

For day to day usage it's not that bad, dnf is documented well. Once you start demanding more from the package manager your will realize Fedora does things very differently then it can become a big impact (your miles may vary). Fedora is optimized for newer devices, it uses xz compression and downloads diffs instead of full packages for updates (more CPU less disk/network usage idealistically). In other words, it has it's own pros and cons.

I've certainly grown fond of deb based distributions over the years. I think it's the best out there especially Ubuntu's convenience of PPAs! However, now that I'm something else I ask myself is the complexity of debs really required? (me of 10 years ago would not like this question at all) I have not found the need to use any of those advanced things on Fedora (not yet anyways). IIRC I used rpmfusion for something once might have been Slack. If you use apt-xyz, dpkg or manage your own deb repositories I would not recommend switching, unless you experience as many problems as I do.

PS: I hope package managers might become something the average user does not require at all. There are a few distributions that are moving in this direction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gES4-X6y278 although it might take many years before it's widely used.