Fedora worth checking out?

[mamamia88]

Pretty comfortable in a debian or arch environment but, looking for something new to try out. Is it worth learning a bit about fedora?

[Eigenvektor]

More knowledge never hurts. If you already know your way around Linux, it shouldn't be too hard. The package manager has a different name, some packages have a different name and some paths and default settings may be different. But overall it's still a Linux distribution.

 

If you need Linux knowledge for work, it may be worthwhile checking out server distributions like CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Get comfortable operating a Linux system remotely through an SSH shell, rather than a desktop.

[SupaKomputa]

No. after centos no longer free i moved to Ubuntu for all my server. I think most of the community fed up with RHEL.

[Guest willies leg]

Fedora and Red Hat seem to be a bit behind on things, although Linus uses and develops the kernel on Fedora.

RHEL is good if you want to get a job in a large government organization, they typically use stuff like RHEL, Oracle, and other expensive to support but "slow and safe" software, that's the only reason I'd ever look at that stuff.

I've always enjoyed Ubuntu, but their latest stuff with snaps is not so good, so I switched to Debian, have been using it for almost 2 years now, enjoying it.

 

[flindeberg]

1 hour ago, willies leg said:

Fedora and Red Hat seem to be a bit behind on things, although Linus uses and develops the kernel on Fedora.

RHEL has some out-of-tree backports though, of which most are available on Fedora, so neither are as far behind as it might seem at a first glance.

[finest feck fips]

4 hours ago, mamamia88 said:

Pretty comfortable in a debian or arch environment but, looking for something new to try out. Is it worth learning a bit about fedora?

Yes. Fedora is worth checking out because it has well-engineered tooling, and at root those are what make a distro a distro. It's worth playing with and learning about:

• dnf, Fedora's high-level package manager
• dracut, Fedora's initial ramdisk generator
• Fedora packaging guidelines, since Fedora uses the latest RPM specification and best practices. It's cleaner than what you'd be used to on Ubuntu or even openSUSE
• Fedora SIlverblue, which is an interesting approach to shipping a stable base system built on top of traditional package management with rpm-ostree
• stratis, an alternative approach to achieving the same kinds of functionality as ZFS using existing filesystems

Fedora is pretty up-to-date, and Fedora Rawhide is nearly as bleeding edge as Arch, but they have a different design philosophy from Arch that shows in some of the choices mentioned above.

Imo Arch's KISS philosophy actually results in a deficient technology stack in a number of ways, and Fedora is a good example of how a distribution whose intended audience includes users similar to those in the Arch userbase might choose to make different tradeoffs. dnf is a very good example of this, with a much more robust dependency solver and more sophisticated support for managing multiple repositories, at the cost of a more complex implementation whose worst cases are slower. (Correct and complete dependency resolution requires a SAT solver, which means tackling an NP-complete problem. Pacman gets to be fast by using an algorithm which cannot find solutions to some dependency resolution problems, even when they exist. DNF uses libsolv, which includes a mature SAT solver so that it never fails to find a solution if one exists.)

 

[finest feck fips]

1 hour ago, LloydLynx said:

Fedora also puts you in the mindset that everything has to be done the proper and perfect way with no exceptions.

Could you say some more about this? I think this is kinda interesting. Is it the documentation? Is it the community that instills this mindset?

I'm imagining that the kind of stuff you have in mind that (something about) Fedora (culture or usage) discourages includes things like

• modifying files that belong to packages on the system, in-place
• using checkinstall or just doing ./configure && make && make install instead of packaging something
• using sudo pip install
• idk what else

Do I have the right idea here?

[10leej]

11 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

No. after centos no longer free i moved to Ubuntu for all my server. I think most of the community fed up with RHEL.

rhel did nothing wrong CentOS was gonna die anyway even if rhel never bought it.

[Sauron]

I mean, why not... but there really isn't that much to "learn". The only major differences between the distros you mentioned are the package manager and the release model. On the other hand, if you're looking to get some sort of certification or work as a sysadmin then yeah, you might be expected to know specific things about RHEL-based systems and some practice would be good even if you have prior Linux experience.

3 hours ago, finest feck fips said:

I'm imagining that the kind of stuff you have in mind that (something about) Fedora (culture or usage) discourages includes things like

• modifying files that belong to packages on the system, in-place
• using checkinstall or just doing ./configure && make && make install instead of packaging something
• using sudo pip install
• idk what else

Do I have the right idea here?

Nah, you can still do all of those more or less as easily as you could in any other distro.

[finest feck fips]

9 hours ago, LloydLynx said:

Basically I got obsessed with using the default settings for everything and doing everything the "proper" way. I was so obsessed with doing things properly, I would've just lived with a problem rather than doing a slightly hacky fix. I was worried about the cleanliness under the hood rather than the end result of a working system.

This is really interesting to me in part because it's such a strange phenomenon and in part because to me, it's hardly strange at all! I can relate to that kind of perfectionism, and in general I strongly prefer to do things ‘properly’ on Linux because Linux distros come with such good tools that make everything work well when you do things ‘properly’.

When you want to forge ahead and learn whatever it takes to do things ‘the right way’ (e.g., ‘fuck it, today is the day I learn to create proper packages from scratch for my distro’), this attitude can be fine and even productive (if time consuming). But if you're not sure what the way forward is, it just leaves you with low-grade anxiety and a tendency to procrastinate, because it makes each task seem bigger than it really is (‘I'll take care of that later, when I have time to learn how I really want to do it’).

So maybe a useful piece of advice here (especially keeping in mind that the latest Fedora ships with BTRFS on the root filesystem by default, so you can probably go back if you think you've really made a mistake!) is:

Sure, try Fedora! Try it and plan to fuck it up with experiments and hacky bullshit because it's yours to fuck up and you can always reinstall it if you want a clean slate.

And truthfully, that applies to any distro. Software is easy to replace. It's not bad to want to do things the right way. It's also not bad to break things or duct tape them together while you're still learning, especially on a home machine.