I’m not super tech savvy or familiar with the linux world much, nor do I know anything about the drama behind these things, so please bear with me.
Heard a lot of bad things about RedHat and vaguely know that they have a lot of influence over Fedora and things like Wayland, which I’m planning to make my main OS sometime soon. How concerned should I be in the long term if I settle with Fedora? Don’t wanna constantly distro hop anymore, Fedora is the closest thing to my needs for now.
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You should. Give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a try. It’s about as leading-edge as Fedora, but without the Red Hat baggage.
SUSE, the enterprise behind OpenSUSE, has scarcely any controversies behind it. It is also EU-based.
Plus tumbleweed works pretty well. That’s my daily driver distro.
While Red Hat does a lot to enable Fedora (and the Linux ecosystem in general), Fedora remains a community distro. It just happens to receive significant backing. Which, one might argue, isn’t a lot different to how SuSE backs openSUSE. Heck, while (arguably) in a different order of magnitude, Canonical contributes to Debian and even Valve contributes to Arch.
But, to underline an important aspect to the RedHat-Fedora relationship, Fedora does not have to follow Red Hat in everything. Like how Fedora continues to default to Btrfs as its filesystem while Red Hat has deprecated Btrfs for 7 years now.
Yet, I don’t want to underscore that both Arch and Debian can probably easily keep the lights on if any contributing party would cease its support. On the other hand, if Red Hat or SuSe would stop contributing to Fedora or openSUSE respectively, then it would at least require a huge restructuring for them to have a chance at surviving the aftermath. So, in that sense, both Fedora and openSUSE are dependent on their respective big backers.
As for concerns related to Red Hat, they did like two bad things (I think) that go against the spirit of open source sortware. But these pale to their contributions. With PipeWire, systemd and Wayland; they’ve literally built the backbone of modern Linux. Boycotting them will likely result in picking some niche Linux that might be a huge pita to operate.
If you’re interested in a deep dive, then consider looking into this thread and the links found within.
Really appreciate the in-depth explanation, thx! I’ll take a look at the links then.
So with all of this considered, do you personally think it’s safe to go with Fedora long term? Even in a worst case scenario? And if not then what else should be considered for me?
I also am curious about Fedora’s whole “leading edge” thing, do they push for new technologies even when it’ll cause issues or are they careful with it?
Really appreciate the in-depth explanation, thx!
It has been my pleasure, fam! Note that my answers found below are often oversimplified and/or kept short for the sake of brevity. Please feel free to ask me in case you’d like me to elaborate on any of the topics discussed below or otherwise.
So with all of this considered, do you personally think it’s safe to go with Fedora long term?
First of all, I have to make clear that I’ve been a Fedora user ever since I (cold turkey) made the switch from W10 over three years ago. And any of the ‘scandals’ that have happened since[1] hasn’t swayed me away from it (yet). So, I’m probably biased in my views. Or, at least don’t equally value the very same things that have led detractors to look elsewhere.
With that out of the way…, you should ultimately make up your own mind. What is it that has drawn you into Fedora in the first place?
Even in a worst case scenario?
I suppose the worst case scenario would be that Fedora somehow ceased to exist and erecting a fork didn’t turn out to be a productive endeavor either. But I suppose most technologies come with some risks attached to their long-time survival. Yet, this doesn’t necessarily deter us from trying them out whenever they happen to be a good option at the very moment they’re considered.
Regardless, it is statistically unlikely you will stick to your first distro in the long run. So, I suppose you don’t have to overthink it; if it satisfies your needs at the moment, then it’s good to give it a go 😉.
And if not then what else should be considered for me?
Again, I don’t know exactly what drew you to Fedora in the first place. So, please consider to shed some light on that 😉. Afterwards, I can try to fill in my thoughts 🙂.
I also am curious about Fedora’s whole “leading edge” thing, do they push for new technologies even when it’ll cause issues or are they careful with it?
Historically-speaking, Fedora used to be pretty ruthless 🤣. One might argue that they forced their users to test the new and upcoming technologies long before they were ready. This has caused their community to feel alienated and not respected. In turn, Fedora’s user base became mostly comprised of (relative) Linux-experts (with Stockholm syndrome 😜) that could deal with these issues.
Thankfully, though, Fedora seems to have learned from their past mistakes. For the last couple of years, earth-shattering changes have not been introduced. Sure, Fedora continues to be forward-thinking and the first to introduce changes that might be considered drastic. Yet, it’s handled in a respectful way towards its users.
Unsurprisingly, this has even translated to a (relative) uptake of their user base. Heck, Fedora -at least for some- fills the very space that Ubuntu used to dominate. All in all, Fedora seems to have changed their ways for the better. As such, the concerns seem to have become (slightly) out of place; unless Fedora is legally forced, you should expect a very sane, ‘stable’ and reliable experience.
Which should be just one, the other one was committed before I started to use Fedora. ↩︎
It’s totally fine, no worries!
And again as I’ve said before I don’t wanna distro hop anymore, this isn’t my first distro (but am not a linux expert or anything, very much a normal/casual user here), jumped around a lot for a good while now before eyeing up Fedora to be my main, have a good idea of what I want and so am focused on the long term and reliability of the thing.
And well, you kinda said it yourself haha, it’s up to date but stable, and it’s basically taken the place that Ubuntu originally held as a jack of all trades of sorts, that’s literally it, that’s my reason for being interested in it, Ubuntu has been extremely hit or miss for me in regards to stability and updates (literally the system at one point nearly bricked itself when trying to upgrade and am now stuck on a specific Ubuntu version forever because of it, the updating thing seems completely borked for me, can’t upgrade it without wiping the whole thing and this isn’t the first or last time anything Ubuntu based has done this to me before, updating it is very dreadful for me because it’s a complete gamble), and as far as I know Fedora seems to be a lot more stable and polished on that front, haven’t heard anything majorly bad about it.
