Hello everyone.
I’m not a tech dude, I’ve moved from Win10 to Pop_OS couple of years ago and i really like that distro. They seem to fix the bugs very quickly. I’ve read that Fedora34 is moving to Wayland and Pipewire. I’m having issues with Pulseaudio on Pop (I need to restart it after every boot) and I see some image sheering when i watch videos (I’ve learned this probably comes from X11). So I was really wondering if jump into Fedora 34 to solve those little issues was a good idea for me. I’ve tried it on a VM, but this is not here that i can see Wayland and Pipewire in effect.
My fears are:
There are plenty of help for Ubuntu based distros, not so much for Fedora
I know that proprietary stuff can be painful in Fedora (I have an Nvidia graphics card, I use CUDA in Blender, I watch contents with DRM, etc…)
I do everything on Linux: work, arts, gaming, watching movies, etc… Is Fedora able to do it all easily?
It feels to me that one must be a Linux expert to enjoy the full potential of it and not having a painful experience. But as I really don’t know it, I’m maybe totally wrong.
Can someone help me in my decision of trying the big leap?
Thank you!
I don’t have POP OS experience but it looks like it’s part of the Debian/Ubuntu universe where things tend to work a particular way.
I recently moved from Debian to the Fedora/RHEL universe. There was a minor learning curve but they’re really more a-like than they are different, a lot of the advice is agnostic. I do use XFCE as my DE though so my UI experience never changed, there may be more difference for you in the UI department.
Fedora is very “un-opinionated” on the initial setup so by default it comes with basic Gnome. You’ll need to polish your own experience similar to Debian where-as Ubuntu and it’s derivatives tend to come really polished out of the box. It’s also capable of doing everything you’ve listed no problem. Michael Tunnel’s moved to it for example.
Thank you for your help.
Yes I’ve seen that we can use dnf or yum (I don’t know the differences) and the syntax is very close to apt.
I’ll wait a couple of months for early users of Fedora 34 to find all the bugs of Wayland and Pipewire, than I think I’ll give it a go.
Thank you also for configuration guide. It is very helpful!
dnf is the successor to yum as the new package manager. yum is just there for backwards compatibility till it’s finally removed.
Fedora has done an amazing job with Pipewire, I never even noticed the change. It’s been a shining example of what’s so great about the Fedora team.
Wayland is a complicated situation… it’s been a work-in-progress for eons and because developers are abandoning XOrg to work on Wayland it means transitioning is important for the sake of security and support. It’s also important for distros to start using it in order to accelerate the bug finding process.
That said… a few days ago I had an extremely poor experience attempting to transition to Fedora KDE using Wayland. It was acceptable for basic usage but my X/Wayland window mixing caused tons of issues for my workflow.
I just discussed it in DLN Matrix chat and people have good wayland experiences with MATE and Gnome though I don’t know their workflow. Michael also uses KDE Wayland (I think) and he has a very advanced workflow so you probably just need to try it out, it may be perfect for you.
Right now i’m on Fedora XFCE which is XOrg and it’s heaven, I may considered Wayland again in 6 months to a year.
Fedora is a great distribution and in reality not really any more difficult than what you already know. It works in every aspect you mentioned except that you really want to add Rpm Fusion because of many codec related things.
Now comes the but. If you are concerned with long term support and do not want to upgrade every six months or so then it might not be your thing. That said, I think the latter is the only real drawback of Fedora.
Though you will notice that Fedora uses vanilla Gnome but I actually prefer this and I am far away from being a Gnome user. Everything that Pop customized for you out of the box you must now do by yourself but maybe you will even like and prefer stock Gnome.
So just take a USB key and put Fedora Workstation on it and try it out like the others said and you will see how it goes. Have fun!
Well, my journey into the Fedora’s world starts with difficulties. I’ve tried it in a VM, but it’s slow and just can’t boot the KDE version even if it’s installed. I’ve tried the Live USB and it doesn’t boot at all (it seems to freeze when loading the graphical part with my screen tearing up after the mounting of the /temp folder). As I have an Nvidia graphics card, maybe there is a proprietary shenanigan here. I don’t know, but I feel sad.
