for the newbies or tinkerers, fedora's dnf has awesome rollback commands if you screw up your packages, mainly "dnf history" and "dnf swap". Both have saved my install so many times I'm embarrased to count them
I just broke my debian server during an upgrade (ssh disconnect and not upgrading via screen) due to my supidity. But an hour later (short research and restarting the upgrade) all is running fine again. I love debian - on my laptop I do use Manjaro since two years tough.
@@Nunya58294 Look for nala, its a frontend for apt and there is even a video about it from Chris. He even said it may be better than dnf lol. But in essence it gives it a good looking interface and has the history/rollback commands. It is actually pretty nice
@@rishirajsaikia1323 that only applies to Rawhide, I thought? Can find plenty use of leading edge within the RH realm (RHealm?). Cutting edge I only saw mentioned when talking about Rawhide. Or am I mistaken?
One thing you will find in the Linux community is that everyone has an opinion. The arguements abound regarding distributions. For every distribution, you will find those who love that distribution and think that it is the absolute best while others hate that very same distro and think it should be done away with. My advice is to go check out the reviews and try the distros that interest you. Eventually, you will tend to go back to one or two distros time after time. Those will be the distros that you love even with their faults. Debian is that distro for me. Regardless, enjoy your Linux journey and have fun!!!!!!!! 🙂
@@zeocamo , Arch really only sticks for install, if you're not going to use something like Manjaro. I'm definitely in the script whore camp. and will happily use whatever Arch install script that offers all the options I want. ;)
@@donaldmickunas8552 I agree with you lol. I'm a basic user so it probably doesn't matter that much what I use. I'm also, Linux wise, an intermediate user at best. Arch, for me, is too high maintenance, BUT, I really like Manjaro. Pure Debian is frustrating to get set up right, but MX and LMDE make it a pleasant experience. Once you add RPM Fusion stuff to Fedora it is brilliant. Probably my 'perfect' solution would be Fedora with an LTS kernel (which is how I actually run Manjaro) :)
Fedora is not based on RHEL. It's actually the other way around, RHEL is based on Fedora. Or actually now CentOS steam is based on Fedora, and RHEL is based on CentOS steam.
@@bored78612 Sure, I think what Chris meant by "based on" was that it was originally forked from RedHat back in the day, not that RHEL releases are currently based on Fedora
i absolutely agree, Arch or Arch based systems right now have been pretty stable and pretty well maintained. I use it for majority of my work and alot of personal use as well. Its brilliant for Education, Entertainment, hobbies and also workspaces.
@@konyption Well thats definitely correct and that should be a hard and solid rule, lol haha. When you only have necessary packages installed and you don't have unnecessary things , you will easily find stability.
Fedora is from my perspective, the most homogeneous Linux desktop distro out there related to experience and function. Why? In my opinion it's feels like has been made it from the backend-fronted to provide a logical, stable and consistent experience.
@@christopherneufelt8971 LOL I went to fedora recently when I was getting back to linux. Can't get the install to work. Never gets past grub welcome. Every other distro I have tried works near flawless. Mint did have some issues that were easily resolved. Fedora... can't even get it to boot into a live environment.
Debian - If u want an ultra stable experience and u don't care about having the latest software Arch - If u prefer bleeding edge stuffs and don't mind updating and downloading a bunch of packages every now and then Fedora - In b/w Arch and Debian, I suppose
Finally!!! A distro review/comparison that is actually about the fundamental differences between the distros, their packages, and their package managers. I’m a Arch user (btw) but have been looking for comparisons with Fedora and all I could find were pretty much glorified GNOME reviews… Amazing video!
Tried to go Linux so many times and always went back to Windows for one reason or another. But I’m now running Fedora exclusively on my laptop and it’s been such a wonderful experience. Gnome is beautiful and smooth, OS updates are really well implemented (and frequent), and it even handles fractional scaling extremely well. I won’t be getting rid of the Windows partition because you never know when it might be needed, but I will be shrinking it dramatically.
I almost always keep a dualboot just for that odd bit of software that either has no Linux port or I can't get the Linux port to work on my system. However, I have no Windows install rn because my video card shows a black screen for GRUB (lol) so I won't be booting any other OS until I get around to troubleshooting that issue.
@@ultralance So you'll often be faced with the choice of debugging something that's broken in Linux or debugging your boot issue and getting back into Windows 😄
I just switched to Fedora from Pop_OS and I can't say that I'll miss it. I definitely liked Pop_OS, but they made it hard to customize the desktop environment and make it my own. Fedora has been a pretty painless move, although learning the package manager was a bit of struggle at first.
I'm literally planning for that now. I hate to distro-hop since I found Pop to be the most stable distro for me to use comfortably, but damn do I also want to use arch. I have been following up on it a bit late, but fedora seems to be very promising in what I want
@@necrobynerton7384 we installed PopOS on my wife's HP laptop .. there seems to be a tendency for unreliability with PoP updates. She became less and less impressed. Arcolinux has been reliable. ('m also impressed by Nobara). I recently caught her opening a terminal and typing 'update' on her own intuition .. the terminal was formerly a no-go area.
@@glynnsmith4560 Yea, tbh I'm not surprised with that... LTT had a whole whoopsie going on when linus tried Pop lol. Meanwhile me over here has had so many problems with many distros except pop. And Fedora! That thing is going pretty strong so far Glad that yall getting more familiar with the terminal, that thing can be pretty useful if something goes wrong
People should know about these two distros more. Tumbleweed and fedora workstation are somewhat similar in their update scheme. And zypper is as delightful to use as dnf.
Finally someone who isn't just talking about the new desktop picture or what the new DE has to offer. All Linux distro's are "Linux" and the only thing that really separates them is the package manager . They all use the Linux kernel. It is just a question of how stable of a version you want. Great video Chris.
No, a distro isn't just the package manager, its the also the choice of components that make up the system, the availability of packages and the trust and philosophy of the distro managers. Fedora failed every time I tried to install it. Also all this talk about Arch being unstable is FUD. The only downside to arch is that it for the most part you have to choose the components that make up the system. This forces you to learn a lot upfront to get a functional system.
This is the video that all new people to Linux, like me, need to watch. There's so much focus on DTE in the Linux TH-camr space that it almost seems that underlying OS makes no difference, but that is not the reality.
I think Chris in the video nails it with (paraphrasing) that the package manager is the biggest difference you end up noticing as a user when it comes to the system behind the DE/WM. Everything on top can be (relatively) easily changed. I mean, you CAN install a different package manager into your distro of choice, but that's... not typically a thing you have much reason to bother with.
My friends and I have started a month long Linux challenge to use it as a daily driver for about a month. It's been 10+ years since I've used a Linux desktop OS and it's certainly come a long way.
I've been running this challenge for ~15 years. Mostly on Arch, but there was some distro-hopping in the first couple years. Though honestly, I'd be lying if I said I never used Windows in that time, whether on someone else's PC or because I had it installed on mine for some game/software I couldn't run in Linux. Support's a lot better these days, but it's still useful to dual boot just for the odd thing that doesn't work.
Using Fedora Silverblue as my first Linux distro and absolutely loving the stability it offers. Especially because I broke several other distros before this while trying them out in virtual machines. If you're not super into tinkering or customization then immutable distros like Silverblue/Kinoite/openSUSE MicroOS are the way to go.
I wish to see the immutable version of fedora i3 or with any other tiling windows manager. KDE and Gnome are beautiful but too heavy, specially considering there are a lot of old devices out there with low resources and even there are some new devices with just 4 G of ram and a Pentium processors or similars .-.
@sk All the KDE apps fail to install for some reason with a UTC timezone set. You get an empty desktop, no terminal, no discover, etc. You get a semi-working panel, its applets and broken shortcuts. x3
I wanted to try out fedora kinoite, but can't install it, as the installer is stuck getting my disks. I have heard only good of silverblue and like the idea of it, so I wanted to try it, but with kde.
Silverblue works well but I do not like gnome. Kinoite is a disaster like everyone else said. Does the Fedora normal spin of kde work? Or are they just really focused on gnome which I hate. Nothing against gnome to each his own. It's just not my cup of tea.
Fedora is a release based distro, not rolling . Fedora is upstream to RHEL. Fedora stable packages eventually go into RHEL. It's impressive how stable some distros have become and the feature set that is available. I'm a debian and/or mint user but warming to fedora again thanks to trying out Rocky. I love the fedora spins and hate Gnome. Am I the only one that thinks "did not finish" every time I type DNF? Excellent review Titus!!!
Fedora isn’t technically rolling but a lot of packages are basically as new as they can get without being unstable. I’ve heard some people call it semi-rolling
AUR is the best way to use Linux for new users. I use Linux for at least 15 years and I still don't know how to build packages properly. I am not a programmer, if the instruction in the package does not work, I need to lose a lot of time looking it up online. And I have been using Linux exclusively for at least 8 years, switch to arch from ubuntu based, 4 years ago, and I am never using a Distro without the AUR anymore, I don't even distro hop anymore because it is so good.
It can be, however the AUR isn't perfect and when using arch or really any distro good backups are key. Using timeshift or snapper is mandatory just incase you do get a bad update or install a bad aur package.
@@ChrisTitusTech I have not have a system breaking update until now luckily, and I update using Pamac most of the times. At first I was using command line, following your instructions, I still do sometimes when I see a lot of packages since it has become kind of a reflex, but even if I don't, I haven't encountered any trouble until now. Sometimes some packages refuse to update because of dependencies, and if it persist I just remove the dependency and all that needs it and reinstall what I need again if I find myself missing what I removed. However backups cannot hurt, I suppose. I am using Endeavour btw...
I don't want to disagree but Manjaro is still running into small breakes once a year that a new user won't be able to solve. Even if it's a simple fix. Add the uncontrolled aur doesn't make it tie best. There's flatpak now, much better solution for odd packages. Things like yabar that aren't on Fedora is two copy paste to install, worst case.
Thank you, Chris. No matter what I might say what I actually do is come back to Debian family. Especially now that Flatpaks give such new packages or I can usually build.
@@ChrisTitusTech Yeah, Debian is my first love among the Linux distros as well. I have been running Debian 11 as my daily driver for the past 4 months and plan to do so for the foreseeable future though I am venturing into Slackware 15 on my testing PC but that is for fun and to explore the possibilities. LOL
@@donaldmickunas8552 I have to ask: What possibilities are there that all other distros of linux don't offer? I mean is the fact that all distros are Linux and any of them can become the other. I can only assume that you mean Slackware has possibilities more so than the others by the lack of scripts that auto-run by default, thus customization. Really I think a video on Linux distro foundation needs to be made to open up the viewpoint of what "llinux distros" truly are at their cores. FYI: My understanding is this: Kernel (Linux), Terminal (Bash or what have you), package manager and the rest is just distro fluff; correct me if there is more to it please.
@@TheOmegaDMM You are correct that, with enough work, one can turn one distro into another. However, that is a LOT of work. So, I advocate finding a distro that most closely approximates what one wants in a distro then modify it from there. Thus my interest in Slackware. Regarding your question about what makes up Linux. A video would not cover it. Your real question is what makes up an Operating System. You can go from a 30,000 foot viewpoint to a very detailed examination. You might want to look into Unix system design if you are curious. For me, my interest in Slackware is based on my querky preferences which some would call grey beard. I'm 67 years old. I grew up in an era before computers were common. The whole notion of computers and what was possible with them was what caught the fascination of the geeky types back in the 1950s and 1960s. A machine that one could tell what to do. What was possible? Would it surprise you to know that most of what is being done today was being dreamed of and pursued by the geeks in the 1950s and 1960s? With enough knowledge, anything was possible. Computers back then were thought to be the solution to man's problems, the way of a wonderful future. Anyway, I am looking for a minimal system that will allow me to do what I want. I prefer to avoid the huge all-in-one software packages as they become almost impossible to maintain over time. I prefer smaller packages that can be strung together through scripts and programs to the users specification. Systemd is a relatively new init system for linux that has been adopted by most Linux distros. Today, it seems to work just fine for my modest needs. However, It continues to grow like a virus which concerns me. Slackware uses a script based init system that suits me better. Every program/package has undiscovered bugs that could allow a hacker to break into a computer system. The larger the program, the more potential bugs. So, imagine, if you will, the number of potential bugs in these huge computer systems. So, minimizing the size of the system also minimizes the attack vectors. I prefer Window Managers like i3, DWM, Bspwm over Display Managers like KDE and Gnome. They are both more minimal and they give me more control over my system. One last point, I want control of my system, the more control the better. To have the control I want requires that I learn a LOT about scripting, programming, and how Linux works. Most people want a computer to be an appliance that simply works with minimal effort on the part of the user. I want a computer that I can do whatever I want with which requires a LOT of effort from the user. That's just me. So, while I am using Debian 11 as my daily driver and I am content with it's reliability, I continue to look for that minimal system of my dreams. Slackware may offer a more direct path to what I am looking for. BTW...there is a lot more to my ideal system which would take far too long to describe. Besides, you should be diving in and discovering Linux for yourself. 😉 So, I hope this is of some help. Take care and have fun!!!!!
@@donaldmickunas8552 Excellent reply! From what I have seen with Slackware back when I was younger (bought the disks and manual from a hobby lobby with my birthday money) it is pretty close to what you are looking for (assuming not much has changed). I definitely see your POV on things like systemD as a lot of forum users have expressed the same concerns. I love PCs but my ability to wrap my head around the core of all systems (binary code) makes it difficult for me to use them for more than "applicance" purposes. I really wish I had the same chance to grow up with them as now the mountain of information far surpasses my ability to absorb. I hope you have a lot of fun on your endeavor!
