> There's also the fact that Ubuntu ships with the GNOME desktop environment, and really only GNOME.
This is a feature. Standardization is what makes „Works on Ubuntu“ a stable target.
I also dislike Snap and the various other Ubuntu anti-features, which is why I recommend Pop OS - at least I did when it was a light weight Ubuntu fork, it may not be anymore.
This is just a rando‘s opinion, so it may not be based on that, but my intuition from a few years ago is that Debian/Ubuntu still has a reliable lead in the availability of software packages, especially less popular ones: You’ll almost never find something that doesn’t work on Ubuntu, for other distros this happens sometimes.
Has this changed? Maybe with the widespread adoption of Flatpak this is not much of an issue for consumer apps anymore?
Both Arch and Nix solve this by making it very easy to write packages that work around the compatibility issues. When I used to use ubuntu and mint it was a lot more common to run into these types of issues.
Hasn't been my experience, running KDE Wayland on host with amdgpu. Just had to pass `--extra-flags "env GDK_BACKEND=wayland"` when exporting the app. Zero issues, far from being unusable.
In fact you can even run an entire DE from Distrobox if you wanted to, although I can imagine that being a bit awkward. But a single GUI app? Shouldn't be an issue unless you've got a tricky/niche setup.
How well does Fedora handle proprietary software nowadays? For example the Nvidia driver, Steam, Rider or video codecs. I negatively remember their patent paranoia regarding elliptic curve cryptography.
My favourite feature of Manjaro (and presumably Arch) is how easily I can install almost any software from a single package manager (which supports the official repos, flatpak and AUR). While on Mint I had to mess with custom package sources, or install individual vendor provided packages which lacked auto-update.
There's still a bit of manual work involved to install the codecs (and proprietary drivers if you need em), which is why I would never recommend vanilla Fedora to a newbie - but Fedora derivatives exist to address that issue.
Ultramarine[1] is one such easy-to-use derivative, and for gamers there's Nobara[2] and Bazzite[3] (an immutable distro).
i've never really understood what bazzite offers that stock fedora does not. like steam works out of the box just fine on plain ole fedora 41, and my AMD card is supported without issue. runs CP2077 flawlessly.
literally, steam out of the box is just adding rpmfusion repos, which you're probably gonna do anyway if you want stuff like vlc or other tools
For brand new hardware, Fedora gets the niggle-free experience faster than Ubuntu. 5K screens are treated as two separate devices "under the hood", many Ubuntu software didnt honor the abstraction, hence the monitor layout, notifications, taskbar etc were treating each half as a full monitor.
Ubuntu has fallen out of favour with quite a lot of Linux recommender sites and reviewers and its mainly about flatpak and Gnome, but also gaming support by default. Other Linux distributions do things better now for the influx of gamers to Linux and with SteamOS being on Arch a lot of Arch deriatives are becoming increasingly popular. I don't think its Fedora picking up users, its Cachyos and Bazzite.
Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration (gaming mode, etc.). Bazzite works really well on my PC handheld and I don't think a generic distro with Steam added after the fact would be the same. Id you want a distro without Steam bundled there are lots of those.
> Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration
This shows a weakness than in the Linux desktop ecosystem that something has to be bundled to correctly integrate with the system.
It's no different to Chinese OEMs bundling additional stores with their phones.
It's a quid pro quo from Valve. They are investing profusely in Linux ecosystems, and the distro-devs are following that.
Meanwhile Epic Games still lacks a first-party app on linux, and users need to pass from Lutris, Heroic etc...
What are the specific issues with gaming that you're claiming Ubuntu has?
I've been using Ubuntu for a few months, and I have complaints - lots of them. But gaming isn't one. I just installed the apps I needed and they worked.
I doubt Canonical cares much about the desktop segment, at least the segment that doesn't pay. They seem to be focusing on servers. Or at least that's what it seems to me.
Recommended by João Carrasqueira, a "Lead Windows Editor" at XDA[1], who "has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem".
Clearly an expert on Linux distros, as you can see.
I still don't understand how people can run Debian/Ubuntu. Every single time I have tried my environment in the span of a few months turns into a wet ball of mud with various levels of breakages. It's honestly astounding how bad it is. Once in a while I install a newly released version and naively think "Surely this problem is now fixed". But no, it's terrible.
I have used in my life many different Linux distributions: Slackware, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian (professionally or privately). My private choice is the only one not driven by marketing: Debian.
You have three main Debian releases:
SID (if you need to be as close as possible to upstream versions)
Testing (the same as above but a few days after SID)
Stable (you sacrifice the latest software versions for insane stability)
Which one did you use ?
And please don't mix Debian and Ubuntu.
Canonical is commercial company driven by profit (and CEO's bonus).
Debian is driven by community and (mostly) engineers.
I used Stable and SID. The reason I mixed Debian and Ubuntu is because I perceive the root of shittiness to be apt and how it can, and often does, poison your system.
running apt install can brick your system in both large ways, it just stops booting. Or small ways, breaking existing packages or a myriad of other ways. On the one hand this is the fault of apt itself. It allows package scripts to do way too much. And on the other hand package maintainers write honestly brain damaged scripts a lot of the time.