Sorry to hear this. If this is a prevalent problem I hope the good folk of Fedora issue fixes as I’m pretty sure a lot of users might be interested in the Plasma version. I found installing Plasma as a second DE on top of the default Gnome worked fine for me on Fedora 33 when I last tried it in a VM, though Plasma under Wayland had some issues which seemed to me to be about font scaling. Plasma worked fine as a second DE under X11 though.
I installed Fedora 34 in a VM, like I did with Fedora 33. I liked Fedora 33, but I did run into problems with Fedora 34. I use Lollypop as music player and the music stutters in Fedora, in all other VMs (Ubuntu, openSUSE; Manjaro; Deepin; etc) it works fine. Compared to POP and Ubuntu, they hide the non-free codex, you will need to play mp3 or wma music. Even after I installed those codecs, Lollypop still did not recognize my wma and mp3 music files. I think pipewire still need some bug fixing or the adaption of others to pipewire is not yet complete.
I hate Gnome 40, on every App you want to start, you first have to push the “Windows” key. That is getting very annoying after some time.
Try it first in a VM, install virtualbox and run fedora in a VM. Personally I would prefer Fedora 33.
VMs are not slow with the exception of games and other high GPU demanding Apps, the VM will run at 95% of the performance on bare metal.
If you want to resolve your problem quicker you probably should post in the support section of the forum and I am sure some Fedora lovers and especially KDE aficionados will gladly help you.
I am not sure about VMs myself as it is ages I used virtual environments but as far as I know Fedora uses Wayland by default (Gnome and Plasma), maybe related.
For VMs I’ve tried even on Fedora 33 I find the video and audio slightly choppy compared to Ubuntu and Manjaro but I tend not to use the VMs for that so hasn’t been a major thing for me. Pipewire working perfectly would be awesome so whatever current issues there are, hopefully they’re able to fix before next release.
I’ve just experienced the same problem. I’ve really been enjoying Fedora workstation (with Gnome) on my laptop, so I thought I’d put Fedora KDE on the Emergency Reinstall Live Usb that I keep in my desk drawer. However, my PC has a GTX 1660, and on several test boots, the desktop would freeze while loading. I re-flashed the USB with Kubuntu 20.04, which is also currently installed on the machine, and it booted just fine, and my Nvidia card works with Nouveau (the open source driver for Nvidia cards, which is enough to display an image on the screen so you can install the proper drivers). This makes me think the issue with Fedora is probably Wayland related, as this is the default now (Too soon, in my opinion, as it’s preventing the OS from being installed on fairly common hardware ).
I know I’m a little late here, but I wanted to pop in. I use fedora (LXQt) and ubuntu as my daily drivers and as much as i love fedora, its definitely not the same stable, polished experience you’ll find in ubuntu or pop. Even though fedora does point releases, they update closer to a rolling release. Its much more bleeding edge and updates my kernel nearly every time I do a dnf upgrade. This has left me with at least 2 instances in the last 6 months where I needed to chroot in to revert parts of the upgrade. Knock on wood, but that is not the type of problem ive run into during my 8 years of running ubuntu. Fedora can be really fun and much lighter on resources as well though.
I can relate… Fedora’s been a blessing for forward movement though the move to pipewire broke libvirt/QEMU passing audio back to the host. After some failed fixes including attempting to downgrade back to Pulseaudio I went back to CentOS though I still do all my work in Fedora VMs.
Thanks for this recap. Your long-term experience with Ubuntu carries some weight with this review. When an LTS gets close to its end (~18 months), you can find yourself wishing for more updated features – but being able to get actual work done on the daily with a stable machine is paramount. IMHO Canonical has done so much for the Linux community.
I really appreciate Canonical for their rock solid releases. I still have a machine from 2005 running ubuntu 14.04 with the Lubuntu Desktop and extended ESM updates. I use 20.04 on my production desktop so that I know I can always get work done if I need to. Fedora has some really great hardware support for older devices, however. All of their hybrid ISOs work perfectly with my older two in one netbook that has the 32 bit UEFI 64 bit processor issue. Most other distros dont address it unless its for older macs. There are workarounds for Ubuntu, but they are not elegant. I sincerely appreciate that redhat takes the time to add those types are small features. The LXQt spin has become my go to for devices in the 5-15 year old range.
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