I've had a similar experience with Arch and Debian based distros. Constantly swapping between them. I tried out Fedora at one point, but I just couldn't get into it at the time, but have been considering giving it another try now that I know more about Linux in general. This video has definitely helped me to solidify that decision to give Fedora another shot.
That's why i move from arch to debian for my main computer and laptop, because it's stability. And i love debian very much. But i use fedora also on my second laptop, because it's very easy to use.
ya i'm thinking of giving Debian a try.. i just want to settle on a system already and debian seems like the best mix of stability, familiarity, and flexibility
Hey great video. I've really been happy to see Fedora getting the love it deserves lately. I was amused at your use of the Kernel as an example of a package that might not be quite as up-to-date as on arch, since the Kernel is honestly the easiest thing to switch out, even besides Fedora's Kernel Vanilla Repositories. A better example would be Mesa, the heart of the graphics system. s/Kernel/Mesa/g works pretty well on this video. I'm a little amused about the dnf discussion, since I think it's one of the things that most drives me crazy about Fedora - dnf automatically triggers an update to its repositories whenever you run commands, and it's really (ridiculously) slow about doing it. That means any time I want to install a package, dnf is just waiting to interrupt my business with a 30s timeout before I get to ask it to do something, and the differential updates just seem ridiculous. I've never seen the diff updates save more than a percent or two, and applying the diffs seems to take longer than the downloads. Despite my complaints, I do really appreciate the system. Debian's recent war over merged /usr is a great example of why. Which brings me around to another point - Fedora is not a derivative of RHEL. The two are related, but no longer share direct lineage.
Using Fedora 36 Beta as my daily driver. I can say, that it's perfectly stable. It really doesn't feel like Beta software. I used pretty much everything. From Debian Stable over Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Solus, Slackware, CentOS, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, openSUSE, you name it. Debian-based is stable, yes. But I can't use anything Debian-based due to the packages being way too old. Arch-based is up to date, yes. But it breaks so easily (especially if you use the AUR) that you can't really use it as a production system. Solus is fine, but you don't have many packages. Slackware... If you like it, use it. I don't. openSUSE can be a great system, but I dislike the way to configure it. RHEL-based is super stable (even more stable than Debian imo), but same problem as with Debian. And then there is Fedora. While it's also Red Hat-based, it combines the things, I like about both Debian/RHEL and Arch. You get a stable Linux distribution that's also up to date. Heck I noticed, that my installation of Fedora Beta is sometimes even more up to date than frickin' vanilla Arch Linux with the testing repos ENABLED! I can't tell if I'll eventually switch off of Linux some day (macOS and Apple Silicon is really tempting me tbh). But if I have to choose a Linux distribution, then it will be Fedora!
@@officialdoomatic I used both Arch and Manjaro. And while vanilla Arch is more stable than Manjaro, it still broke many times on my system. Especially Ethernet. My Ethernet chipset is a very well supported one and yet on Arch after a couple of updates, it started behaving weirdly (Mostly download speeds capped at ~80 BYTES/s) Never had that on any other distro. I still have one installation of Arch on a spare drive. Might check it out to see if it has returned to sane speeds again.
@@iitzrohan I would love to check it out even tho my GNOME 42 is snappy as is. Unfortunately the x86_64 package is only available for Fedora 34 and 36 doesn't want to install it.
BTW, I just read on the Distrowatch website that the SUSE Linux was created by a bunch of German Linux developers based on Slackware and SUSE as a company started from selling DE version of Slackware in Germany. Based on Slackware they developed SUSE, later changed the package management to RPM and init system to Init.d from Slackware's Init V and that's how SUSE came to be. Funny that I am a big fun of Slackware and then since 2006 I started to use OpenSUSE just as it was released and it originated from Slackware too. In the Linux tree SUSE is shown as Slackware's daughter distro. I am a loyal Slackware fan and user, and despite having used Debian and RedHat/Fedora based distros too, I always go back to the minimalism and stability of Slackware. It is so damn stable it is beyond belief. I installed Slackware in 2016 on my mother's PC, configured it and it works without ANY problems and administration from my side till today. The only thing I needed to upgrade was Firefox. That's about it.
I finally made the switch from Windows to Linux, and Fedora 35 is the base of that transition, particularly because it supports more modern hardware than most Debian-based distros (Arch wasn't an option, for several reasons, mostly to do with long term stability and package quality.) I do have Windows in a VM in case I need something that only runs In that environment. I've managed to get most of the games that I actually play running on Linux, either through Steam, or Lutris. So I'm happy with it overall, and will probably stick to it from here on out. Good overview of the differences between the distros, and especially the different package management systems. I'm very happy with DNF so far. Thanks, Chris :) P.S. I used to be a regular Linux Mint user, but this time around with the requirement to be stable, but new enough to support newer hardware and software, it had to be either Fedora or something very close.
You should install it and try it out on flatpak! Been suing it for 2 years no organizing my notes and you have no idea how great it is to mind map something using hyperlinks. It's like creating your own Wikipedia for your mind using markdown.
@@duser My killer feature is to use Syncthing (or similar) to make a proper sync of my Obsidian directory onto my Android smartphone, in realtime. I can populate my literal grocery list, get up, open Obsidian on my phone and the items are already listed, in quasi-realtime. That, and self-hosted as a bonus :) The fact that an Obsidian folder is portable (installed plugins and theme will persist across installations) is a nice plus, too.
@@bilange OH wow! you do that too? I started using syncthing to sync my notes across several devices and over time it has become on of my favorite apps. Its great that obsidian lets people actually own their files instead of charging for access on their on platforms.
Obsidian is wonderful. For about a year now I've synced it between my phone and desktops using Google Drive and DriveSync on Android. I use it for daily planning, project planning, general note taking, and just archiving as much of my own brain as I can in a reasonable timeframe. I managed to actually comprehend Elden Ring's story by building (and extensively linking) it in wiki form as I went. Best part is it just gets out of your way once you know what you're doing. You can get a lot out of it if you put a lot in, and I *have* found myself making connections I wouldn't otherwise.
I'm in a similar boat. I started trying out Linux in early 2020 and have hopped around all the main distros. Arch/Manjaro/Endeavour/Arco, Ubuntu/Debian/Mint etc. Then I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on my desktop and Fedora on my Thinkpad and have had zero inclination to distro hop since. Both of them feel extremely stable while still being up to date (Tumbleweed is even ahead of Arch sometimes), not to mention very polished and professional, not like someone's hobby project. I think the corporate backing plus being developed as serious workstations makes a big difference over all the rest. After the novelty of exploring Linux wore off and I just wanted to install a reliable, up to date system to get stuff done, these RPM distros have checked all the boxes.
I think OpenSUSE also is worth mentioning in this party. It doesn't seem to get the most love for desktop, even though Tumbleweed is a pretty solid rolling release for workstations. It's backed by SUSE, which is pretty big in the Linux enterprise world, and it has the OBS and YaST. The package manager is also very similar to dnf UI wise and it also bases itself on RPM packages. Whenever I'm deciding between a distro for some quick testing in a VM, I'm pretty much always torn between opensuse and fedora.
I've been using openSUSE TW for a few months and its been smooth sailing, even though people told me not to as a home user yet its been rock solid. I recently jumped on fedora on a spare drive and I'm starting to enjoy it as well
Yeah, Fedora and Arch are my favorite distros. I use Arch as my daily, because I like the Arch Build System so much. I can super easily create my own packages like this which I can then deploy really quickly. RPM isn't bad in that department either but I just don't like it as much ... :)
Thanks for the video, i'm a noob to linux still but i'll have to give Fedora a shot. I've used Debian as my first linux based os for running a rust server and it didn't seem too hard to use after googling pretty much anything and everything and learning a little bit about apt and stuff. When I got it the way I wanted it for that purpose, it ran like a dream. I currently run Win7 on everything I don't game on but looking for alternatives for when browsers finally kill off 7.
Debian 11 with Gnome for me. My perfect distro after trying numerous others. If I want later apps then I can use Backports or Flatpak - no problem. Super stable and does everything I need it to do, and more. I won't be changing any time soon.
As you said you like to build packages for software you use yourself, one major difference to note between the three is how easy it is to create your own packages. Here Arch really shines as the PKGBUILD format used to build the packages is dead easy to use. It's not the most flexible, but it's the easiest to get into, the quickest one to set up for new packages and the whole AUR is based on it (as you noted). Next up is the RPM format & its spec files used in Fedora/RHEL & others. It's not incredibly more difficult to learn & use than Arch's PKGBUILDs, but it does have its arcane corners & documentation can be somewhat hard to find (looking at all the different macros, which ones are available on the different distributions using RPMs etc.). Also it requires a certain directory structure for building, and that structure must be in a fixed place (noted in a config file), unlike the other two which can build from any directory. The most complicated build system by far is Debian's. The packaging instructions spread over a tones of files (one for specifying meta data such as dependencies & package descriptions, one for the build rules, one containing the build system compatibility level, one for each sub-package listing the files to install in them…). It's incredibly flexible, but the cost is incredible complexity. It makes getting into the system really, really difficult for newbies. Quick, what's the difference between a native and a non-native package? What is the Quilt format? How do you write one set of Debian packaging instruction that works across multiple versions of a distribution where packages you depend on might have different names in different releases? Here's also where the meta languages used for the build files have their limits: things you can do in Pacman & RPM packaging such as true conditions based on OS & release you simply cannot do in Debian's packaging system. As an OSS developer I've provided binary packages for all of those distros for a long time now, and the Debian-based systems are the ones I had to spend the most time on, hands down. Whenever I create one-off packages for myself I often actually use Pacman & convert them to other formats with the "alien" tool. If you're new to packaging, look into Pacman, just to get a feel for it. Or RPMs on Fedora, it isn't really that much harder. It's actually fun & rewarding, despite how I sounded above 😁
I dont know about documentation as i always used arch wiki and occasionally ubuntu stuff, but installer is fine for me, not the greatest but for real if you are using it that often something else is wrong
THe only problems I have encountered in my windows to Fedora journey are the DEs. The default gnome is just android, and the extenstion I was recomented material shell is unstable in the current version and it sounds like I just have to wait for fedora to upgrade gnomes to get a fix. Then KDE wants to encrypt everything to the point that I cannto zip a file and it is constantly asking for some wallet credentials to log into everyhting. Also both the gui package managers are basicaly unusable, but for some reason contain unique updates not shown in dnf. And for some reason now get plasma errors when I log into non kde DEs. Fedora is probably great, but the DEs they have setup by default are a load of trash.
@@wisnoskij DEs in general are pretty bad imo, but yeah i agree the gui package managers always gave me problems and i am baffled such a problem is left in the backlog for so long
Although I'm probably incorrect in this, I usually mentally group distros by their package manager, and then have a folder for specialty distros (Tails, Parrot, Alpine)
It's so easy to have a rolling release on Debian, just select the unstable branch (you have the choice of stable/unstable, which should not be thought of as a disadvantage). If you want to have the most up to date kernel just download the source and compile it, you can be running it on the day it is released.
Sure, but then you might as well use Arch. Both are fine, I think that Arch is a bit better for rolling. But hey, Linux is all about giving the user choices and let the user be in chare over the system so roll with whatever floats your boat. :)
I used Pop Os! for like 6 months on last year, and it's a great distribution for everything you need to do; also liked they modded gnome, they shortcut's, and the way they managed things like Nvidia drivers etc., but this year I committed to used Fedora daily for software related and gaming sometimes, and overall it's a great experience, everything works, every package you need will find in the shop (which works infinite better than the pop shop) or through DNF .. I feel like fedora with the vanilla gnome just get of you way and let you do things. Overall I think that it lacks on tiny things to be a perfect initial (linux new person) distro, like pre-install media codecs, maybe individual iso's with dedicated graphics drivers (like pop does), a better install wizard ?!
Fedora is general purpose distro, not a gaming distro as Pop_OS!. Fedora is against dedicate use case distro so i don't think they will produce this. For wizard it's coming, check out the Fedora 36 beta, you can enable 3rd party repo before installing, setup you system, chose packages... Things are not perfect but they plane to improve it. For gaming stuff related stuff their is community on Fedora
Fedora doesn't pre-install any proprietary product as it's against their ethos and for the sake of floss spirit. But it gives users the option to add them by their own consent afterwards, which I think is not limiting the user at all. And for the installer, they are working on a new and improved one.
@Saptarshi Mondal Yes, it's against what they believe as a project, i like and respect that, but my point is "Could be easier for someone without experience ? If so, why don't?" And I don't say Linux experience, but pc experience overall. For example, they put sections on the shop with "drivers" and "codecs" (for some reason lack the codec used by twitch, or I faced other problem, idk) and that its just perfect, no other words. About the new installer, looks good. :D
@@yt_reborngameplays And thinking now, what if they do this on the initial configuration pos-install .. Like 1 more page, "Do you wish to install now this and that driver? Or this and that codec?" For a person coming new frustrated with another distro or as new person to linux, they for sure would feel more comfortable
I'd 100% love to watch someone go through how they customized their desktop. Customize on linux seems so bloody hard because unless you know the name of exactly what you want, you'll never find it.
I found that KDE does make it really beginner friendly, perhaps at the cost of SOME customization, but latte for panels helps a lot if that's what you're into; you can make your own system wide themes, and coding widgets isn't too hard
I really like what you've done with your tweaking! I would really love a whole tutorial series on how you built it and got it to look the way it does. I love Fedora as well. Thank you very much for your knowledge and sharing it with us :).
