My stay on Gnome 40 became shorter than I expected; I started wanting to go back to Xfce this week.
My big problem now is… should I stay on Fedora, or go back to EndeavourOS / Arch.
The big reason to stay on Fedora is an easier install as well as a slimmer install. Oh and the fact that they seem able to parry for things like the 5.12 disaster, not releasing 5.12 outside of Rawhide until 5.12.5, which seems to have fixed all major issues.
The big reason to go back to EndeavourOS is the AUR and the compability with codecs etc right out of the box. Plus, if you don’t use Gnome the Fedora release model just doesn’t make much sense. Without a release model timed after the Gnome releases, it just an almost-bleeding-edge rolling release with extra steps every 6 months.
In more detail, the Fedora pros are that it has a competent out of the box Btrfs install, pipewire out of the box and, strangely enough, about 30% less packag size than Endeavour.
Yes, seriously, the default Fedora install, even with Gnome Workstation, is a much slimmer install, landing around 5-6 Gb total while Endeavour (and vanilla arch) is about 2 Gb larger. Yet Fedora can do absolutely everything out of the box, from printing, to detecting network shares, to… you know what I mean,
The Fedora cons are the weird (it is weird unless you use Gnome) release model, where 90-95% (including kernel(!)) is updated rolling, but for some reason you still have to make a version upgrade every 6 months. And a lack of AUR, of course, tho I might actually (since I use so few things) just use flatpak anyway for Firefox and Spotify.
Oh I know, that’s why I am trying to decide what distro to use; the main con with using Fedora for Xfce, quite frankly, is that not using Gnome on Fedora renders it’s release model pointless. Oh well, I’ll continue later. Right now i am on Windows, I wiped my linux partition completely.
Oh for sure; one thing that has always irritated me with Arch is that you have to install the complete LibreOffice package for example, while on Fedora you can literally chose to only install Calc and Write, saving a lot of space and not bother with the three apps that 95% of users never use.
As for compression tho, I use the same compression on both. It might be that Gnome uses less disk space than Xfce, but I doubt it.
Interestingly enough, I like Fedora 34 and GNOME 40 enough that I’m considering my long term “home” laptop staying on it because of the update cadence of Fedora following the gnome releases hahaha.
I’m still trying to figure this out. I can’t watch my . . . “Free” baseball games on chromium browser even after all the rpm fusion ffmpeg, codec whatever stuff. It works in Firefox fine.
I’m really enjoying GNOME 40 and install of fedora was no joke 5 clicks or less. And I like that the workflow is completely different than my normal plasma setup since I was starting to get shortcuts confused between plasma and Cinnamon. Gnome and plasma seem to be a better fit for me.
I loved that printing and everything works right out of the gate with Fedora as well.
But, why oh why isn’t hibernate an option? I tried (unsuccessfully) twice now to setup hibernate and I botched the install.
In my humble opinion - you should do exactly what suits your workflow - no matter what it is build upon.
I have been using Arch(-based) systems for almost a decade and I am never going to use another Linux.
The rolling Arch has fewer issues than any of the counterparts - but as humans we tend to expect the perfect from others while being more relaxed with ourselves.
In my experience - and I admit I am not a gamer and not a fan of widgets and advanced theming - but in my experience Arch is really solid.
Where the issues are mostly found is within the customization Linux systems invite to. Gnome shell extensions and Plasma widgets which tends to break on almost every release. Some themes available from random sites are not maintained and they often break because the rely on qt features which has changed.
Look no further than sddm - some themes relies heavily on qt functions tightly integrated with the graphical environment provided by drivers which may - more often than is good - introduces black screen - especially with Nvidia and AMD hardware.
So if you do as I do - watch out for the pits - Arch is your friend and the best companion for your hardware - but it requires an effort - just like a marriage (I suck at that last part ).
I just reinstalled endeavour last night(first install started with gnome40, then I3, then bspwm, then kde just to try out, at every step removed anything i considered unnecessary, btw it didn’t crash at all with all this tinkering) because i wanted a cleaner install(i had roughly 300 extra packages which i didn’t know how to safely remove), and i decided to go with btrfs this time. As long as you know which partitions you need, that being at least a FAT32 512MB partition mounted to /boot/efi with the boot flag, a btrfs partition mounted to / with the root flag(i don’t know if that flag is mandatory but i guess it worked ok), and eventually a swap which is formatted as linuxswap, with as much space as you want(i just set it to be the size of my ram), with the swap flag, you should not have any issues
This is exactly the problem I seem to run into time and time again. It’s just so concise and simple, added with the wiki, Arch is REALLY hard to leave.
The hibernate issue is likely due to how your grub parameter line is set up, along with the fact that a default install uses zram instead of a dedicated swap partition. Personally I avoid hibernate and suspend all together since booting up from a poweroff takes a nominal amount of additional time, and avoids any potetial security issues.
Chrome/Chromium has a recent DRM issue whihc might have been the cause, also when adding the codecs do it via the commandline options instead of picking them in Software.
Fedora really is a fantastic laptop distro (I use it for everything, but I use Redhat at work so that also influences my choices), main reason I went to it to begin with.
I don 't find the kernel management for either to be significantly more or less of a pain.
No version update is the principal + in the Arch toolbox for me.
Honestly as a far as access to the latest and greatest outside of DE releases, I usually get packages earlier on Fedora than I do on Arch. Really Fedora is rolling outside of DE version changes.
As to easier access to a broader array of software, that is simply no longer true. For the longest time I believed the AUR was a big reason to run Arch, but having stepped over to Fedora as my daily about three or four years ago, the convenience of installing an rpm directly from the developers website, and getting updates directly, reliably, for both open source and proprietary software (looking at you Brother Printers) without having to wrangle out of date build files or dealing with poorly maintained AUR packages has definitely changed my opinion as far as to how much of a benefit the AUR actually is.
It isn’t that kernel management on Fedora is difficult, it just isn’t as flexible. At least not for my needs.
Unless you build your own kernels, you have minimal control over which kernels are available to you on Fedora by default. Further, most of the Arch kernel module maintainers patch much more aggressively. The zfs dkms module on Arch is patched almost as soon as the patches are available. The zfs modules on Fedora are still not patched for 12.x. I suspect they will never be until the next version of zfs is released.
We will have to agree to disagree on this one.
One of the reasons I switched to Linux was so that I would never have to do this again. I find this utterly inconvenient. What I find convenient is being able to install and update all my packages with a single command without having to add and manage countless repos and track all the software I located from 12 locations and make sure I am keeping it all updated appropriately.
I don’t find updates for many packages to be nearly as reliable/timely on Fedora as they are on Arch. Especially proprietary software. For example, VMware workstation is not officially supported on Arch but it is on Fedora. But practically speaking it is much easier to keep running on Arch. The reason is that on Fedora you rely on VMware to update it for new versions which they do…slowly. On Arch, the dkms modules are patched by the community and it pretty much just always works.
This doesn’t mean I dislike Fedora. I still use it, but it isn’t my first choice.
Understood. ZFS on Linux is not even a thing for me speciically because of the hoops to leap through, if I want ZFS I run BSD, if I want something similar on Linux I run Btrfs (yes I know not close on feature parity, but it is native).
Everything I have installed directly from a developers website updates with eveyrthing else via dnf update, so outside of initial install there is nothing to track.
This is simply anecdotal on both our parts. For the stuff I use, it is ahead or on par with Arch, in your instance it is behind. Good thing we have choices.
For me the primary reason I started using Fedora was SELinux and it continues to be. The mindset developed from using it as a daily, helps me at work immensely.
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