1y ago

Was Fedora always so unstable?

I was on Ubuntu for a year. No major issues, although I used the interim releases, which are supposed to be less solid than LTS. Then, a couple of months ago, I decided to switch to Fedora, just out of curiosity. Many people stated how Fedora is rock solid, Fedora is the new Ubuntu, etc. First some rpmfussion updates broke mesa, then the ostree update broke Flatpak, and recently there was a broken kernel 6.3.11 update that affected some AMD users. A few days ago, I updated my kernel to 6.3.12, and I got frequent freezes on boot. Other users are also reporting such issues. So now I boot with an older kernel. Which is not optimal. There is no LTS kernel on Fedora, the old kernel version doesn't receive security updates. Was it always like that, or it's an unusual bad phase.

38 comments

You want an honest answer? Fedora was never that great to begin with and went down quite a bit in quality since the whole patent debacle. I had to switch distros when Mesa was constantly breaking. Also, untested kernel updates would remove HDMI audio (and despite a fix being available they waited a crazy long time to push it) among many other things
Tumbleweed is just plain better.
- I think it's worth noting that Tumbleweed also has the Mesa/codecs situation, where if you want the codecs you have to enable the Packman repo and install mesa from there, and when there's an update for mesa you have to wait for the update on Packman repo, otherwise you get some conflicts when trying to update. Though packman usually updates quick enough so it's usually not an issue but it can be a bit weird the first time you see it.
  Aside from that yeah, Tumbleweed is great. Though i'm currently running Fedora Kinoite and overall I've been happy with it, but I would probably go back to Tumbleweed if something were to happen.
- Fedora was never that great to begin with
  I always just found it to be really, really, ridiculously slow. I swear DNF might rival Windows in terms of update slowness and it seems to permeate the whole system.
- How does Tumbleweed compare to Fedora for you? The Mesa situation is also the driving force behind me looking for alternatives.
  
  No issues at all, packman (the rpmfusion equivalent) is much more in sync with official repos and so I never had to wait until mesa caught up or anything. Also, Tumbleweed is feature packed and offers a much better experience than Fedora.
- Nice to hear someone say the truth. People keep recommending it but I had nothing but trouble. My girlfriend tried it also and had ton of weird bugs, like couldn't copy paste from Firefox and other super weird things going on.
  She installed Pop OS and now she loves Linux. Never any issues whatsoever.

I’ve been using Fedora and haven’t encountered any of the issues you mentioned. To me it’s always been rock solid.
- Same here. For me Fedora is incredibly solid and fresh experience. Hope Red Hat will not make strange decisions with Fedora in future.

I personally found Fedora to be rock solid, and along with Ubuntu provided the best hardware support out of the box on all my computers - though it's been a couple of years since I used it. I did end up on Ubuntu non-LTS in the end as I now run Ubuntu LTS on my servers and find having the same systems to be beneficial (from a knowledge perspective).

Very strange, I am using Fedora as my daily-driver since about 6 months now, and I had none of the issues you mention. Rock solid experience so far.

Rock solid on my 11-yo laptop that has been running fedora and updated every 6 months since I bought it in 2012.
I've always updated late in the fedora cycle - maybe that's the go.
- Yeah, I've been running Fedora since the first Fedora Core release. Only ever had an issue once, back on FC4 but was easily fixed. My current laptop is 8 years old and is solid. Only issue is rotating it causes airplane mode to turn on, so I don't rotate it.
- I only have problem with driver in Fedora, and nothing Else. Only Upgrade driver when needs to.

Anecdotally it seems to be an unusually bad phase, lots of people reporting problems since kernel 6.3 ,then there was the bad ostree update (which I don't think was exclusive to Fedora).
I have enough years of good experience with Fedora to know that's not normal and confidence enough to stick with it.
- Last year Silverblue spent a whole month broken, the developers have no concept of rolling back bad updates.
  
  Not for me it wasn't, when was that?

I'm using fedora as my work system, because I have a relatively new laptop that needs the new kernels. Haven't experienced anything you're describing. Are you on fedora regular or on sliverblue (the immutable version)? If you're having issues running the newest kernel, follow the fedora documented way to build and run your own. I did just that when needed a prerelease kernel and it worked out fine. I usually upgrade to a new release by the end of the cycle, so that the new version had 6 months to mature. I never immediately upgrade.

If you want to continue using Fedora try Kinoite or Silverblue. With their immutability and ease of rollback, I've really enjoyed using Fedora again.
- Fedora Silverblue is basically my ideal distro. Used it for the past two years on all my machines.
  Shame about the telemetry stuff and RHEL bullshit... Jumped to Debian 12 and haven't looked back.

Other users are also reporting such issues.
Since kernel 6.3 my laptop would only boot 1/10 times. After a week of not turning it off, I finally moved back to Arch.

Kubuntu is very stable. love it

Back in my distro-hopping days, I found it be unstable both when updating and in day-to-day use. Updates broke it and applications regularly crashed.

The fedora 37 and 38 livecd's have a bug that prevents them from being bootable. So when I wanted to install fedora on my laptop I had to start with 36 then upgrade to 37 then to 38. No other distro has had this problem.
- I had tough times trying to install fedora 38 kde spin.

Yes.
Fedora is the new Ubuntu
Fedora is older than Ubuntu.

Also on AMD APU hardware, I was a while on Kubuntu with 5.15 as 5.16 and 5.17 had pretty frequent regressions regarding s0ix, but it was fine afterwards. Until now, though 6.3.12 seems to be somewhat stable again

I always found Fedora to be a little unstable for my work use. I switched to CentOS because of that, and that was truly rock solid. I even used CentOS Stream for a while (but switched to Alma and Rocky eventually).

There are LTS Kernel from Red Hat Employee, you can install it via https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/kwizart/kernel-longterm-5.15/
If you really need that in long term, well, give him some coffee via paypal, haha...
JK, but it's the well known long time best LTS kernel repo in copr. Just not directly endorsed by Fedora as fedora is bleeding edge, when it mean bleeding edge, then any kernel update could break the driver, as the driver is built in into the kernel.

I'm a Debian user. No worries if you get no updates...

Fedora 30 - 36 were phenomenal releases and I mostly used them, recommended them elsewhere.
I had to start using the Spins because the default GNOME desktop is just becoming unusable. Stripping functionality to make it prettier, not fixing longstanding issues.
Then Fedora had that kerfuffle with the licensing issues with codecs, and I couldn't play a certain type of HEVC video that the vast majority of my video library is encoded in.
Then, more recently, I had issues with Python in their repos. That was the last straw. I'll definitely check it out again in a few years to see if they've fixed a lot of these problems, but I wouldn't recommend the distro in its current state.

I run fedora since some months on my Framework laptop, I suspect my SSD is making some issues. It was really bad when I was on arch and fedora is pretty okay? I still goz a system freeze (no tty even) yesterday.

I've been using fedora since 32 and I'd say this is a bad phase. I have heard time and time again that opensuse is more stable tho

38 comments