@@ChrisTitusTech Debian Stable but for those apps that you need newer iterations of, use universal packages - flatpak, snaps or ApoImage. A reasonable compromise between stability & freshness? I use Fedora & OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Both hit a sweet spot in offering contemporary apps with stabiity. Be good Chis if you could review imnutable OS' like Silverblue / Kinoite and Micro OS. Silverblue very good IMO.
Red Hat Linux was my first Linux in the late 90s, I think version 5 or so. Then I moved to Fedora Core until I switched to Ubuntu 8.04 in 2008. I think in 2011 I went to Debian and I used that for a very long time, until around 2017. Then a short excursion to Arch - but that was too unstable for me. That was no fun as an everyday system. And so I ended up back where it all started: with Red Hat and Fedora. And here I found my peace of mind. There is no better distribution that so perfectly integrates new and stable things than Fedora. And on my good old faithful ThinkPad T440p I still have RHEL 8.5 running. In the end, one would like to know how the experiences of Fedora flow into RHEL. Best regards from Vienna/Austria to Chris Titus, one of the best Linux and Tech-TH-camr, and the community!
Just curious what unstability you had? I'm using manjaro on desktop and arch on laptop since november and i've yet to encounter a problem related to it. Stability is important, but the most problems i ever had with was debian / ubuntu so apparently stereotypes can be very wrong...
Red Hat 5 was my introduction to Linux too. I tried Slackware and Gentoo for a while but used Debian on one of the machines. It was OK. The other runs Fedora and I have had zero reason to switch. I also found Arch way too unstable and not very practical when you need your machine for work.
This video is my spirit animal. I use the ubuntu 6 month releases, but have been using fedora on my surface and like it a lot. I'm considering switching, but at the same time, I really like the fact that Ubuntu is so widely supported.
Pacman is by far my favorite package manager, I really love what you called "funky syntax", and the way it presents the results when you search for packages. It's also the easiest to make packages for, at least from my experience. I don't really package software often, or at all these days, but in the past when I wanted to, I could fairly easily write a PKGBUILD and run makepkg. I'm on Fedora right now, and my biggest gripe with dnf is that when you search packages, it doesn't tell you if any of the results it found is already installed on the system. Also, Fedora is based on RHEL? Isn't it the other way around?
I have watched your videos throughout the years, i just think its funny how your preference in distros went from deb, to arch, and now to fed. I first started my Linux journey ~2017-2018 by distro hopping all the "n00b friendly" distros, landed on Manjaro, and havnt left it. I use Ubuntu for my self hosted shinannagans for stability but so far my DT dual boots win10, and Manjaro. I intend to setup the DT to run a head/less game setup like you did, but for amd gpu, just have not had enough ambition lately. Thank you all the help! The guidance you and others provide (lawrence mostly) has kept me growing!
I think its a great idea that youre bringing this back, I expect this year to be quite a big year for Linux marketshare as a whole, and there really cant be enough good breakdowns of what makes a distro(family) on youtube. Keep it up man
Just keep in mind that every breakdown is from that persons perspective and understanding. Chris is a good man but he has his blind spots like the rest of us.
Fedora is the perfect middle ground for me, ease of use of windows but ability to thinker whenever wanted of linux, plus added security. Best example of this was when installing I set up LUKS on both of my drives, /Home occupied 65% of my mechanical drive and root was 50% of my ssd. All in 5 minutes using a easy to follow gui that set up everything for me I just resized/moved drives the partitions I was interested in. Best of all is that dual boot worked flawlessly. Totally painless and didn't take me hours of thinkering to modify fstab to automount both drives and then modify luks so that it only encrypts the partitions and so on. I even had problems with grub dualboot and bitlocker not liking it making me input the recovery code everytime I tried ro boot into windows. It just works
I have always used Linux Mint and have been happy with it, but I am intrigued by this video and look forward to future videos about your next project. You may have convinced me to switch my daily driver!
I am extremely fond of mint. Simple clean, low resource usage, effective, and with only the mildest of bugs. Ubuntu 22.04 is my daily driver personally though.
Well, I am actually more interested what the distros do „under the hood“. E.g. when I compare Endeavour OS with Fedora with the same desktop environment, Fedora uses noticeably more (cache) memory and at idle the processor works more, compared to Endeavour OS. And as a result, the same DE feels on Endeavour OS more snappy and uses less power, which becomes especially important on laptops, but I also don’t want in general any PC doing something in the background without me knowing what. So even though it is fine to use fedora overall, I am still feel a bit suspicious about it. Maybe this is just „my tinfoil hat“ speaking, but I just would like to know what is going on there.
@@Abstract_Nebulizer But shouldn't zram lead to less RAM usage instead of more? But I also don't know... had to look it up just now, what exactly zram does! :)
@@pawrsley Ok, so this is a possible reason for the RAM usage. Does ZRAM also account for the higher CPU usage at idle, or might this be for something else?
Correction ,Manjaro isnt just arch. The Manjaro team add alot of extra nonsense and love breaking things. It was my first distro and it breaks more Vanilla arch. Endeavor ,Arco etc all "the same" as vanilla arch but obv with calimaries installer. I did like your comparison as too many new users get missinformed by Content creators with strong opinions and they often don't cover anything other than Speed and DE,GUI ,community support. Package managers are often overlooked and Mpr manager /Aur managers often not explained. Glad you creating resources for newbies! Also too many users too missinformed that archer is the only distro for gaming bc its higher performance but most games if your hardware is fine the game will be too.
For Debian-based distros I personally recommend to use Nala, a front-end for APT, it looks very nice and attractive and you can better see what APT is trying to do when installing or upgrading or anything else 🤘
There is always Aptitude and apt, no need to add another one. Someone that use apt do not have problems to parse apt output, and beginners will use ... a gui anyway. And i disagree about parallel downloads, this is an egoistic behavior and not fair about distro repositories.
I appreciate your comments about these different OS's. I have found significant differences in the different distros within Arch and Debian. Just for example, try -Syu in a bunch of different Arch distros, and you'll get wildly different experiences, some not even working at all. I've been experimenting with UltraMarine OS that is Fedora based (they even have a migration script) and like what they've done with the installer. It will be interesting to see if Fedora-based distros begin to proliferate the way they have with Arch.
I like the distribution breakdown, but there's more happening under the hood than that. For example, SELinux vs AppArmor. Fedora has SELinux enabled by default, Debian has is supported but disabled by default and uses AppArmor out of the box. It doesn't come up very often as far as running a Linux distro for a desktop OS as it's pretty transparent for most desktop user tasks, but it does matter when you get into the guts of the system and start customizing certain aspects of it. Also there's the flatpak vs snaps vs appimages debate and it's only worth mentioning because there are different starting points for each distro in regards to them. Like how Ubuntu is very heavily invested in snaps and even has many default apps installed as snaps now on a refresh install.
I’ve tried various Fedora versions, LM, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc and after a decade of distro hopping and getting fed up then returning to windows, I stumbled across Garuda Arch using Wayland/Hyprland and after some tinkering (and a little bit of CLI work) it’s by far my absolute favorite and such a beauty! Always been more of a fan of Arch after becoming acquainted with Ubuntu back in 2012. I love the work flow, speed, resource usage, pacman, and its gaming capabilities. Such a satisfying feeling to truly make it mine. Excited to see what’s in store for Wayland/Hyprland!
I only used Arch for about 4 months now on a laptop and a PC but I really think that people are overstating the "instability" of Arch and the "danger" of using the AUR (tho in my opinion you should use Arch repos before using the AUR). Also with Arch a lot of the system you end up using consists of things you chose and installed yourself. So in case something starts being buggy or stops working you have much more of an idea of what could be causing it and how to fix it than on distros that come "ready for use". That's not an advantage exclusive to Arch tho.
The only time that an update "broke" my system, was a major Gnome update that was completely incompatible with my extensions. That would have happened on any distro. Arch itself has been rock solid for me, and I have zero complaints! I decided then to just uninstall gnome and install a tiling window manager, and I've never been happier!
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You are right. I have been trying all linux flavors along the last 20 years, and in the end I stick with Fedora.
For a gaming system, I found Fedora not to be the best choice, as it offers by far the most un-opimized gaming experience in my testing. You can correct that with a custom Xanmod-Kernel to some degree and working with DNF was a pleasent surprise. On the other hand, there were some unexpected bugs when trying to get some COPR repos to run with Fedora Rawhide, which simply refused to work. Why? But there is hope, as there is a new gaming-dedicated project (Nobara) to tune Fedora better for gaming which I haven't tried out myself yet. But from what I read on their website, that should adress most of these shortcomings. Currently I prefer EndevourOS (Arch) as I get a x86-64-v3 custom repo with AVX2-optimized packages and despite its own shortcomings, I found customizing PKGBUILDS and compiling from AUR easier and more productive than doing the dependency handling myself on other distros which can be a pain if they miss crucial packages. Hence I found it to be the easiest to work with distribution for optimizing my Linux install, to get the most out of my hardware. I am impatiently waiting for SerpentOS, as it also aims to be a more performance-focused distro.
I see why, after I moved to Fedora 40 XFCE, my gaming experience hasn't been the best, and when I was on EndeavourOS Cinnamon I had a really nice experience with gaming and all.
this is a well-timed episode. I'm a Debian user but a) I strain against not having newer tools available in the mainline distro and b) I have a new machine and it doesn't look like Debian is going to support it without some hoop-jumping and roll-your-own kernels. I'm considering jumping ship, much as I hate to do it. My alternatives are Arch (possibly in the guise of Manjaro) and lately, Fedora. Ubuntu might be a potential choice because it tends to work with newer hardware, although I'm not a fan. Looks like I'm going to be trying several different distros and I hate distro-hopping: it's one reason I prefer Debian: it just works, and continues working for a long time, even if the toolchain tardiness is a pain in the butt. It's great with older hardware, but less so on bleeding-edge stuff, and I have strayed over that edge.
Fedora NEVER worked for me, and when I mean NEVER, I do really mean it. Log in to the desktop and I am greeted by three + 1 error notifications, three from the report tool about some gnome software misbehaving, the other one from the software store telling me that X failed to update. I have tried the point releases as well as rawhide. Never worked on my machine, while Debian and even Linux From Scratch did work flawlessly.
A windows to Linux tutorial would be fantastic, really want to, I am trying…but there is certainly some learning to get the most out of it. Great video.
There's another advantage of Arch that's worth mentioning. Since the install process is manual, you install ONLY the packages you want. Most distributions install a default set of packages that I have to go back and remove - sometimes with unintended consequences.
You don't really _have_ to remove anything unless you use a very very tiny hard disk. One of my most stable (actually probably most stable) machines is my Slackware and that one installs everything by default, simply because its package manager doesn't do dependencies. It's still up to you what services you enable.
I like seeing unbiased comparisons. I don't use Linux DT right now. But I have plans to get back to it. I do use Debian - but not the DTE because it's not configured with it where it is deployed. Over time I have realized I am very out of date! So seeing these comparisons is interesting and useful. I'll probably stick to debian when I do make changes - but you never know.
I'm still deciding on what to actually use as I wanted to teach myself Linux for my job's sake and also for myself since I might transition a semi old gaming PC into strictly Linux. I may start with Fedora and see how it goes. I have Mint running on an old Thinkpad and it's been smooth.
Absolutely beautiful I love it. Bit of a journeyman Linux user for work essentially. I'm not afraid of CLI but I have no software dev uses or background. This is the info we need
Interesting journey You've had. I'm at the stage of going on Arch from Debian on my desktop PC. I do love that i can install Arch from ground up and have only the stuff i want on it. Fedora, hmmm, I'm not feeling ok about the fact that big corporation is behind it and that maybe one day it won't be free or they just block the progress of the project like they've done with CentOS.
An argument you can make is that a corporation is willing to spend the money on building a system for users to test and figure out problems for their main OS. They are basically getting free work by users for their RH server market.
For me arch har been stable as a rock, only time i had some problems was when i did not update a laptop for a year but all i had to do was to remove some packages.
Whenever i use Arch, it's breaking at every corner. Updates every day, so everything always works, but tomorrow something will break, and i have to wait for the day next for it to work again. Sure, it's great and all, but i'll never use it as my day to day. Never.
Fedora, is far more enticing. It's like Arch, but far less "breaky fixy breaky fixy" in how it performs. Debian based Systems like Mint (and or ubuntu?) are definitely going to reign in the Linux Noob category however. It's just that type of Distro.
@@AURON2401 now you must be the noob if you manage to break arch all the time. Ive had one breakage in 3-4 years and im not using the lts kernel. Also a tinkerer but yet arch stable as a rock.
@@Arcticpagan Well hello, the asshole who takes pleasure in insulting everyone else to enhance his own ego has emerged. Mind renaming yourself to ZAsshole? Break Arch? no. It breaks itself. Everyday. Even Arch users and Developers admit that. Arch isn't rock solid, it's Unstable, Hence the need for the rolling release. Mind renaming yourself to ZAsshole? Seems a more fitting title.
@@AURON2401 never had any of the problems you describe and i dont update on a daily basis i update here and there sometimes two weeks apart sometimes 12 hours apart.
I've just started using Fedora. I've been on Arch and Debian. I really have been loving my experience with Fedora. I don't know how to explain it,but it just seems to make more sense the more you get into it.
I've been using manjaro for over a year and now i want to switch to a more security and privacy friendly distro like fedora. The problem is i've fallen in love with the AUR! I know Arch can be hardened, but it seems like a too complicated process for me...
In my eyes, Manjaro has lost its charm and the *friendly Arch* title as it's really straying away from Arch and.. has issues that is not even arch related.. I have watched a TH-cam video talking abt this topic and I gotta agree with it.. I would suggest however if you are looking for a better arch-friendly distro, try Endeavour OS... Sure, it's still arch but I personally find it much easier to secure and is way closer to pure Arch than Manjaro would even try..
