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’m actually switching from Fedora today. miserable experience.
Care to elaborate? Not saying I doubt you, it’s just the polar opposite of my experience and I’m curious why that is.
Yeah wondering what could have possibly made it miserable
i don’t know if it was just the hardware I had it on or what but had to reinstall it a couple times as for whatever reason the desktop manager kept breaking, it wouldn’t kick over to a TTY when hitting ctl+alt+f2, it decides on a whim when it will or won’t display the grub menu, audio issues as well as AMD GPU issues of all things which I found weird, random kick outs back to the desktop manager or just straight up crashing (using Fedora KDE which I wish I picked a different “spin”) and I found it sluggish as well as dnf being slow regardless of the fact I edited the dnf.conf to set install_weak_deps to false, max parallel downloads to 10 and fastestmirror to true.
Sorry but I just don’t like it. Not to say I think it’s a bad distro it’s just clearly not one for me.
Oof, yeah, that sounds painful. It does sound like some kind of hardware-related issue, maybe the default settings in the Fedora kernel are seriously aberrant when mixed with one or more of your hardware components? Given the broad range of issues (GPU, network speed, audio), I’d be inclined to suspect the problem was related somehow to something core/common like CPU or mobo. Almost certainly not a pure hardware fault, given the problems didn’t follow the hardware when you changed distros.
I totally get it. Doesn’t take much of that kind of frustration to leave a bad taste in your mouth. I had some perplexing intermittent lockup issues years ago that turned out to be BTRFS, or at least the issue went away when the VMs were rebuilt with a different root FS. I’m still leery of BTRFS, even though it was a fairly esoteric stack (SLES, ESX, NFS datastores served from a ZFS-backed storage server), so entirely possible the fault didn’t lie exclusively with the filesystem. But I still avoid it, just because I’ve been burned once.
Well to follow up I decided that this could potentially be more of a me problem than a fedora one. And actually…it was a KDE problem. I decided to switch to a basic WM, DWM, on it and low and behold all my problems just vanished. no crashing, switching to a TTY suddenly started working, audio and video was fine, no kick backs to the login screen. hell even something that SHOULD be unrelated as DNF suddenly improved.
So I’m not sure if I just got a wonky KDE install or an update went wrong with it but I’m more than happy to ditch KDE to keep using Fedora. I’d reinstall with a different spin but honestly at this point I spent a week or so setting this up i’ll just keep using the KDE version without the KDE. I’d like to switch the DM to something other than Plasma Login Manager but at this point I’m not sure if that’s a can of worms I should attempt to open.
So a question would be, is it a good idea to keep using Fedora KDE without using KDE? I’d just hate to update a system for something that I’m not going to use. Or would I just be better off reinstalling Fedora with a basic spin or a WM focused one.
Add the repos for RPM fusion.
I already have them, didn’t improve anything.
Fair enough.