It seems like every 7-8 years I’m switching operating systems. In 2006 I first started using Apple, because it was just so damn cool to have a well working Unix-like system. (I’ll never forget you Snow Leopard).
In 2015 I switched to Ubuntu. Apple’s Software seemed to hit rock bottom at this point from a quality perspective, and hardware seemed to go obsolete at a rate I hadn’t seen before. Fed up paying a premium price for a sub-par product, it was time for a change.
Ubuntu’s fall
Ubuntu was the obvious choice. I want something that just works, and Dell’s XPS 13 Developer Edition ships with Ubuntu which means hardware support from Dell itself. Breath of fresh air and fast as hell. The
experience was similar to what people have been saying about the new M1 chips. But it’s fast because of software, not hardware.
But something changed with Ubuntu in recent years. I think linux users have a thicker than usual skin when it comes to software issues and are willing to look past more things. But Ubuntu’s quality has been consistently falling. I was being worn down, and it seems to be a common sentiment in my bubble.
The best example is Ubuntu’s package manager Snap. A pretty good idea, I like the branding too but the execution hasn’t been there. Ubuntu users have been effectively beta-testing this for years. Just to give you an idea I made a giant list of bugs that I ran into when Ubuntu switched
Firefox from apt to Snap.
To be honest I feel a bit bad ragging on Ubuntu, because without knowing anything about how the project and Canonical is run, my intuition is that the steam is just kind of running out for them. Ubuntu feels ‘depressed’, but maybe it’s all in my head.
Installation
Installation was super smooth. I always forget to make a separate /home
mount, so it took a while to move everything to an external disk and back.
The one thing I always forget to move is my MySQL databases, and today was no exception.
Non-free stuff
Fedora does not ship with things that aren’t open source. Nothing against that philosophy (awesome in fact), but personally I don’t mind adding some binaries for a better experience.
I miss Ubuntu’s Additional Drivers tool, because it told me what to install. I’m sure the drivers I need are available for Fedora, but I don’t know what to look for which makes me slightly worried my computer is not running optimally. Battery feels worse
but that could also be my imagination.
Video in Firefox didn’t work at all in stock Fedora. I had to install ffmpeg to get it to barely function, but then I discovered RPM Fusion, where I got an even better ffmpeg, plus gstreamer and Intel drivers and I can now watch beautiful smooth 4K video, and confirmed with intel_gpu_top
that I’m using hardware acceleration.
Gnome
Ubuntu used to have their own desktop environment called Unity. In 2018 they switched to Gnome, but they modified Gnome to keep their Unity look.
This felt like a good move, because it let them kept their look while taking advantage of all the Gnome plumbing.
One drawback is that Ubuntu was usually a bit behind with Gnome features.
Fedora uses stock Gnome. As a result
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2756 bytes)