I also have the same problem with you about deciding between the bleeding edge of arch and the stable-ness of debian. thanks for this content really helped me to make me more certain to distro hop to fedora
Honestly, i think that arch or maube better artix would be a better choice. Installing programs and setting up is much much easier on arch based distroes then debian. Plus, using arch based over fedora is definitely AUR
If you do a Windows to Linux video in the future, please include how to read QA's from different distros. This was something that really confused me when I first started Linux that I think a lot of new users would benefit from. I would often look up questions when something wasn't working, and the response would be from the Ubuntu community, but I was using Fedora. So I had no idea if it'd work or not. Now that I've gotten more comfortable with it, I understand that if an answer says that the solution is "rpm install " there's a good chance I'm missing that package too and I just need to "dnf install ". But when I was a new user, I didn't really know what the commands were doing, or why, etc. I think it'd be really helpful for new Linux users to understand some of the basic syntax they'll see when they're searching for a solution, and how to apply it to their own distro if the only solution they can find isn't for the distro they're using.
Even Linus Torvalds uses Fedora. I use RHEL in servers at work and Fedora in a VM at home (alongside Ubuntu and Windows). By far, my favourite linux distro to use is Fedora. And my knowledge in Fedora for the most part works just fine with RHEL too, because Fedora is based on RHEL. And as others have mentioned, DNF is freaking awesome! dnf revert is such a life saver when things go awry.
I've daily driven each of these three at separate points while looking for a distro I like, with Arch being the most recent I've used. Gotta say, I love Arch due to the fact that when you install it, you have complete control and choice over what goes into it. Want a command line with nothing fancy? Good, you start with that anyway. Want a fancy DE that's absolutely tricked out without interference from an already installed DE? Perfect, you can choose out of any of the popular ones without worrying about conflicting configurations. Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu are both great OS choices, but for me the out-of-box experience that you get with Arch is what I was looking for. Just make sure if you're doing UEFI booting you figure out if you need to put --removable in your GRUB install because I didn't and was stuck forcing my laptop to load a specific EFI file each time (manually selecting it I mean) for a week before I figured out my mistake.
A lot of people saying Arch is unstable and you may face up some bugs, but i didn't face anything while using it, the AUR is there if you need some app that is not available on repo(you can read on net why the repository packages are limited), and also the community is freaking big, there is a lot of support, and the thing that i like about Arch is the up to date.
Wow, first it's Debian's 90s abandoned looking website. Now, FEDORA is the best way to avoid "AUR neck-beards". It's not Linux that's hard to use, it's these cruel.. hilarious mind games that scare people off.
Its about Power: what humans can't turn into a monopoly for wealth, they make into a religion for status. Dogma should be arcane and obscure, else the common ruck won't defer to the priests.
On the other hand you can just use Mint that has a great website, great community forums, super easy to install, configure and use without even touching the terminal.
@@mi2-c035 normal release ubuntu would be better for desktop use as mint is only based on LTS version. It's 6 months behind vs 24 months behind. 6 months stability is more than enough for desktop use.
@@rishirajsaikia1323 For a while i used to think the same, but it turns out if you can update the single packages you need to be on the latest version, it's not going to change much: you can upgrade the kernel, some packages ship with the latest versions (like Firefox and Chromium for instance) while for others you can use PPA for a more recent version of LibreOffice.
Big thanks. I'm new to your channel. Started watching yesterday and already moving to Fedora and confirmed the persistent voice in my head for some time now that I really only need to consider three distributions instead of all the versions of them. Look forward to future videos.
My friend... 22 year Linux System Engineer here. The gold standard is Kubuntu LTS... you could go Regular releases of Kubuntu, but got to say, Kubuntu has got it all.
Someone that actually prefers dnf. Now I've seen everything! You make some good points, but for someone like me, a home user with simple day to day needs mostly revolving around multimedia, I've settled on Arch after years on Debian stable, Mint, various Ubuntu flavors (mostly Kubuntu and Neon), and dabbling with most of the competitors including Fedora. I agree that pacman's syntax is a bit unnecessarily arcane, but who really does much more than -Syu or -S or -R? Maybe -Ss occasionally. Not that hard to remember the common usages. I find Pamac (AUR) to be decent enough for everything else, though I find that I rarely use it. My issues with Fedora are mostly that it's Gnome-centric (I despise Gnome and believe that Linux is years behind in wide acceptance due to the major distros insisting on using it as the default). Sure, the Plasma spin (I currently have 36 installed too) is usually fine, but for my use case it requires extra effort to get things set up for multimedia (rpmfusion - I know, not hard but an extra series of steps before you can actually do things...). Plus, I find dnf lacking in a few ways. I used to have an ISP that throttled me after a certain point, and dnf doesn't like that AT ALL. It would spend hours trying to download large packages, failing, then starting again FROM THE BEGINNING (something to do with a curl bug was the best I could diagnose). I no longer have this issue as I've ditched that ISP, but it was a real concern that even the forum experts were never able to help me with much. Never did find a fix other than manually downloading the packages with wget, which of course picks up where failed DL's leave off. It's also much MUCH slower than pacman for the most part, in my experience at least. Then there's the confusion as to what normies should use to update or install. Gnome Software, which will prompt you to reboot unnecessarily? CLI won't do that... Those are the choices, aside from the abysmal dnf-dragora. Maybe they have muon? Haven't looked. I used to like Yumex years ago... Bottom line? I'll take pacman every day of the week over dnf for my use case. I don't mind Fedora at all, despite the above blathering. It's a fine distribution, like openSUSE or those mentioned already. Somehow I just don't find myself wanting to use it as a daily driver. Maybe it's the release cycle. I always seem to be upgrading or installing, not using. Not on Arch, and I haven't experienced so much as a paper-cut bug in quite a while, though I acknowledge that it does happen, usually with a front page announcement on their web page describing the steps necessary to fix things. For me? Arch, hands down, no contest.
Thank you. I have been delving further into Linux and have been struggling with the true difference of distros. With this and a video from redhat guy I finally feel I have it. I just didn't understand why people kept showing the desktop environment as the distro. So thanks. Also the setup you have looks neat -- I will look at all of those things and see what I want. As a developer I never had problems using the terminal and have found that is the fastest way to do almost everything in Linux. But thanks again for the ideas and much better understanding.
Great approach to this. Been out of desktop Linux for years, just decided to replace Windows on my 3 year old laptop with Nobara Linux, a Fedora derivative. I've always favored RH compatible distros, didn't know anything about dnf. Good stuff, thanks.
First time I tried Linux was Ubuntu back around 2007. Then was primarily on Mac for many years. Tried various distros over the years in VM's to play around. When Fedora 34 came out last year, I put it on a mini pc to see what it was like on bare metal. I literally stopped using my iMac, and have been on the Linux PC full time. Fedora 34 was the point where I was like - ok, this has all the drivers installed already, I can connect to my printer automatically, I can get all sorts of software in the app store, use flatpaks if you want or not if not, current kernels for newer hardware, super stable and nothing ever broken, btrfs and snapshots allowing system restores if I break something. long story short: as a Linux n00b, it was easy out of the box to get started, and the more I learned about Linux, the more I loved the distro I chose.
Been using Fedora since F32 now (after installing it for an LPI/RHCSA Exam). I really like the spins (Cinnamon) and how smooth they run. Thumbs up for this distro and your video. ;)
Debian is obv the most Desktop-oriented. Fedora is Red Hat, it's very work focused like all Red Hat products (their "desktop" people use is literally called "workstation"), so just doesn't prioritize some of the home user luxuries. Arch is primarily for the trans community.
Yup a great video, and your thoughts are really very interesting. What I would like to know next is: your thoughts and your impressions comparing fedora with opensuse tumbleweed. These 2 are very close to each other with certain substantial differences...
If you use VMWare, please be careful with Fedora (and most RHEL based distros). When VMWare for Linux updates it has to recompile some C++ header files & Fedora updates have a tendency to break the VMWare update. It happened to me & it was really no fun. (I think I read online it can happen to CentOS too, so, it's specific to Fedora only)
For the last year I've been exactly where you said you were...loving Arch for newer stuff and Debian for smoother, cleaner, more stable stuff. And now unlike every other distro comparison TH-camr, you told me exactly what I needed to hear... Fedora is a beautiful blend of Arch and Debian. Tried it once years ago and I'm going to give it another go. If someone had told me about this a couple years ago it would have saved me so much time and aggravation! Can someone recommend the best Fedora flavor to try on a low power laptop I'm messing with just because? You answered so many questions I've had in my search for what's best for me. Thanks.
Good video Chris. I might have to retry Fedora KDE at some point. I wouldn't add anything to your comments except to remind people that Debian's stability is a general rule. There is hardware it just doesn't like. I've tried half a dozen Debian distros on my desktop and none would last more than a couple of months before breaking. It has been running EndeavourOS for a couple years with no major issues. Just wanted to remind people of that and prevent them from inferring the general rule into a universal one.
Use the unofficial non-free Debian ISO and see whether the driver issues persists. Debian removes lot of close source drivers in spirit of its DFSG rules.
Back when I worked for Business Objects/SAP ten years ago, most of our major business clients (such as Intel, GE, etc) use Unix (Solaris for example), some used Linux (mostly all REDHAT or SUSE). I'd say about half used Windows, and of course none used a Mac. I am speaking to servers of course, not desktops. At work we'd have to maintain pretty much every client environment since they'd spend from a few hundred thousand to millions per year on Business Intelligence support contracts. The databases they used were mainly Oracle, IBM DB2, MS SQL Server, and our low end clients used MySQL in some cases. The primary reason for RHEL was that they'd have support contracts for the OS itself, we are talking top 500 companies, not your average everyday ecommerce :)
You automatically get a like because Obsidian + Fedora has made my not taking go to the NEXT LEVEL, and that's before I used the community plugins! 📓➕🖤
![กี่หมื่นฟ้า | Your Sky Series EP.1 [1/4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vLGjxFL6U_I/mqdefault.jpg)
for the newbies or tinkerers, fedora's dnf has awesome rollback commands if you screw up your packages, mainly "dnf history" and "dnf swap". Both have saved my install so many times I'm embarrased to count them
I just broke my debian server during an upgrade (ssh disconnect and not upgrading via screen) due to my supidity. But an hour later (short research and restarting the upgrade) all is running fine again. I love debian - on my laptop I do use Manjaro since two years tough.
Where was this shit when I needed it on Debian 😂😂😂
In learning linux, I ended up reimaging the computer several times lol when I borked drivers trying to get openCL to work
@@Nunya58294 Look for nala, its a frontend for apt and there is even a video about it from Chris. He even said it may be better than dnf lol.
But in essence it gives it a good looking interface and has the history/rollback commands. It is actually pretty nice
On openSuse you even have /usr/ btrfs snapshots at every zypper call (dnf alternative)
FYI: "leading edge" is what the Fedora people are calling their approach.
Or cutting edge.
@@rishirajsaikia1323 that only applies to Rawhide, I thought? Can find plenty use of leading edge within the RH realm (RHealm?). Cutting edge I only saw mentioned when talking about Rawhide. Or am I mistaken?
@@JohnCremboz this is semantics.
Fedora is more updated than Debian but not so updated that things break
By leading edge, it means Fedora incorporates newer technologies like Wayland, flatpak, pipewire, wireplumber etc first than the rest.
@@JohnCremboz cutting edge is more tested than bleeding edge.
I’m new to Linux still and found my self on fedora recently. The best part about this comparison is arch, deb, fedora are all great choices.
One thing you will find in the Linux community is that everyone has an opinion. The arguements abound regarding distributions. For every distribution, you will find those who love that distribution and think that it is the absolute best while others hate that very same distro and think it should be done away with. My advice is to go check out the reviews and try the distros that interest you. Eventually, you will tend to go back to one or two distros time after time. Those will be the distros that you love even with their faults. Debian is that distro for me. Regardless, enjoy your Linux journey and have fun!!!!!!!! 🙂
@@zeocamo ,
Arch really only sticks for install, if you're not going to use something like Manjaro.
I'm definitely in the script whore camp. and will happily use whatever Arch install script that offers all the options I want. ;)
@@senselessinductor7921 you do you, but it is only a few commands.. hostname time network that stuff and then your WM
@@donaldmickunas8552 I agree with you lol. I'm a basic user so it probably doesn't matter that much what I use. I'm also, Linux wise, an intermediate user at best. Arch, for me, is too high maintenance, BUT, I really like Manjaro. Pure Debian is frustrating to get set up right, but MX and LMDE make it a pleasant experience. Once you add RPM Fusion stuff to Fedora it is brilliant. Probably my 'perfect' solution would be Fedora with an LTS kernel (which is how I actually run Manjaro) :)
@@emjaycee Excellent. Have fun and enjoy. 😀
Fedora is not based on RHEL. It's actually the other way around, RHEL is based on Fedora. Or actually now CentOS steam is based on Fedora, and RHEL is based on CentOS steam.
Source?
@@thilosavage He is right Google it.
@@bored78612 Sure, I think what Chris meant by "based on" was that it was originally forked from RedHat back in the day, not that RHEL releases are currently based on Fedora
Never been happier with Arch. I've been using it extensively and very heavily 99% of the time for all my daily work and personal use.
Arch is pretty stable these days.
Same here, I use it with Qtile and it's been amazing.
The less packages you have installed the more stable it is lol
i absolutely agree, Arch or Arch based systems right now have been pretty stable and pretty well maintained. I use it for majority of my work and alot of personal use as well. Its brilliant for Education, Entertainment, hobbies and also workspaces.