Sounds similar to my experience with other systems (like Red Hat).
Amazing - you've just realised that IT systems don't always work.
Welcome to IT world !
"welcome to IT world" is just dismissive and needlessly aggravating. Just because systems can break doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and accept the terrible state Debian package management is in. Debian-style package management has specific architectural issues, combined with maintainers writing poor package scripts, that make breakage seem far more common than it should be.
Back in the 1990's I was fond of it for the community spirit, the attention to detail, the way things "just worked" even it had a particular take on some things. Over time it felt like it became burderned with design-by-committee decisions, maintainers leaving and abandoning packages faster than they could replace them, and just a bit too political.
> There's also the fact that Ubuntu ships with the GNOME desktop environment, and really only GNOME.
This is a feature. Standardization is what makes „Works on Ubuntu“ a stable target.
I also dislike Snap and the various other Ubuntu anti-features, which is why I recommend Pop OS - at least I did when it was a light weight Ubuntu fork, it may not be anymore.
This is just a rando‘s opinion, so it may not be based on that, but my intuition from a few years ago is that Debian/Ubuntu still has a reliable lead in the availability of software packages, especially less popular ones: You’ll almost never find something that doesn’t work on Ubuntu, for other distros this happens sometimes.
Has this changed? Maybe with the widespread adoption of Flatpak this is not much of an issue for consumer apps anymore?
yeah PopOS has been getting kind of weird lately
If you use a Linux desktop professionally, it's only a matter of time until you hit that one GUI app that you need, that is only supported on Ubuntu.
I prefer Tumbleweed, but the sane choice remains Ubuntu.
Both Arch and Nix solve this by making it very easy to write packages that work around the compatibility issues. When I used to use ubuntu and mint it was a lot more common to run into these types of issues.
> that is only supported on Ubuntu.
So much for that Linux ecosystem compatibility, Linux apps not even compatible with other linuxes!
It's a packaging problem.
A vendor used to the Windows ecosystem might find it natural to support only one Linux distribution.
So if packaged with it's dependencies, that program would run on that OS?
Distrobox exists for that very reason. No need to ruin your main OS just to run one app.
Distrobox is great for cli apps and stuff not touching mesa/drivers.
It's very awkward or unusable otherwise.
Hasn't been my experience, running KDE Wayland on host with amdgpu. Just had to pass `--extra-flags "env GDK_BACKEND=wayland"` when exporting the app. Zero issues, far from being unusable.
In fact you can even run an entire DE from Distrobox if you wanted to, although I can imagine that being a bit awkward. But a single GUI app? Shouldn't be an issue unless you've got a tricky/niche setup.
This is again the argument of the power user arguing that everyone should just become the expert in the power users domain.
As long as the Kernel ist compatible, sure, technically.
This is not what I would consider "supported". This is not something a company wants to deal with on every single Linux client.
Backed by IBM/ Red Hat a US based company.
I trust the German government to have more respect for privacy rights at this point.
So I use Open Suse Tumbleweed. It’s been pretty stable , although with nvidia you have to do a bit more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318830
Suse is up for sale.
I don’t imagine the German government will allow it to be sold to a non EU entity.
But there’s always NixOS.
well then to Arch it is
How well does Fedora handle proprietary software nowadays? For example the Nvidia driver, Steam, Rider or video codecs. I negatively remember their patent paranoia regarding elliptic curve cryptography.
My favourite feature of Manjaro (and presumably Arch) is how easily I can install almost any software from a single package manager (which supports the official repos, flatpak and AUR). While on Mint I had to mess with custom package sources, or install individual vendor provided packages which lacked auto-update.
There's still a bit of manual work involved to install the codecs (and proprietary drivers if you need em), which is why I would never recommend vanilla Fedora to a newbie - but Fedora derivatives exist to address that issue.
Ultramarine[1] is one such easy-to-use derivative, and for gamers there's Nobara[2] and Bazzite[3] (an immutable distro).
[1] https://ultramarine-linux.org/
[2] https://nobaraproject.org/
[3] https://bazzite.gg/
i've never really understood what bazzite offers that stock fedora does not. like steam works out of the box just fine on plain ole fedora 41, and my AMD card is supported without issue. runs CP2077 flawlessly.
literally, steam out of the box is just adding rpmfusion repos, which you're probably gonna do anyway if you want stuff like vlc or other tools
Just use Flathub on Fedora for anything proprietary including codecs. Leave dnf/rpm for system software / updates.
Nvidia is pretty simple, you can either enable the driver via the UI or just follow the rpmfusion guide.
there's a third party repo called rpmfusion for that
For brand new hardware, Fedora gets the niggle-free experience faster than Ubuntu. 5K screens are treated as two separate devices "under the hood", many Ubuntu software didnt honor the abstraction, hence the monitor layout, notifications, taskbar etc were treating each half as a full monitor.
