It crushes me, CRUSHES ME, that the wretched Fedora beats my beloved openSUSE Tumbleweed in popularity! Why, oh why!??!
Seriously though, why do people prefer Fedora? I used it for 2 years and was very, very happy after switching my daily driver to Tumbleweed. It felt faster, had better repos, defaults, stability, etc. — aaaaaand it’s rolling release, which is so much easier (ironically) from a stability perspective (every, EVERY, Fedora release something would break for me, gosh-darn-it). I just don’t get it; am I the only one experiencing this?
Most of it is historical momentum. Regardless of relative quality, far more people try Fedora and so far more people stick with it.
As for Tumbleweed specifically, many people do not like rolling distros. I do.
I tried openSUSE a few months back because I wanted to be more closely associated with SUSE than Red Hat (I had to update to a new RHEL release at work about a year ago and really hated some of the shit they were pulling).
Here’s a list of issues I had:
- Was forced to not encrypt my system because for some reason the unlock screen rarely recognized my keyboard was connected and I couldn’t input the password. I would have to turn on the computer, then reboot at least once to get it to work.
- The absolute confusion surrounding YaST when I tried it out. The community made it sound like the best thing about openSUSE, but also don’t use it because it’s terrible. Apparently it’s being depreciated now. Don’t want to learn an entire system just for it to be removed.
- I didn’t experience any issues with this but it makes me nervous: Rolling Release + Required (for me) Community Repos. Meanwhile the standard release is slower than Fedora
- This one is a big “first world problem” but it really annoyed me. zypper, it’s one of the longest package manager names, and i can’t tab to autocomplete because there are other packages with similar names.
Now, all of these I problems I could probably fix. But it just wasn’t really worth the effort when my main issue was: “The downstream company associated with my Distro did some dumb shit that doesn’t really impact my system.”
My 2 cents. I started with Bazzite and switched to Fedora after some things broke. Fedora works for my use case and I don’t see any reason to switch further. Even upgrading from 40 to 41 worked without hickups.
I’m surprised bazzite broke
Sooo… The author mentions that Manjaro fucked up, but I’m not sure what they’re referring to…?
I mean, like… To which Manjaro fuckup are they referring?
https://manjarno.pages.dev/ Manjaro’s Pamac took AUR down twice, also their website had its SSL certs expire 4 times
Yes, I’m on staff with Arch. I’m very aware of all of these. That’s like, one of my favorite pages to link to. The fact that I’m aware of these is the whole point of my comment.
I said:
To which Manjaro fuckup are they referring?
I mean, like… To which Manjaro fuckup are they referring?
Obviously, I’m not the author. But if I’d have to guess, their answer would likely be “Yes.”.
Arch is the most “just works” distro I ever tried.
Reducing the workload of the distro maintainers by keeping packages vanilla and close to upstream, not writing a shitload of distro-specific GUI tools, and off-loading all the weird stuff to a user repo, is genius.
That way, there’s more capacity to focus on getting it right.Other distros have a lot more “features” (looking at you, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu) but Arch just gives you a high quality package of the newest stuff, and it’s amazing how solid it is nowadays.
I went wild and started using it for servers about 5 years ago and I shit you not, it’s far more stable than I would have thought. I parse the blog for update notes if there’s any big changes to anything I’m using but given most stuff is offloaded to containers, I pretty much yolo a
yay -Syuevery week. Zero issues.I had more issues with Debian and Ubuntu due to bugs in stale packages or weird default configs than I have running bleeding edge vanilla via Arch.
People underestimate the issues that stale packages cause as well as the fragility that comes from the ways people introduce either newer packages or packages missing from the repos.
With Arch, everything is super up-to-date and you pretty much never install from outside the repos. It makes the system extremely robust and reliable (what I want from “stable”).
Finally pacman (and yay) are awesome and I trust them to do updates of thousands of packages at once. With Debian and Ubuntu, I lived in fear of those kind of updates uninstalling essential parts of my system. I had Fedora botch more than one upgrade release to release.
So, I also find Arch the most “stable” system I have used (though Chimera is looking awesome so far as well).
In the Linux world though, the word “stable” has come to mean “static” and unchanging as in RHEL and Debian. Arch is not “stable” by that definition.
I did have an issue with Arch in the past couple years. A kernel update cause the WiFi on one laptop to stop working on the latest kernel. I also have an LTS kernel install so rebooting into that brought me back up in a minute. When I checked a few days later, the problem had been fixed in the current kernel as well.
I wouldn’t call it stable. To me that implies I can run it for 5 years and don’t have to worry about compatibility changes.
But I never had it break on me.
It’s interesting to see how much nixos grew over the last 2 years, even though the distribution exists since 2003.
The Ubuntu and Manjaro era is over. Arch is the new Ubuntu (by popularity for gaming). Fedora and Endeavour also grew a lot. Question is if they reached their ceiling already. Pop OS could explode in popularity once COSMIC is out, but maybe not for gaming. Bazzite got even a patch note addressing an issue with this specific distribution in the game Marvel Rivals. Here is a lot of potential for this distro, as an alternative for the future general SteamOS distro (if it ever comes out as a general install media). BTW, nobody seem to talk about HOLO ISO anymore.
I root for bazzite. It’s so easy to setup and update all while providing superb support for gaming. I actually run it as a desktop os and I love it.
Debian, always stable…
Flatpak is surprisingly low
“Without further due”…
… yeah …
Wow, fascinating to see I am one of the Few Debian users. It works great on the distribution, even better than what I had heard about other platforms.
Do you run Steam from Debian repos or Flatpak?
I go from the repos myself.
Weird, am I blind or is there no SteamOS?
I know it’s based on Arch, but it is NOT Arch.This is mainly data reported from desktop PCs, so no, SteamOS is not a thing at the moment on such machines.
If only it was mentioned in the article…
This is mainly data reported from desktop PCs, so no, SteamOS is not a thing at the moment on such machines.
I was about to say “what article?” because this is just an image post, but then I opened this in the web ui and apparently there’s a linked post that my client isn’t showing!
Very interesting! Thank you for mentioning this! I suppose including a link to the article in the main body would help alleviate this issue.
Na don’t worry, I raised an issue and the developer confirmed it was a bug, so you did everything right, no need to post the link twice!
It’s interesting that you can see exactly when antergos shut down where Popos and Manjaro surge in popularity.
Ah, yes, “Flatpak”, my favourite distro 😸
Author’s disclaimer:
“Flatpak is NOT a distro, but that’s what Steam reports when it’s running on Flatpak, and Flatpak being distro independent we report it as a separate environment, if that makes sense. Feel free to ignore it if you wish.”
It’s interesting and kinda cool that you can’t tell what distro it’s running on when using Flatpak. I would have thought that there’s some way to find out (it would be important for fixing bugs, I guess?)
it would be important for fixing bugs, I guess?
I think this is where the sandbox~y nature of Flatpak comes in. It doesn’t really care for the distro-environment, because it creates its own distro-agnostic one; ensuring that software continues to work regardless of the shit-show going on elsewhere.
It is for this and other reasons that some developers vouch for Flatpak.