@@konyption Well thats definitely correct and that should be a hard and solid rule, lol haha. When you only have necessary packages installed and you don't have unnecessary things , you will easily find stability.
Fedora is from my perspective, the most homogeneous Linux desktop distro out there related to experience and function. Why? In my opinion it's feels like has been made it from the backend-fronted to provide a logical, stable and consistent experience.
I agree. After an installation before 2 years, still I cant login. Take care.
@@christopherneufelt8971 LOL I went to fedora recently when I was getting back to linux. Can't get the install to work. Never gets past grub welcome. Every other distro I have tried works near flawless. Mint did have some issues that were easily resolved. Fedora... can't even get it to boot into a live environment.
LMAO can you login now@@christopherneufelt8971
wth does backend-fronted mean?
Probably secure boot. Had same problem @@MrGeemonty
Debian - If u want an ultra stable experience and u don't care about having the latest software
Arch - If u prefer bleeding edge stuffs and don't mind updating and downloading a bunch of packages every now and then
Fedora - In b/w Arch and Debian, I suppose
Fedora - almost everything best from both worlds
Fedora would be like between Ubuntu (non LTS) and Arch for package updates.
Debian isn't great for newest hardware.
Good thing Debian Testing and Sid exist so you can have more up to date software and still more tested than Arch.
Fedora - stability and new packages at the expense of tweakability and experimentation
Nix/Guix - what fedora claims to be
Finally!!! A distro review/comparison that is actually about the fundamental differences between the distros, their packages, and their package managers. I’m a Arch user (btw) but have been looking for comparisons with Fedora and all I could find were pretty much glorified GNOME reviews…
Amazing video!
How can you spot an arch user? They’ll tell you
@@MrCleverclips haha u beat me to it 😆
Tried to go Linux so many times and always went back to Windows for one reason or another. But I’m now running Fedora exclusively on my laptop and it’s been such a wonderful experience. Gnome is beautiful and smooth, OS updates are really well implemented (and frequent), and it even handles fractional scaling extremely well. I won’t be getting rid of the Windows partition because you never know when it might be needed, but I will be shrinking it dramatically.
I almost always keep a dualboot just for that odd bit of software that either has no Linux port or I can't get the Linux port to work on my system. However, I have no Windows install rn because my video card shows a black screen for GRUB (lol) so I won't be booting any other OS until I get around to troubleshooting that issue.
@@ultralance So you'll often be faced with the choice of debugging something that's broken in Linux or debugging your boot issue and getting back into Windows 😄
I just switched to Fedora from Pop_OS and I can't say that I'll miss it. I definitely liked Pop_OS, but they made it hard to customize the desktop environment and make it my own. Fedora has been a pretty painless move, although learning the package manager was a bit of struggle at first.
Linus uses Fedora so you are in good company. Still think ARCH based distros are better then Fedora.
I'm literally planning for that now. I hate to distro-hop since I found Pop to be the most stable distro for me to use comfortably, but damn do I also want to use arch. I have been following up on it a bit late, but fedora seems to be very promising in what I want
@@necrobynerton7384 we installed PopOS on my wife's HP laptop .. there seems to be a tendency for unreliability with PoP updates. She became less and less impressed. Arcolinux has been reliable. ('m also impressed by Nobara). I recently caught her opening a terminal and typing 'update' on her own intuition .. the terminal was formerly a no-go area.
@@glynnsmith4560 Yea, tbh I'm not surprised with that... LTT had a whole whoopsie going on when linus tried Pop lol. Meanwhile me over here has had so many problems with many distros except pop. And Fedora! That thing is going pretty strong so far
Glad that yall getting more familiar with the terminal, that thing can be pretty useful if something goes wrong
I'm running KDE on Pop and modified a bunch of things.
But yes, the default DE doesn't have many options.
I love OpenSuse Tumbleweed because it's bleeding edge and at the same time is very solid. It's a good competitor for Fedora.
People should know about these two distros more. Tumbleweed and fedora workstation are somewhat similar in their update scheme. And zypper is as delightful to use as dnf.
I would use it if I could lock root
fedora and debian package way more in their repos though, not an issue if you build stuff yourself but how many folks do that?
Open suse has OPI which offers a lot of software
Tumbleweed is nice, but they have smaller repositories, their mirror handling is shite, and the OBS is a confusing mess, unlike Fedora's COPRs.
Finally someone who isn't just talking about the new desktop picture or what the new DE has to offer. All Linux distro's are "Linux" and the only thing that really separates them is the package manager . They all use the Linux kernel. It is just a question of how stable of a version you want. Great video Chris.
Yes, I agree it.
No, a distro isn't just the package manager, its the also the choice of components that make up the system, the availability of packages and the trust and philosophy of the distro managers. Fedora failed every time I tried to install it. Also all this talk about Arch being unstable is FUD. The only downside to arch is that it for the most part you have to choose the components that make up the system. This forces you to learn a lot upfront to get a functional system.
This is the video that all new people to Linux, like me, need to watch.
There's so much focus on DTE in the Linux TH-camr space that it almost seems that underlying OS makes no difference, but that is not the reality.
I think Chris in the video nails it with (paraphrasing) that the package manager is the biggest difference you end up noticing as a user when it comes to the system behind the DE/WM. Everything on top can be (relatively) easily changed. I mean, you CAN install a different package manager into your distro of choice, but that's... not typically a thing you have much reason to bother with.
My friends and I have started a month long Linux challenge to use it as a daily driver for about a month. It's been 10+ years since I've used a Linux desktop OS and it's certainly come a long way.
I've been running this challenge for ~15 years. Mostly on Arch, but there was some distro-hopping in the first couple years.
Though honestly, I'd be lying if I said I never used Windows in that time, whether on someone else's PC or because I had it installed on mine for some game/software I couldn't run in Linux. Support's a lot better these days, but it's still useful to dual boot just for the odd thing that doesn't work.
Using Fedora Silverblue as my first Linux distro and absolutely loving the stability it offers. Especially because I broke several other distros before this while trying them out in virtual machines. If you're not super into tinkering or customization then immutable distros like Silverblue/Kinoite/openSUSE MicroOS are the way to go.
Though if you live in the +0 timezone, beware that Kinoite will not install. :p
I wish to see the immutable version of fedora i3 or with any other tiling windows manager. KDE and Gnome are beautiful but too heavy, specially considering there are a lot of old devices out there with low resources and even there are some new devices with just 4 G of ram and a Pentium processors or similars .-.
@sk All the KDE apps fail to install for some reason with a UTC timezone set. You get an empty desktop, no terminal, no discover, etc. You get a semi-working panel, its applets and broken shortcuts. x3
I wanted to try out fedora kinoite, but can't install it, as the installer is stuck getting my disks. I have heard only good of silverblue and like the idea of it, so I wanted to try it, but with kde.
Silverblue works well but I do not like gnome. Kinoite is a disaster like everyone else said. Does the Fedora normal spin of kde work? Or are they just really focused on gnome which I hate. Nothing against gnome to each his own. It's just not my cup of tea.
Fedora is a release based distro, not rolling . Fedora is upstream to RHEL. Fedora stable packages eventually go into RHEL. It's impressive how stable some distros have become and the feature set that is available. I'm a debian and/or mint user but warming to fedora again thanks to trying out Rocky. I love the fedora spins and hate Gnome. Am I the only one that thinks "did not finish" every time I type DNF? Excellent review Titus!!!
Absolutely. Or "Do Not Forget"
Fedora isn’t technically rolling but a lot of packages are basically as new as they can get without being unstable. I’ve heard some people call it semi-rolling
AUR is the best way to use Linux for new users. I use Linux for at least 15 years and I still don't know how to build packages properly. I am not a programmer, if the instruction in the package does not work, I need to lose a lot of time looking it up online. And I have been using Linux exclusively for at least 8 years, switch to arch from ubuntu based, 4 years ago, and I am never using a Distro without the AUR anymore, I don't even distro hop anymore because it is so good.
It can be, however the AUR isn't perfect and when using arch or really any distro good backups are key. Using timeshift or snapper is mandatory just incase you do get a bad update or install a bad aur package.
@@ChrisTitusTech I have not have a system breaking update until now luckily, and I update using Pamac most of the times. At first I was using command line, following your instructions, I still do sometimes when I see a lot of packages since it has become kind of a reflex, but even if I don't, I haven't encountered any trouble until now. Sometimes some packages refuse to update because of dependencies, and if it persist I just remove the dependency and all that needs it and reinstall what I need again if I find myself missing what I removed.
However backups cannot hurt, I suppose.
I am using Endeavour btw...
I don't want to disagree but Manjaro is still running into small breakes once a year that a new user won't be able to solve. Even if it's a simple fix. Add the uncontrolled aur doesn't make it tie best.
There's flatpak now, much better solution for odd packages.
Things like yabar that aren't on Fedora is two copy paste to install, worst case.
@@ChrisTitusTechhow often does that happen
I'm really loving Fedora Workstation since it's got the RPMfusion repos which are like AUR but without the stability or maintenance problems
The AUR and RPMFusion are really nothing alike. RPMFusion just provides stuff that can't go in the official Fedora repos because of licenses.
COPR is more analogous to the AUR but I get what you mean
Thank you, Chris. No matter what I might say what I actually do is come back to Debian family. Especially now that Flatpaks give such new packages or I can usually build.
Haha I always end back on Debian as well, Debian is so good.
@@ChrisTitusTech Yeah, Debian is my first love among the Linux distros as well. I have been running Debian 11 as my daily driver for the past 4 months and plan to do so for the foreseeable future though I am venturing into Slackware 15 on my testing PC but that is for fun and to explore the possibilities. LOL
@@donaldmickunas8552 I have to ask: What possibilities are there that all other distros of linux don't offer? I mean is the fact that all distros are Linux and any of them can become the other. I can only assume that you mean Slackware has possibilities more so than the others by the lack of scripts that auto-run by default, thus customization. Really I think a video on Linux distro foundation needs to be made to open up the viewpoint of what "llinux distros" truly are at their cores. FYI: My understanding is this: Kernel (Linux), Terminal (Bash or what have you), package manager and the rest is just distro fluff; correct me if there is more to it please.
@@TheOmegaDMM You are correct that, with enough work, one can turn one distro into another. However, that is a LOT of work. So, I advocate finding a distro that most closely approximates what one wants in a distro then modify it from there. Thus my interest in Slackware.
Regarding your question about what makes up Linux. A video would not cover it. Your real question is what makes up an Operating System. You can go from a 30,000 foot viewpoint to a very detailed examination. You might want to look into Unix system design if you are curious.
For me, my interest in Slackware is based on my querky preferences which some would call grey beard. I'm 67 years old. I grew up in an era before computers were common.
The whole notion of computers and what was possible with them was what caught the fascination of the geeky types back in the 1950s and 1960s. A machine that one could tell what to do. What was possible? Would it surprise you to know that most of what is being done today was being dreamed of and pursued by the geeks in the 1950s and 1960s? With enough knowledge, anything was possible. Computers back then were thought to be the solution to man's problems, the way of a wonderful future.
Anyway, I am looking for a minimal system that will allow me to do what I want. I prefer to avoid the huge all-in-one software packages as they become almost impossible to maintain over time. I prefer smaller packages that can be strung together through scripts and programs to the users specification.
Systemd is a relatively new init system for linux that has been adopted by most Linux distros. Today, it seems to work just fine for my modest needs. However, It continues to grow like a virus which concerns me. Slackware uses a script based init system that suits me better.
Every program/package has undiscovered bugs that could allow a hacker to break into a computer system. The larger the program, the more potential bugs. So, imagine, if you will, the number of potential bugs in these huge computer systems. So, minimizing the size of the system also minimizes the attack vectors.
I prefer Window Managers like i3, DWM, Bspwm over Display Managers like KDE and Gnome. They are both more minimal and they give me more control over my system.
One last point, I want control of my system, the more control the better. To have the control I want requires that I learn a LOT about scripting, programming, and how Linux works. Most people want a computer to be an appliance that simply works with minimal effort on the part of the user. I want a computer that I can do whatever I want with which requires a LOT of effort from the user. That's just me.
So, while I am using Debian 11 as my daily driver and I am content with it's reliability, I continue to look for that minimal system of my dreams. Slackware may offer a more direct path to what I am looking for.
BTW...there is a lot more to my ideal system which would take far too long to describe. Besides, you should be diving in and discovering Linux for yourself. 😉
So, I hope this is of some help. Take care and have fun!!!!!
@@donaldmickunas8552 Excellent reply! From what I have seen with Slackware back when I was younger (bought the disks and manual from a hobby lobby with my birthday money) it is pretty close to what you are looking for (assuming not much has changed). I definitely see your POV on things like systemD as a lot of forum users have expressed the same concerns. I love PCs but my ability to wrap my head around the core of all systems (binary code) makes it difficult for me to use them for more than "applicance" purposes. I really wish I had the same chance to grow up with them as now the mountain of information far surpasses my ability to absorb. I hope you have a lot of fun on your endeavor!
I've had a similar experience with Arch and Debian based distros. Constantly swapping between them. I tried out Fedora at one point, but I just couldn't get into it at the time, but have been considering giving it another try now that I know more about Linux in general. This video has definitely helped me to solidify that decision to give Fedora another shot.