Ubuntu has fallen out of favour with quite a lot of Linux recommender sites and reviewers and its mainly about flatpak and Gnome, but also gaming support by default. Other Linux distributions do things better now for the influx of gamers to Linux and with SteamOS being on Arch a lot of Arch deriatives are becoming increasingly popular. I don't think its Fedora picking up users, its Cachyos and Bazzite.
Linux distributions shouldn't ship with Steam installed and imho bundling it makes a bad precedent.
Steam should be easy to install (whether from a store like Flathub) instead.
Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration (gaming mode, etc.). Bazzite works really well on my PC handheld and I don't think a generic distro with Steam added after the fact would be the same. Id you want a distro without Steam bundled there are lots of those.
> Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration
This shows a weakness than in the Linux desktop ecosystem that something has to be bundled to correctly integrate with the system.
It's no different to Chinese OEMs bundling additional stores with their phones.
Microsoft had to bundle an Xbox gaming mode to compete. It's not a normal app.
It's a quid pro quo from Valve. They are investing profusely in Linux ecosystems, and the distro-devs are following that. Meanwhile Epic Games still lacks a first-party app on linux, and users need to pass from Lutris, Heroic etc...
What are the specific issues with gaming that you're claiming Ubuntu has?
I've been using Ubuntu for a few months, and I have complaints - lots of them. But gaming isn't one. I just installed the apps I needed and they worked.
Isn’t Bazzite based on Fedora?
I doubt Canonical cares much about the desktop segment, at least the segment that doesn't pay. They seem to be focusing on servers. Or at least that's what it seems to me.
Fedora may be becoming the default for desktops, not for servers (Debian possibly the default for servers).
Actually on servers RHEL is still the default (43% server OS market share), followed by Ubuntu at 34%, Debian at 16% and SuSE at 11%.
https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-server-market-shar...
No sources cited, and the supposed author churns out multiple articles a day on Linux, gambling, and AI content strategy.
Not sure I'd put any weight whatsoever on those figures!
(and how would they even compare a commercial offering with something like Debian that doesn't even have popcon enabled by default?)
They're talking about billions of dollars of market share, so how does debian get a mention being free? I'm suspicious of their methodology.
At least the infographics down the bottom are obviously full of slop
Enterprises love RHEL because of the paid support, even if they never use it, it's "there".
CYA is SOP. gotta have an escalation path or other fallbacks.
Red Hat will also support you using 15 year old versions of Linux if you pay them enough, the military love that.
Fedora is upstream for RHEL, which is absolutely dominant in the server space some sectors that require enterprise support.
Why do you think Debian for servers only ? Did you use Debian SID or Testing as a desktop ?
Recommended by whom?
Recommended by João Carrasqueira, a "Lead Windows Editor" at XDA[1], who "has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem".
Clearly an expert on Linux distros, as you can see.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/author/joao-xda/
XDA is a normie consumer site, beware conflating consumer with professional recommendations.
XDA has the hackerist of hackers uploading random android ROMs
a whole freakin lot of mobile code is essentially just a couple random dudes on XDA making something work. definitely not 'normie'
I still don't understand how people can run Debian/Ubuntu. Every single time I have tried my environment in the span of a few months turns into a wet ball of mud with various levels of breakages. It's honestly astounding how bad it is. Once in a while I install a newly released version and naively think "Surely this problem is now fixed". But no, it's terrible.
I have used in my life many different Linux distributions: Slackware, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian (professionally or privately). My private choice is the only one not driven by marketing: Debian.
You have three main Debian releases:
Which one did you use ?And please don't mix Debian and Ubuntu.
Canonical is commercial company driven by profit (and CEO's bonus).
Debian is driven by community and (mostly) engineers.
I used Stable and SID. The reason I mixed Debian and Ubuntu is because I perceive the root of shittiness to be apt and how it can, and often does, poison your system.
What do you mean by "poison" ? Be specific. Very specific.
running apt install can brick your system in both large ways, it just stops booting. Or small ways, breaking existing packages or a myriad of other ways. On the one hand this is the fault of apt itself. It allows package scripts to do way too much. And on the other hand package maintainers write honestly brain damaged scripts a lot of the time.
Sounds similar to my experience with other systems (like Red Hat). Amazing - you've just realised that IT systems don't always work. Welcome to IT world !
"welcome to IT world" is just dismissive and needlessly aggravating. Just because systems can break doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and accept the terrible state Debian package management is in. Debian-style package management has specific architectural issues, combined with maintainers writing poor package scripts, that make breakage seem far more common than it should be.
Back in the 1990's I was fond of it for the community spirit, the attention to detail, the way things "just worked" even it had a particular take on some things. Over time it felt like it became burderned with design-by-committee decisions, maintainers leaving and abandoning packages faster than they could replace them, and just a bit too political.
I've lived on Debian since day dot, never really had an issue. Biggest gripe with Debian is that it's /too/ stable!
Are they both still a nightmare to setup and/or use?