That’s good to hear, well alright then, what legal stuff would be concerning if I may ask? Heard at one point they were gonna get rid of hardware acceleration or something because of legalities or whatever?? But then changed their minds? Idk, stuff like that worries me a bit haha.
And again as I’ve said before I don’t wanna distro hop anymore, this isn’t my first distro
Ah okay, somehow that went over my head. Apologies*. Thanks for clarifying, though!
so am focused on the long term and reliability of the thing.
it’s up to date but stable, and it’s basically taken the place that Ubuntu originally held as a jack of all trades of sorts
Noted. Thanks (again) for clarifying!
Ubuntu has been extremely hit or miss for me in regards to stability and updates (literally the system at one point nearly bricked itself when trying to upgrade and am now stuck on a specific Ubuntu version forever because of it, the updating thing seems completely borked for me, can’t upgrade it without wiping the whole thing and this isn’t the first or last time anything Ubuntu based has done this to me before, updating it is very dreadful for me because it’s a complete gamble), and as far as I know Fedora seems to be a lot more stable and polished on that front, haven’t heard anything majorly bad about it.
Pff…, there’s a lot to unpack here. Heck, I could dedicate a whole comment just on this. Unsure if you’d be interested, though 😅. Regardless, the gist would be that uncompromised stability across updates on Linux has historically been (and mostly remains to be) a hard problem to solve. This isn’t because the Linux ecosystem is incompetent, instead the onus is on the freedom we enjoy on this platform and the consequences that very freedom entails.
Anyhow, I do agree that Fedora (or at least some variant of it) does better than Ubuntu in this regard. There are high-profile Ubuntu veterans that have since migrated to ‘Fedora’ for stability and they’ve been very much enjoying themselves with the improved experience.
what legal stuff would be concerning if I may ask? Heard at one point they were gonna get rid of hardware acceleration or something because of legalities or whatever?? But then changed their minds? Idk, stuff like that worries me a bit haha.
Please feel absolutely free to ask fam. At least :P , as long as you can bear my ramblings 😂.
So…, like a lot of other[1] independent distros, Fedora is not able to ship with everything the end user might require for smooth onboarding. Instead, for hardware acceleration and more, the end user is responsible to install it themselves if they desire full functionality. This shouldn’t be too much of a deal; some might just regard it as part of the first installation process. However, sometimes, Fedora (and the aforementioned distros) are legally bound to cease support of existing functionality. That’s where things get ugly 😅; see this thread. Note that this isn’t lost forever as changes like these just introduce more elements/bullets/articles to RPM Fusion’s Howto’s. Though, it goes without saying that Ubuntu handles this a lot more gracefully.
Thankfully, there are downstream projects of Fedora that are not -or, rather, don’t seem to be- legally bound to the same extent. As such, onboarding is handled better. Heck, some even come with exceptional system management promises (on which they deliver), that ensure your system continues to function as desired. I can share some of my first-hand experiences with these: on multiple occasions I didn’t experience any breakage or whatsoever from the supposed loss of functionality that other users were affected by. Why? Because the maintainers of the downstream project I run on my system handled it without requiring any input from me. It genuinely feels like dark sorcery at times :P .
I believe at least Debian and openSUSE suffer from this as well. ↩︎
You found something that works for you. keep using it until it doesn’t.
Ignore the drama, if you like the distro then use it. All the big distros are influenced by the companies that use them but should a distro make a substantial.change you don’t like you can move.
However I would always have the mentality that you may one day want to move or reinstall so its good to be ready.
As a minimum its a good idea from the outset to ensure data you would want to keep and migrate is kept somewhere secure and separate to the linux OS itself. That might be having a separate home partition and root partition (not essential but its made migeation for me much easier). However regardless of that always do have robust backups of all your home folder data anyway.
If you do end up tweaking and getting more technical its also a good habit if you tweak your system files (like fstab files etc) to try and keep backup copies of those away from the root folder structure should you need to rebuild your system with another distro or even a fresh install. I also even save copies of webpages where i got specific tips and tricks to achive things i wanted so i can redo it easier in the future - has saved me a lot of time when i do make major changes.
Another good thing to backup from time to time can be your /opt folder. Some software you install may end up there and can contain custom files (esp if you needed to do something manually or customise it - Jellyfin for me sits in /opt and i always fins it a bit annoying to set up between distros - ffmpeg, firewall and file permissions are recurrent issues for me every time).
Finally I’d suggest it can be good to backup a list of your flatpak packages and system installed packages into text files from time to time (this is easily done but how differs between distros). This can be a helpful reference to rebuild your preferred set up when starting from afresh with a new distro or reinstall. You’d eventually reinstall everything you need without that but i’ve found such lists have saved me a lot of time.
A distro change or reinstall could be years away but your future self will appreciate it if you have regualar backups of all thet stuff - makes reinstalling or migrating to a new distro a doddle. Also it gives you freedom to do it whenever you want - if you know its already all there its far less daunting.
How much you should do depends on how deep ypu get into twealing your system. A minimum is bakc up your home folder / personal files, anything more depends on what you end up getting up to with your system.
Fedora forces new not ready beta technologies to stay the most innovative distro no matter what. That’s basically all you need to know.