That's why i move from arch to debian for my main computer and laptop, because it's stability. And i love debian very much. But i use fedora also on my second laptop, because it's very easy to use.
ya i'm thinking of giving Debian a try.. i just want to settle on a system already and debian seems like the best mix of stability, familiarity, and flexibility
Hey great video. I've really been happy to see Fedora getting the love it deserves lately. I was amused at your use of the Kernel as an example of a package that might not be quite as up-to-date as on arch, since the Kernel is honestly the easiest thing to switch out, even besides Fedora's Kernel Vanilla Repositories. A better example would be Mesa, the heart of the graphics system. s/Kernel/Mesa/g works pretty well on this video. I'm a little amused about the dnf discussion, since I think it's one of the things that most drives me crazy about Fedora - dnf automatically triggers an update to its repositories whenever you run commands, and it's really (ridiculously) slow about doing it. That means any time I want to install a package, dnf is just waiting to interrupt my business with a 30s timeout before I get to ask it to do something, and the differential updates just seem ridiculous. I've never seen the diff updates save more than a percent or two, and applying the diffs seems to take longer than the downloads. Despite my complaints, I do really appreciate the system. Debian's recent war over merged /usr is a great example of why. Which brings me around to another point - Fedora is not a derivative of RHEL. The two are related, but no longer share direct lineage.
Using Fedora 36 Beta as my daily driver. I can say, that it's perfectly stable. It really doesn't feel like Beta software. I used pretty much everything. From Debian Stable over Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Solus, Slackware, CentOS, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, openSUSE, you name it.
Debian-based is stable, yes. But I can't use anything Debian-based due to the packages being way too old.
Arch-based is up to date, yes. But it breaks so easily (especially if you use the AUR) that you can't really use it as a production system.
Solus is fine, but you don't have many packages.
Slackware... If you like it, use it. I don't.
openSUSE can be a great system, but I dislike the way to configure it.
RHEL-based is super stable (even more stable than Debian imo), but same problem as with Debian.
And then there is Fedora. While it's also Red Hat-based, it combines the things, I like about both Debian/RHEL and Arch. You get a stable Linux distribution that's also up to date. Heck I noticed, that my installation of Fedora Beta is sometimes even more up to date than frickin' vanilla Arch Linux with the testing repos ENABLED!
I can't tell if I'll eventually switch off of Linux some day (macOS and Apple Silicon is really tempting me tbh). But if I have to choose a Linux distribution, then it will be Fedora!
I feel like the people who say they used arch and it's unstable are actually using manjaro.
@@officialdoomatic not even, ive used manjaro for years on all kinds of hardware and i have had maybe 1 annoying break (2010 MBP wifi chip)
Use fedora copr for gnome triple-buffering patch.There's a massive difference in performance.
@@officialdoomatic I used both Arch and Manjaro. And while vanilla Arch is more stable than Manjaro, it still broke many times on my system. Especially Ethernet. My Ethernet chipset is a very well supported one and yet on Arch after a couple of updates, it started behaving weirdly (Mostly download speeds capped at ~80 BYTES/s) Never had that on any other distro. I still have one installation of Arch on a spare drive. Might check it out to see if it has returned to sane speeds again.
@@iitzrohan I would love to check it out even tho my GNOME 42 is snappy as is. Unfortunately the x86_64 package is only available for Fedora 34 and 36 doesn't want to install it.
OpenSuSE is the most underrated distribution all around. I think it deserves to be on any video.
BTW, I just read on the Distrowatch website that the SUSE Linux was created by a bunch of German Linux developers based on Slackware and SUSE as a company started from selling DE version of Slackware in Germany. Based on Slackware they developed SUSE, later changed the package management to RPM and init system to Init.d from Slackware's Init V and that's how SUSE came to be. Funny that I am a big fun of Slackware and then since 2006 I started to use OpenSUSE just as it was released and it originated from Slackware too. In the Linux tree SUSE is shown as Slackware's daughter distro. I am a loyal Slackware fan and user, and despite having used Debian and RedHat/Fedora based distros too, I always go back to the minimalism and stability of Slackware. It is so damn stable it is beyond belief. I installed Slackware in 2016 on my mother's PC, configured it and it works without ANY problems and administration from my side till today. The only thing I needed to upgrade was Firefox. That's about it.
I finally made the switch from Windows to Linux, and Fedora 35 is the base of that transition, particularly because it supports more modern hardware than most Debian-based distros (Arch wasn't an option, for several reasons, mostly to do with long term stability and package quality.) I do have Windows in a VM in case I need something that only runs In that environment. I've managed to get most of the games that I actually play running on Linux, either through Steam, or Lutris. So I'm happy with it overall, and will probably stick to it from here on out. Good overview of the differences between the distros, and especially the different package management systems. I'm very happy with DNF so far. Thanks, Chris :)
P.S. I used to be a regular Linux Mint user, but this time around with the requirement to be stable, but new enough to support newer hardware and software, it had to be either Fedora or something very close.
Obsidian looks awesome! I always liked the way you could structure your documents with org-mode and this looks like the alternative I always wanted.
You should install it and try it out on flatpak! Been suing it for 2 years no organizing my notes and you have no idea how great it is to mind map something using hyperlinks. It's like creating your own Wikipedia for your mind using markdown.
@@duser My killer feature is to use Syncthing (or similar) to make a proper sync of my Obsidian directory onto my Android smartphone, in realtime. I can populate my literal grocery list, get up, open Obsidian on my phone and the items are already listed, in quasi-realtime. That, and self-hosted as a bonus :) The fact that an Obsidian folder is portable (installed plugins and theme will persist across installations) is a nice plus, too.
@@bilange OH wow! you do that too?
I started using syncthing to sync my notes across several devices and over time it has become on of my favorite apps.
Its great that obsidian lets people actually own their files instead of charging for access on their on platforms.
I wish my organization allowed such tools. I'm enjoying using it. And it's search beats onenote so far.
Obsidian is wonderful. For about a year now I've synced it between my phone and desktops using Google Drive and DriveSync on Android.
I use it for daily planning, project planning, general note taking, and just archiving as much of my own brain as I can in a reasonable timeframe. I managed to actually comprehend Elden Ring's story by building (and extensively linking) it in wiki form as I went.
Best part is it just gets out of your way once you know what you're doing. You can get a lot out of it if you put a lot in, and I *have* found myself making connections I wouldn't otherwise.
I'm in a similar boat. I started trying out Linux in early 2020 and have hopped around all the main distros. Arch/Manjaro/Endeavour/Arco, Ubuntu/Debian/Mint etc. Then I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on my desktop and Fedora on my Thinkpad and have had zero inclination to distro hop since. Both of them feel extremely stable while still being up to date (Tumbleweed is even ahead of Arch sometimes), not to mention very polished and professional, not like someone's hobby project. I think the corporate backing plus being developed as serious workstations makes a big difference over all the rest. After the novelty of exploring Linux wore off and I just wanted to install a reliable, up to date system to get stuff done, these RPM distros have checked all the boxes.
I always look forward to your Linux videos. I appreciate/connect more since your return to Fedora. Keep them coming and I'll keep watching!
I think OpenSUSE also is worth mentioning in this party. It doesn't seem to get the most love for desktop, even though Tumbleweed is a pretty solid rolling release for workstations. It's backed by SUSE, which is pretty big in the Linux enterprise world, and it has the OBS and YaST. The package manager is also very similar to dnf UI wise and it also bases itself on RPM packages. Whenever I'm deciding between a distro for some quick testing in a VM, I'm pretty much always torn between opensuse and fedora.
I've been using openSUSE TW for a few months and its been smooth sailing, even though people told me not to as a home user yet its been rock solid. I recently jumped on fedora on a spare drive and I'm starting to enjoy it as well
Yeah, Fedora and Arch are my favorite distros. I use Arch as my daily, because I like the Arch Build System so much. I can super easily create my own packages like this which I can then deploy really quickly. RPM isn't bad in that department either but I just don't like it as much ... :)
Thanks for the video, i'm a noob to linux still but i'll have to give Fedora a shot. I've used Debian as my first linux based os for running a rust server and it didn't seem too hard to use after googling pretty much anything and everything and learning a little bit about apt and stuff. When I got it the way I wanted it for that purpose, it ran like a dream. I currently run Win7 on everything I don't game on but looking for alternatives for when browsers finally kill off 7.
Debian 11 with Gnome for me. My perfect distro after trying numerous others. If I want later apps then I can use Backports or Flatpak - no problem. Super stable and does everything I need it to do, and more. I won't be changing any time soon.
As you said you like to build packages for software you use yourself, one major difference to note between the three is how easy it is to create your own packages. Here Arch really shines as the PKGBUILD format used to build the packages is dead easy to use. It's not the most flexible, but it's the easiest to get into, the quickest one to set up for new packages and the whole AUR is based on it (as you noted).
Next up is the RPM format & its spec files used in Fedora/RHEL & others. It's not incredibly more difficult to learn & use than Arch's PKGBUILDs, but it does have its arcane corners & documentation can be somewhat hard to find (looking at all the different macros, which ones are available on the different distributions using RPMs etc.). Also it requires a certain directory structure for building, and that structure must be in a fixed place (noted in a config file), unlike the other two which can build from any directory.
The most complicated build system by far is Debian's. The packaging instructions spread over a tones of files (one for specifying meta data such as dependencies & package descriptions, one for the build rules, one containing the build system compatibility level, one for each sub-package listing the files to install in them…). It's incredibly flexible, but the cost is incredible complexity. It makes getting into the system really, really difficult for newbies. Quick, what's the difference between a native and a non-native package? What is the Quilt format? How do you write one set of Debian packaging instruction that works across multiple versions of a distribution where packages you depend on might have different names in different releases? Here's also where the meta languages used for the build files have their limits: things you can do in Pacman & RPM packaging such as true conditions based on OS & release you simply cannot do in Debian's packaging system.
As an OSS developer I've provided binary packages for all of those distros for a long time now, and the Debian-based systems are the ones I had to spend the most time on, hands down. Whenever I create one-off packages for myself I often actually use Pacman & convert them to other formats with the "alien" tool.
If you're new to packaging, look into Pacman, just to get a feel for it. Or RPMs on Fedora, it isn't really that much harder. It's actually fun & rewarding, despite how I sounded above 😁
Fedora needs better installer and documentation to be the best distro for pc
true I had a hard time setting it up with the terminal
I dont know about documentation as i always used arch wiki and occasionally ubuntu stuff, but installer is fine for me, not the greatest but for real if you are using it that often something else is wrong
THe only problems I have encountered in my windows to Fedora journey are the DEs. The default gnome is just android, and the extenstion I was recomented material shell is unstable in the current version and it sounds like I just have to wait for fedora to upgrade gnomes to get a fix. Then KDE wants to encrypt everything to the point that I cannto zip a file and it is constantly asking for some wallet credentials to log into everyhting. Also both the gui package managers are basicaly unusable, but for some reason contain unique updates not shown in dnf. And for some reason now get plasma errors when I log into non kde DEs. Fedora is probably great, but the DEs they have setup by default are a load of trash.
dont you just click next like 3 times and it is installed?
@@wisnoskij DEs in general are pretty bad imo, but yeah i agree the gui package managers always gave me problems and i am baffled such a problem is left in the backlog for so long
Although I'm probably incorrect in this, I usually mentally group distros by their package manager, and then have a folder for specialty distros (Tails, Parrot, Alpine)
It's so easy to have a rolling release on Debian, just select the unstable branch (you have the choice of stable/unstable, which should not be thought of as a disadvantage). If you want to have the most up to date kernel just download the source and compile it, you can be running it on the day it is released.
Sure, but then you might as well use Arch. Both are fine, I think that Arch is a bit better for rolling. But hey, Linux is all about giving the user choices and let the user be in chare over the system so roll with whatever floats your boat. :)
Actually, RHEL is based on Fedora. Fedora is their testing grounds before changes get made to RHEL.
I used Pop Os! for like 6 months on last year, and it's a great distribution for everything you need to do; also liked they modded gnome, they shortcut's, and the way they managed things like Nvidia drivers etc., but this year I committed to used Fedora daily for software related and gaming sometimes, and overall it's a great experience, everything works, every package you need will find in the shop (which works infinite better than the pop shop) or through DNF .. I feel like fedora with the vanilla gnome just get of you way and let you do things. Overall I think that it lacks on tiny things to be a perfect initial (linux new person) distro, like pre-install media codecs, maybe individual iso's with dedicated graphics drivers (like pop does), a better install wizard ?!
Fedora is general purpose distro, not a gaming distro as Pop_OS!.
Fedora is against dedicate use case distro so i don't think they will produce this.
For wizard it's coming, check out the Fedora 36 beta, you can enable 3rd party repo before installing, setup you system, chose packages...
Things are not perfect but they plane to improve it.
For gaming stuff related stuff their is community on Fedora
Fedora doesn't pre-install any proprietary product as it's against their ethos and for the sake of floss spirit. But it gives users the option to add them by their own consent afterwards, which I think is not limiting the user at all. And for the installer, they are working on a new and improved one.
@@rittalisa4916 They should do it just because it would be so cool if they did :D
@Saptarshi Mondal Yes, it's against what they believe as a project, i like and respect that, but my point is "Could be easier for someone without experience ? If so, why don't?" And I don't say Linux experience, but pc experience overall. For example, they put sections on the shop with "drivers" and "codecs" (for some reason lack the codec used by twitch, or I faced other problem, idk) and that its just perfect, no other words. About the new installer, looks good. :D
@@yt_reborngameplays And thinking now, what if they do this on the initial configuration pos-install .. Like 1 more page, "Do you wish to install now this and that driver? Or this and that codec?" For a person coming new frustrated with another distro or as new person to linux, they for sure would feel more comfortable
I'd 100% love to watch someone go through how they customized their desktop. Customize on linux seems so bloody hard because unless you know the name of exactly what you want, you'll never find it.
