Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
I honestly think it’s the best distro so far. Which sucks since it is so reliant on RedHat. I prefer to avoid corporate related distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, but I must admit they have a better experience right out of the box. I still want to give NixOS a try and maybe Gentoo, but after that I will probably come back to Fedora just like you…until something I think might be better comes along.
Tried Fedora Silver blue or univerdalblue spins? Unless you do serious embedded development work (which takes more setup on atomic distros), then I have experienced that it is less work in general in setup and upkeep.
Yeah, Silverblue is nice; not my main distro, though. I came from many years of Gentoo on almost all machines I had. Debian stable is currently the most practical for me.
The immutable variant of Fedora is nice for the low maintenance computers, although I needed to get my head around podman to not overuse
rpm-ostree. So far so good. I think it will not replace the distro on my main machine, but I see the way it works as a general potential future. An immutable variant of Debian stable would be something I’d consider switching for.
I like fedora. I used it 20 years ago. I recently switched a laptop over to it, quickly realized atomic distros are kind of a PITA if you know how to linux and hopped off.
It feels… mature? Clearly there’s a lot of work that has gone into making fedora a “Set and Forget” experience, the normie distro… if you don’t try to use it like a windows machine.
If you want a machine that just works, doesn’t bug you about just frankly stupid shit that’s been solved already (looking at you kwallet), and feels like a computer that your grandma could check her email on without feeling like she’s starting the falcon’s hyperdrive, Fedora Atomic Silverblue is the distro for you.
I am not a shill. I don’t use fedora on any of my machines currently (unless you include my partner’s bazzite rig, I don’t, personally). I don’t plan to use fedora on anything currently, but the next time I get a laptop that’s meant to be “Just a fuckin computer”, you bet your ass I’m going straight to Fedora Atomic Silverblue.
I started with RedHat 2.0 and CDE, then spent almost 30 years jumping around including almost a decade on Arch BTW, and now I’m back at Fedora and Plasma. Something catastrophic will need to happen to knock me off it.
The circle of life.
The correct choice is NixOS, fyi
