Been a good six months since I've given an update on how my journey with Linux has been going.
Well, all I can say is Fedora is a horrible choice if you're a boomer trying something new and you don't know what you're doing. Everything I got working broke the next day. One day audio just worked without having to do anything, the next day I would have to spend hours getting my interface to work. Spent more time fixing shit than actually using the computer.
Yeah... Fedora
really does
not make an easy case for itself. I would also argue that Fedora's most ardent defenders are arguably its
worst exemplars. Fedora's one of those Linux distributions where it comes
just shy of being "good enough," and the devil
always remains in the details. Either way man, I'm grateful you at least gave it a fair shake.
FWIW: Fedora's own user-facing infrastructure has heinously schizophrenic mixed messaging. Fedora Linux was explicitly designed back in 2003 as a Red Hat-sponsored yet community-oriented Linux distribution explicitly meant for "the Linux hobbyist." In the past, this was effectively a hard noob filter. Basically, you'd
never see someone recommending a complete and total noob start their Linux journey with Fedora for decades. You wanted Linux for Human Beings? Ubuntu 4.10 Warty Warthog was your best bet (and later Ubuntu releases until 16.04 went EOL; now Ubuntu is worthless for home users because their priorities are enterprise, cloud, and IOT devices and the subsequent home user experience hideously atrophied).
Unfortunately, the early-to-mid 2010s' emphasis on shunning both gatekeepers and behaviour construed as gatekeeping was a
huge problem that I would argue the Fedora Project failed to properly manage. The consequences of that management failure continue to lull newcomers who think Linux Mint is amateur hour into a false sense of security. This ultimately means that official Fedora Documentation on the portal will tell newcomers how to accomplish the most
basic of tasks with a given desktop environment's GUI tools, but that doesn't mean newcomers develop Fedora competencies; they just learn how to do things via GNOME Shell or KDE Plasma's own GUI tools. Those tools have noticeable shortcomings, and even counterintuitive design philosophies where the GUI obfuscates toggles for specific functionality or settings.
There's also the matter that the Fedora Project's own documentation portal fails to specifically outline the most common failure modes on a Red Hat system. I've said it before a million times and I'll continue saying it until I die: Red Hat, the actual legal entity responsible for the Fedora Project, is headquartered in and primarily operates out of the USA. It
needs to abide by American export controls, American business law, and even if there's no legal imperative to minimise liabilities, you try telling that to broader American business culture. RPM Fusion is a literal necessity when daily driving
any Red Hat distro, RPM Fusion is legally distinct from Fedora/Red Hat, but it's staffed primarily by paid Fedora developers who maintain RPM Fusion off-the-clock (allegedly).
For
decades, it was just expected that Fedora will have somewhat broken functionality OOTB that the broad majority of their users will easily remedy because there were eleventy bazillion forum posts that outlined how to install Dribble, FreshRPMs, and Livna (all of which later merged into RPM Fusion). It wasn't ideal for a newcomer who's still green around the gills, but perfectly fine for someone willing to do some extra legwork to install binary graphics drivers, multimedia codecs, codecs for hardware acceleration, etc.
NOW, the situation is so fucking baffling because modern Fedora releases (c. Fedora 42-onward) now provide you
toggles for RPM Fusion repos regarding the most common proprietary software: Google Chrome, Steam, PyCharm, etc. While I'm open to this QOL adjustment, I would argue two things:
a) It doesn't go far enough because you still need to install RPM Fusion's free, nonfree, free-tainted, and nonfree-tainted repos post-hoc to get all the missing shit that the installer deliberately omits! I'm grateful that I can enable Steam repos on a fresh Fedora 44 ISO installation, but why the hell can't I install ffmpeg-freeworld, mesa-freeworld, and so on from Anaconda Web UI? Do you have
any idea how much time it would save me just to enable those repos on install and then simply executing a
sudo dnf --refresh update -y? The answer is
at least an hour or two of fiddling post-install. I'm long past that point, but I fiddle with shit on portable hard drives and QEMU semi-regularly. So... who knows?
b) If Red Hat is deliberately including RPM Fusion repositories, even in a partial format, and it's an established fact that RPM Fusion is a legally distinct entity staffed primarily by paid Fedora developers who allegedly maintain RPM Fusion in their spare time, what good does that formal separation even do for you now? I would argue (in my distinctly non-lawyer, maladjusted, terminally online Linux user capacity) that from a pure liability standpoint... the distinction between RPM Fusion and Red Hat is starting to blur significantly, and all it would take is some unforeseen legal trouble from a litigious software patent holder to argue that Red Hat's infringing upon their rights through RPM Fusion's partial inclusion in the modern Anaconda Web UI installer.
That ain't even getting into the push for Fedora Atomic as like "the" future for Linux across the board. Not just in deployments where containers and virtual machines are ubiquitous, but for douchebags like you and me, y'know... the "normal" jackoffs of the Linux world who have explicit needs that deviate from the provided image. Of course, I'll save that digression for when I'm off my medications and legitimately mad on the internet. Point is: Fedora Atomic is an overengineered solution for a mathemetician's problem that most Linux users (re: home and workstation users) won't ever come across. Its only value is specifically for the enterprise, server, and IOT crowd... and even then, it's just one drop in a bucket that Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu IOT have already filled up like 99% of the way to the brim.
To be clear: I'm not trying to shit on Fedora because I hate it. I
live out of Fedora... but I'm specifically daily driving Fedora Cinnamon over Fedora Workstation, Plasma, Silverblue, Kinoite, etc. I'm still doing things on Linux the way I did them in 2011 not because I hate change but because the changes that everyone insists on are themselves ephemeral and also stupidly counterintuitive.