I found that KDE does make it really beginner friendly, perhaps at the cost of SOME customization, but latte for panels helps a lot if that's what you're into; you can make your own system wide themes, and coding widgets isn't too hard
AI should make Linux more attractive to use now. It’s a no brainer for any new systems.
@@GoonCity777excuse me? How? what does AI have to do with anything in this discussion
@@GoonCity777I'm switching back to Linux to get away from MS's AI integration, among other things. No thanks.
I really like what you've done with your tweaking! I would really love a whole tutorial series on how you built it and got it to look the way it does. I love Fedora as well. Thank you very much for your knowledge and sharing it with us :).
Love these comparisons! It's great to see the low level comparisons of the distros at the nuts and bolts level!
Great work!
Great video but you forgot to mention the different Debian branches besides the stable one. The testing branch and of course Debian SID.
Very true, I generally am always running Debian sid when I'm in Debian because I need more up to date packages. It only runs about a year behind.
@@ChrisTitusTech sorry but i don't understand "it only runs about a year behind". Behind what ? Do you speak about Sid having "old" packages?
@@ChrisTitusTech Debian Stable but for those apps that you need newer iterations of, use universal packages - flatpak, snaps or ApoImage. A reasonable compromise between stability & freshness? I use Fedora & OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Both hit a sweet spot in offering contemporary apps with stabiity.
Be good Chis if you could review imnutable OS' like Silverblue / Kinoite and Micro OS. Silverblue very good IMO.
Red Hat Linux was my first Linux in the late 90s, I think version 5 or so. Then I moved to Fedora Core until I switched to Ubuntu 8.04 in 2008. I think in 2011 I went to Debian and I used that for a very long time, until around 2017. Then a short excursion to Arch - but that was too unstable for me. That was no fun as an everyday system. And so I ended up back where it all started: with Red Hat and Fedora. And here I found my peace of mind. There is no better distribution that so perfectly integrates new and stable things than Fedora. And on my good old faithful ThinkPad T440p I still have RHEL 8.5 running. In the end, one would like to know how the experiences of Fedora flow into RHEL.
Best regards from Vienna/Austria to Chris Titus, one of the best Linux and Tech-TH-camr, and the community!
Just curious what unstability you had? I'm using manjaro on desktop and arch on laptop since november and i've yet to encounter a problem related to it.
Stability is important, but the most problems i ever had with was debian / ubuntu so apparently stereotypes can be very wrong...
Red Hat 5 was my introduction to Linux too. I tried Slackware and Gentoo for a while but used Debian on one of the machines. It was OK. The other runs Fedora and I have had zero reason to switch. I also found Arch way too unstable and not very practical when you need your machine for work.
This video is my spirit animal. I use the ubuntu 6 month releases, but have been using fedora on my surface and like it a lot. I'm considering switching, but at the same time, I really like the fact that Ubuntu is so widely supported.
Pacman is by far my favorite package manager, I really love what you called "funky syntax", and the way it presents the results when you search for packages. It's also the easiest to make packages for, at least from my experience. I don't really package software often, or at all these days, but in the past when I wanted to, I could fairly easily write a PKGBUILD and run makepkg.
I'm on Fedora right now, and my biggest gripe with dnf is that when you search packages, it doesn't tell you if any of the results it found is already installed on the system.
Also, Fedora is based on RHEL? Isn't it the other way around?
it is the other way around, rhel is based on fedora
I have watched your videos throughout the years, i just think its funny how your preference in distros went from deb, to arch, and now to fed. I first started my Linux journey ~2017-2018 by distro hopping all the "n00b friendly" distros, landed on Manjaro, and havnt left it. I use Ubuntu for my self hosted shinannagans for stability but so far my DT dual boots win10, and Manjaro. I intend to setup the DT to run a head/less game setup like you did, but for amd gpu, just have not had enough ambition lately. Thank you all the help! The guidance you and others provide (lawrence mostly) has kept me growing!
I think its a great idea that youre bringing this back, I expect this year to be quite a big year for Linux marketshare as a whole, and there really cant be enough good breakdowns of what makes a distro(family) on youtube. Keep it up man
Just keep in mind that every breakdown is from that persons perspective and understanding. Chris is a good man but he has his blind spots like the rest of us.
Fedora is the perfect middle ground for me, ease of use of windows but ability to thinker whenever wanted of linux, plus added security.
Best example of this was when installing I set up LUKS on both of my drives, /Home occupied 65% of my mechanical drive and root was 50% of my ssd. All in 5 minutes using a easy to follow gui that set up everything for me I just resized/moved drives the partitions I was interested in. Best of all is that dual boot worked flawlessly.
Totally painless and didn't take me hours of thinkering to modify fstab to automount both drives and then modify luks so that it only encrypts the partitions and so on. I even had problems with grub dualboot and bitlocker not liking it making me input the recovery code everytime I tried ro boot into windows.
It just works
I have always used Linux Mint and have been happy with it, but I am intrigued by this video and look forward to future videos about your next project. You may have convinced me to switch my daily driver!
I am extremely fond of mint. Simple clean, low resource usage, effective, and with only the mildest of bugs. Ubuntu 22.04 is my daily driver personally though.
Best summary of the different Linux distro's I came across so far. Recommended!
Well, I am actually more interested what the distros do „under the hood“. E.g. when I compare Endeavour OS with Fedora with the same desktop environment, Fedora uses noticeably more (cache) memory and at idle the processor works more, compared to Endeavour OS. And as a result, the same DE feels on Endeavour OS more snappy and uses less power, which becomes especially important on laptops, but I also don’t want in general any PC doing something in the background without me knowing what. So even though it is fine to use fedora overall, I am still feel a bit suspicious about it. Maybe this is just „my tinfoil hat“ speaking, but I just would like to know what is going on there.
İ'm not an expert on the subject but fedora comes with zram enabled, could this be related to the compression ongoing ?
@@Abstract_Nebulizer But shouldn't zram lead to less RAM usage instead of more? But I also don't know... had to look it up just now, what exactly zram does! :)
@@little_forest I don't think Endeavour OS uses ZRAM by default, nor other things such as SELinux. Zram does use system RAM as a swap device.
@@little_forest Yes and no. It uses actual RAM instead of swap, hence the higher memory usage.
@@pawrsley Ok, so this is a possible reason for the RAM usage. Does ZRAM also account for the higher CPU usage at idle, or might this be for something else?
Two things to note- Fedora is not a rolling release. RHEL is based off of Fedora.
Correction ,Manjaro isnt just arch. The Manjaro team add alot of extra nonsense and love breaking things. It was my first distro and it breaks more Vanilla arch. Endeavor ,Arco etc all "the same" as vanilla arch but obv with calimaries installer. I did like your comparison as too many new users get missinformed by Content creators with strong opinions and they often don't cover anything other than Speed and DE,GUI ,community support. Package managers are often overlooked and Mpr manager /Aur managers often not explained. Glad you creating resources for newbies! Also too many users too missinformed that archer is the only distro for gaming bc its higher performance but most games if your hardware is fine the game will be too.
I was all about Debian but after I tried OpenSUSE, I have my new favourite 💪🙏
For Debian-based distros I personally recommend to use Nala, a front-end for APT, it looks very nice and attractive and you can better see what APT is trying to do when installing or upgrading or anything else 🤘
I agree! Nala also installs faster.
Nala is really good, but what actually needed is a replacement for apt....
@@vaisakh_km You say that like there aren't any. (There are many.)
There is always Aptitude and apt, no need to add another one. Someone that use apt do not have problems to parse apt output, and beginners will use ... a gui anyway.
And i disagree about parallel downloads, this is an egoistic behavior and not fair about distro repositories.
I appreciate your comments about these different OS's. I have found significant differences in the different distros within Arch and Debian. Just for example, try -Syu in a bunch of different Arch distros, and you'll get wildly different experiences, some not even working at all. I've been experimenting with UltraMarine OS that is Fedora based (they even have a migration script) and like what they've done with the installer. It will be interesting to see if Fedora-based distros begin to proliferate the way they have with Arch.
Fedora is not rolling release, nor is it based on RHEL. It’s the other way around. Fedora is upstream of RHEL.
I like the distribution breakdown, but there's more happening under the hood than that. For example, SELinux vs AppArmor. Fedora has SELinux enabled by default, Debian has is supported but disabled by default and uses AppArmor out of the box. It doesn't come up very often as far as running a Linux distro for a desktop OS as it's pretty transparent for most desktop user tasks, but it does matter when you get into the guts of the system and start customizing certain aspects of it. Also there's the flatpak vs snaps vs appimages debate and it's only worth mentioning because there are different starting points for each distro in regards to them. Like how Ubuntu is very heavily invested in snaps and even has many default apps installed as snaps now on a refresh install.
Fedora is amazing, can’t wait to see the community grow
It has finally started growing! I've been using it since F32 and oh man, the experience has been delightful. Fedora all the way 😎
Come to arch and you will never go back
@@stardust1064 I tried Manjaro with kde for 2 months, had multiple crashes and app issues with aur
@@sinerova8678 manjaro is not arch.
I’ve tried various Fedora versions, LM, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc and after a decade of distro hopping and getting fed up then returning to windows, I stumbled across Garuda Arch using Wayland/Hyprland and after some tinkering (and a little bit of CLI work) it’s by far my absolute favorite and such a beauty! Always been more of a fan of Arch after becoming acquainted with Ubuntu back in 2012. I love the work flow, speed, resource usage, pacman, and its gaming capabilities. Such a satisfying feeling to truly make it mine. Excited to see what’s in store for Wayland/Hyprland!
I only used Arch for about 4 months now on a laptop and a PC but I really think that people are overstating the "instability" of Arch and the "danger" of using the AUR (tho in my opinion you should use Arch repos before using the AUR).
Also with Arch a lot of the system you end up using consists of things you chose and installed yourself. So in case something starts being buggy or stops working you have much more of an idea of what could be causing it and how to fix it than on distros that come "ready for use". That's not an advantage exclusive to Arch tho.
The only time that an update "broke" my system, was a major Gnome update that was completely incompatible with my extensions. That would have happened on any distro. Arch itself has been rock solid for me, and I have zero complaints!
I decided then to just uninstall gnome and install a tiling window manager, and I've never been happier!
You are right. I have been trying all linux flavors along the last 20 years, and in the end I stick with Fedora.
For a gaming system, I found Fedora not to be the best choice, as it offers by far the most un-opimized gaming experience in my testing. You can correct that with a custom Xanmod-Kernel to some degree and working with DNF was a pleasent surprise. On the other hand, there were some unexpected bugs when trying to get some COPR repos to run with Fedora Rawhide, which simply refused to work. Why? But there is hope, as there is a new gaming-dedicated project (Nobara) to tune Fedora better for gaming which I haven't tried out myself yet. But from what I read on their website, that should adress most of these shortcomings. Currently I prefer EndevourOS (Arch) as I get a x86-64-v3 custom repo with AVX2-optimized packages and despite its own shortcomings, I found customizing PKGBUILDS and compiling from AUR easier and more productive than doing the dependency handling myself on other distros which can be a pain if they miss crucial packages. Hence I found it to be the easiest to work with distribution for optimizing my Linux install, to get the most out of my hardware. I am impatiently waiting for SerpentOS, as it also aims to be a more performance-focused distro.
I see why, after I moved to Fedora 40 XFCE, my gaming experience hasn't been the best, and when I was on EndeavourOS Cinnamon I had a really nice experience with gaming and all.
this is a well-timed episode. I'm a Debian user but a) I strain against not having newer tools available in the mainline distro and b) I have a new machine and it doesn't look like Debian is going to support it without some hoop-jumping and roll-your-own kernels. I'm considering jumping ship, much as I hate to do it. My alternatives are Arch (possibly in the guise of Manjaro) and lately, Fedora. Ubuntu might be a potential choice because it tends to work with newer hardware, although I'm not a fan. Looks like I'm going to be trying several different distros and I hate distro-hopping: it's one reason I prefer Debian: it just works, and continues working for a long time, even if the toolchain tardiness is a pain in the butt. It's great with older hardware, but less so on bleeding-edge stuff, and I have strayed over that edge.
Fedora NEVER worked for me, and when I mean NEVER, I do really mean it. Log in to the desktop and I am greeted by three + 1 error notifications, three from the report tool about some gnome software misbehaving, the other one from the software store telling me that X failed to update.
I have tried the point releases as well as rawhide. Never worked on my machine, while Debian and even Linux From Scratch did work flawlessly.
I run Fedora, but your comment about an error notification popping up is so true, haha.
Works on my machine
@@lv1543 dpnt care
A windows to Linux tutorial would be fantastic, really want to, I am trying…but there is certainly some learning to get the most out of it. Great video.
There's another advantage of Arch that's worth mentioning. Since the install process is manual, you install ONLY the packages you want. Most distributions install a default set of packages that I have to go back and remove - sometimes with unintended consequences.
You don't really _have_ to remove anything unless you use a very very tiny hard disk. One of my most stable (actually probably most stable) machines is my Slackware and that one installs everything by default, simply because its package manager doesn't do dependencies. It's still up to you what services you enable.
I like seeing unbiased comparisons. I don't use Linux DT right now. But I have plans to get back to it. I do use Debian - but not the DTE because it's not configured with it where it is deployed. Over time I have realized I am very out of date! So seeing these comparisons is interesting and useful. I'll probably stick to debian when I do make changes - but you never know.
I'm still deciding on what to actually use as I wanted to teach myself Linux for my job's sake and also for myself since I might transition a semi old gaming PC into strictly Linux. I may start with Fedora and see how it goes. I have Mint running on an old Thinkpad and it's been smooth.
Absolutely beautiful I love it.
Bit of a journeyman Linux user for work essentially. I'm not afraid of CLI but I have no software dev uses or background. This is the info we need
Interesting journey You've had. I'm at the stage of going on Arch from Debian on my desktop PC. I do love that i can install Arch from ground up and have only the stuff i want on it. Fedora, hmmm, I'm not feeling ok about the fact that big corporation is behind it and that maybe one day it won't be free or they just block the progress of the project like they've done with CentOS.
An argument you can make is that a corporation is willing to spend the money on building a system for users to test and figure out problems for their main OS. They are basically getting free work by users for their RH server market.
If fedora dies, red hat will as well.
TOOL! My favorite band! Thanks for the video. I have been using fedora now for about 3 months, really like it.
For me arch har been stable as a rock, only time i had some problems was when i did not update a laptop for a year but all i had to do was to remove some packages.
Whenever i use Arch, it's breaking at every corner. Updates every day, so everything always works, but tomorrow something will break, and i have to wait for the day next for it to work again.
Sure, it's great and all, but i'll never use it as my day to day. Never.
Fedora, is far more enticing. It's like Arch, but far less "breaky fixy breaky fixy" in how it performs.
Debian based Systems like Mint (and or ubuntu?) are definitely going to reign in the Linux Noob category however. It's just that type of Distro.
@@AURON2401 now you must be the noob if you manage to break arch all the time. Ive had one breakage in 3-4 years and im not using the lts kernel. Also a tinkerer but yet arch stable as a rock.
@@Arcticpagan Well hello, the asshole who takes pleasure in insulting everyone else to enhance his own ego has emerged. Mind renaming yourself to ZAsshole?
Break Arch? no. It breaks itself. Everyday. Even Arch users and Developers admit that. Arch isn't rock solid, it's Unstable, Hence the need for the rolling release.
Mind renaming yourself to ZAsshole? Seems a more fitting title.
@@AURON2401 never had any of the problems you describe and i dont update on a daily basis i update here and there sometimes two weeks apart sometimes 12 hours apart.
I've just started using Fedora. I've been on Arch and Debian. I really have been loving my experience with Fedora. I don't know how to explain it,but it just seems to make more sense the more you get into it.
Maybe the Arch is for the use you've mentioned but 9/10 times, a general GNU/Linux problem leads (after search) to Arch Wiki...
I've been using manjaro for over a year and now i want to switch to a more security and privacy friendly distro like fedora.
The problem is i've fallen in love with the AUR! I know Arch can be hardened, but it seems like a too complicated process for me...
On Fedora their is Copr...
I don't use so many of them I prefer compiling by hand the few software that I need and who are not on the fedora repos.
I haven’t personally used fedora but I do know they have rpm fusion. Not sure how close it is to the aur but I know that adds a lot of apps.
Fedora copr is like an alternative to ubuntu PPA and AUR. But you must enable rpmfusion for a greater availability of softwares.
In my eyes, Manjaro has lost its charm and the *friendly Arch* title as it's really straying away from Arch and.. has issues that is not even arch related.. I have watched a TH-cam video talking abt this topic and I gotta agree with it.. I would suggest however if you are looking for a better arch-friendly distro, try Endeavour OS... Sure, it's still arch but I personally find it much easier to secure and is way closer to pure Arch than Manjaro would even try..
I also have the same problem with you about deciding between the bleeding edge of arch and the stable-ness of debian. thanks for this content really helped me to make me more certain to distro hop to fedora
Honestly, i think that arch or maube better artix would be a better choice. Installing programs and setting up is much much easier on arch based distroes then debian. Plus, using arch based over fedora is definitely AUR
Fedora also has Copr, a likely alternative to ubuntu PPA and AUR.
How does RHEL going closed change things?
If you do a Windows to Linux video in the future, please include how to read QA's from different distros.
This was something that really confused me when I first started Linux that I think a lot of new users would benefit from. I would often look up questions when something wasn't working, and the response would be from the Ubuntu community, but I was using Fedora. So I had no idea if it'd work or not. Now that I've gotten more comfortable with it, I understand that if an answer says that the solution is "rpm install " there's a good chance I'm missing that package too and I just need to "dnf install ". But when I was a new user, I didn't really know what the commands were doing, or why, etc.
I think it'd be really helpful for new Linux users to understand some of the basic syntax they'll see when they're searching for a solution, and how to apply it to their own distro if the only solution they can find isn't for the distro they're using.
Even Linus Torvalds uses Fedora. I use RHEL in servers at work and Fedora in a VM at home (alongside Ubuntu and Windows). By far, my favourite linux distro to use is Fedora. And my knowledge in Fedora for the most part works just fine with RHEL too, because Fedora is based on RHEL. And as others have mentioned, DNF is freaking awesome! dnf revert is such a life saver when things go awry.
I've daily driven each of these three at separate points while looking for a distro I like, with Arch being the most recent I've used. Gotta say, I love Arch due to the fact that when you install it, you have complete control and choice over what goes into it. Want a command line with nothing fancy? Good, you start with that anyway. Want a fancy DE that's absolutely tricked out without interference from an already installed DE? Perfect, you can choose out of any of the popular ones without worrying about conflicting configurations.
Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu are both great OS choices, but for me the out-of-box experience that you get with Arch is what I was looking for. Just make sure if you're doing UEFI booting you figure out if you need to put --removable in your GRUB install because I didn't and was stuck forcing my laptop to load a specific EFI file each time (manually selecting it I mean) for a week before I figured out my mistake.
Funny how I use all of them Fedora on my laptop arch on my second pc and debain on my server
A lot of people saying Arch is unstable and you may face up some bugs, but i didn't face anything while using it, the AUR is there if you need some app that is not available on repo(you can read on net why the repository packages are limited), and also the community is freaking big, there is a lot of support, and the thing that i like about Arch is the up to date.
Wow, first it's Debian's 90s abandoned looking website. Now, FEDORA is the best way to avoid "AUR neck-beards". It's not Linux that's hard to use, it's these cruel.. hilarious mind games that scare people off.
Its about Power: what humans can't turn into a monopoly for wealth, they make into a religion for status. Dogma should be arcane and obscure, else the common ruck won't defer to the priests.
On the other hand you can just use Mint that has a great website, great community forums, super easy to install, configure and use without even touching the terminal.
@@mi2-c035 normal release ubuntu would be better for desktop use as mint is only based on LTS version.
It's 6 months behind vs 24 months behind.
6 months stability is more than enough for desktop use.
@@rishirajsaikia1323 For a while i used to think the same, but it turns out if you can update the single packages you need to be on the latest version, it's not going to change much: you can upgrade the kernel, some packages ship with the latest versions (like Firefox and Chromium for instance) while for others you can use PPA for a more recent version of LibreOffice.
Big thanks. I'm new to your channel. Started watching yesterday and already moving to Fedora and confirmed the persistent voice in my head for some time now that I really only need to consider three distributions instead of all the versions of them. Look forward to future videos.
My friend... 22 year Linux System Engineer here. The gold standard is Kubuntu LTS... you could go Regular releases of Kubuntu, but got to say, Kubuntu has got it all.
Thank you - somebody finally opened the hood a little, instead of just reviewing the paint of the car!
Someone that actually prefers dnf. Now I've seen everything! You make some good points, but for someone like me, a home user with simple day to day needs mostly revolving around multimedia, I've settled on Arch after years on Debian stable, Mint, various Ubuntu flavors (mostly Kubuntu and Neon), and dabbling with most of the competitors including Fedora. I agree that pacman's syntax is a bit unnecessarily arcane, but who really does much more than -Syu or -S or -R? Maybe -Ss occasionally. Not that hard to remember the common usages. I find Pamac (AUR) to be decent enough for everything else, though I find that I rarely use it.
My issues with Fedora are mostly that it's Gnome-centric (I despise Gnome and believe that Linux is years behind in wide acceptance due to the major distros insisting on using it as the default). Sure, the Plasma spin (I currently have 36 installed too) is usually fine, but for my use case it requires extra effort to get things set up for multimedia (rpmfusion - I know, not hard but an extra series of steps before you can actually do things...).
Plus, I find dnf lacking in a few ways. I used to have an ISP that throttled me after a certain point, and dnf doesn't like that AT ALL. It would spend hours trying to download large packages, failing, then starting again FROM THE BEGINNING (something to do with a curl bug was the best I could diagnose). I no longer have this issue as I've ditched that ISP, but it was a real concern that even the forum experts were never able to help me with much. Never did find a fix other than manually downloading the packages with wget, which of course picks up where failed DL's leave off. It's also much MUCH slower than pacman for the most part, in my experience at least. Then there's the confusion as to what normies should use to update or install. Gnome Software, which will prompt you to reboot unnecessarily? CLI won't do that... Those are the choices, aside from the abysmal dnf-dragora. Maybe they have muon? Haven't looked. I used to like Yumex years ago... Bottom line? I'll take pacman every day of the week over dnf for my use case.
I don't mind Fedora at all, despite the above blathering. It's a fine distribution, like openSUSE or those mentioned already. Somehow I just don't find myself wanting to use it as a daily driver. Maybe it's the release cycle. I always seem to be upgrading or installing, not using. Not on Arch, and I haven't experienced so much as a paper-cut bug in quite a while, though I acknowledge that it does happen, usually with a front page announcement on their web page describing the steps necessary to fix things. For me? Arch, hands down, no contest.
RedHat Mandrake was my first GNU/Linux gui desktop system. I've always been very pleased with RedHat's environments.
Mandrake was its own distro, that later changed name to Mandriva and then to Mageia. It never belonged to Red Hat.
Thank you. I have been delving further into Linux and have been struggling with the true difference of distros. With this and a video from redhat guy I finally feel I have it. I just didn't understand why people kept showing the desktop environment as the distro. So thanks. Also the setup you have looks neat -- I will look at all of those things and see what I want. As a developer I never had problems using the terminal and have found that is the fastest way to do almost everything in Linux. But thanks again for the ideas and much better understanding.
Great approach to this. Been out of desktop Linux for years, just decided to replace Windows on my 3 year old laptop with Nobara Linux, a Fedora derivative. I've always favored RH compatible distros, didn't know anything about dnf. Good stuff, thanks.
First time I tried Linux was Ubuntu back around 2007. Then was primarily on Mac for many years. Tried various distros over the years in VM's to play around. When Fedora 34 came out last year, I put it on a mini pc to see what it was like on bare metal. I literally stopped using my iMac, and have been on the Linux PC full time. Fedora 34 was the point where I was like - ok, this has all the drivers installed already, I can connect to my printer automatically, I can get all sorts of software in the app store, use flatpaks if you want or not if not, current kernels for newer hardware, super stable and nothing ever broken, btrfs and snapshots allowing system restores if I break something. long story short: as a Linux n00b, it was easy out of the box to get started, and the more I learned about Linux, the more I loved the distro I chose.
Been using Fedora since F32 now (after installing it for an LPI/RHCSA Exam). I really like the spins (Cinnamon) and how smooth they run. Thumbs up for this distro and your video. ;)
Debian is obv the most Desktop-oriented. Fedora is Red Hat, it's very work focused like all Red Hat products (their "desktop" people use is literally called "workstation"), so just doesn't prioritize some of the home user luxuries. Arch is primarily for the trans community.
Yup a great video, and your thoughts are really very interesting.
What I would like to know next is: your thoughts and your impressions comparing fedora with opensuse tumbleweed.
These 2 are very close to each other with certain substantial differences...
If you use VMWare, please be careful with Fedora (and most RHEL based distros). When VMWare for Linux updates it has to recompile some C++ header files & Fedora updates have a tendency to break the VMWare update. It happened to me & it was really no fun. (I think I read online it can happen to CentOS too, so, it's specific to Fedora only)
For the last year I've been exactly where you said you were...loving Arch for newer stuff and Debian for smoother, cleaner, more stable stuff. And now unlike every other distro comparison TH-camr, you told me exactly what I needed to hear... Fedora is a beautiful blend of Arch and Debian. Tried it once years ago and I'm going to give it another go.
If someone had told me about this a couple years ago it would have saved me so much time and aggravation!
Can someone recommend the best Fedora flavor to try on a low power laptop I'm messing with just because?
You answered so many questions I've had in my search for what's best for me. Thanks.
Fedora lxde spin
Good video Chris. I might have to retry Fedora KDE at some point. I wouldn't add anything to your comments except to remind people that Debian's stability is a general rule. There is hardware it just doesn't like. I've tried half a dozen Debian distros on my desktop and none would last more than a couple of months before breaking. It has been running EndeavourOS for a couple years with no major issues. Just wanted to remind people of that and prevent them from inferring the general rule into a universal one.
Use the unofficial non-free Debian ISO and see whether the driver issues persists. Debian removes lot of close source drivers in spirit of its DFSG rules.
@@mzs114 Already tried it. Didn't help.
Back when I worked for Business Objects/SAP ten years ago, most of our major business clients (such as Intel, GE, etc) use Unix (Solaris for example), some used Linux (mostly all REDHAT or SUSE). I'd say about half used Windows, and of course none used a Mac. I am speaking to servers of course, not desktops. At work we'd have to maintain pretty much every client environment since they'd spend from a few hundred thousand to millions per year on Business Intelligence support contracts. The databases they used were mainly Oracle, IBM DB2, MS SQL Server, and our low end clients used MySQL in some cases. The primary reason for RHEL was that they'd have support contracts for the OS itself, we are talking top 500 companies, not your average everyday ecommerce :)
You automatically get a like because Obsidian + Fedora has made my not taking go to the NEXT LEVEL, and that's before I used the community plugins! 📓➕🖤