The most horrible bit about Microsoft is that pesky release of new mandated security features! My windows 7 has everything just the way I like it /s
your characterization of red hat makes sense from where it sounds like you’re coming from but you miss the mark a bit I feel
RHEL isn’t meant for the everyday developer and red hat does a lousy job enabling them. Ubuntu and Debian do a much better job as is proven by the wide availability of developer tools on Ubuntu/Debian.
But look at the enterprise software market share, of which red hat focuses on entirely — canonical has a sub 5% market share for enterprise Linux or something pathetic along those lines while RHEL is over 85% or something close. Canonical has done the opposite by catering to workstations and developers and have done exquisite things with their workstations but their real enterprise servers suck.
SElinux isn’t meant to just run static on your box while you’re using it to everyday browse or develop that’d be brutal. It’s meant to secure an application or files with predefined egress based on business logic.
Now on the other hand, fedora— it’s upstream my man. Frequent releases is… the point? it’s community based upstream development if you’re looking for the latest features it’s perfect but you’re also getting the latest bugs.
Ubuntu sounds appropriate for you! That doesn’t mean RHEL or fedora “has reached peak complexity”
If you wanted RHEL or Cent/Rocky/Alma:
- disable selinux on your home or personal workstation. you can get granular with how to do it too if you choose.
- automate your patching it takes 5 minutes one time
- if you want RHEL benefits with Fedora-adjacent (but not as buggy) releases you’re describing what is now CentOS Stream which is also a rolling-release distro
I felt similar to you last year but my company uses RHEL and we just did some worth while quick training. When explained in ways that make sense, it makes sense. Unfortunately I think red hat has been lackluster several times over on how to say what I just said
Sure, if you're looking to write some commercial application you don't want to recompile it twice a week and then you go for something stable with compatibility guarantees like RedHat. Plus it's a big company and it fixes security bugs and you can probably get some kind of guaranteed support (never bought it but I expect it's true).
I think the whole purpose of RedHat in a way (and of Ubuntu LTS) is the limiting of change.
If you WANT change though, Fedora doesn't compare well to rolling distributions IMO. It has lots of updates but with lots of inconvenience. Rolling distributions just take change continuously forever - there's never a discontinuity so they're very easy to use.
Just use Rocky Linux or Alma Linux it’s basically what Cent was. Unless you’re running anything super insanely mission critical CentOS stream would still be fine for your uses, and if you need something THAT highly available support might be worth while anyways in an enterprise environment.
Yeah if you're using it for a real server then Rocky/Alma/Stream/RHEL. For a personal server I find Fedora fine, since my local packages will match my server's.
>For a personal server I find Fedora fine, since my local packages will match my server's.
Absolutely. I also use Squid[0] as a proxy for updates[1] which, after initial download for one of the dozens of my Fedora boxes, caches the updates, reducing bandwidth usage and (more importantly) speeding up updates significantly.
Red Hat for enterprise use, Fedora for personal desktop use. One of the largest communities you’ll find. If you want Debian based maybe just straight Debian.
The centos debacle was poorly handled but I think what red hat was /trying/ to do made sense. The community just wasn’t there to sustain it. Red Hat was paying to give away free RHEL basically lol. CentOS Stream should have just been called RHEL Stream. It’s basically RHEL minus minor bugs that would only effect small pools of people.
I’m glad Rocky and Alma sprung up and have budding communities though.
I just moved over from Ubuntu to Fedora as I felt I was starting to lose my edge: apt is so easy you forget that the other half of the universe thinks in dnf and I need to keep my skills sharp. Its been a good decision.
A bad decision was to use a Fedora mix with KDE. It works very well, but I think its rough edges would simply not be there if I'd chosen the GNOME path. You get the sense that the RH team default to GNOME and KDE is an afterthought. Which is fine by me, but its a bit of a shame, cos I much prefer it.
KDE user here who has been installing Debian derived distros for about a decade, Fedora Core before that. I often reconsider Fedora. What KDE specific issues should I know about before giving serious consideration to moving back?
>A bad decision was to use a Fedora mix with KDE. It works very well, but I think its rough edges would simply not be there if I'd chosen the GNOME path.
I've been using Fedora as a desktop for many years and agree that KDE is annoying. That said, I understand your point of view, but I find Gnome to be even more so.
Which is why I use XFCE[0] instead. It generally works pretty well, although I don't push it all that hard. Perhaps it might be a good desktop for you too?
Fedora is much more secure (a strong focus on SELinux, secure boot, etc.). Fedora has more cutting edge software (latest GNOME, gcc, etc.) while still being very stable.
A large chunk of the gcc/glibc/GNOME/Wayland/... developers are employed by Red Hat and Fedora shows that, it's where the Linux workstation is going and has an amazingly good of integration of new tech. Most other mainstream distributions trail by several years.
OP mentioned stability and long-term supported as what he’s looking for. The Linux Mint team have stated LMDE is more for themselves to gather info and not a priority. So I would stay away if looking for stability and long-term support.
“We work on LMDE primarily for us, to get that information. It is not a priority, certainly not compared to Linux Mint itself…” https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4276
Isn’t one of the purposes of snaps to allow finer grained permissions? In non-snap systems, how do you prevent that weather app you just installed from accessing your camera and microphone?
The snap service tends to run when it wants and it can slow down a system when it runs. Also the snap binaries are a lot larger than with apt.
Honestly, I don't think a weather app would access a camera or microphone. That seems like a bad example. Honestly, I put a piece of tape over my camera. It looks like other posters in this thread have solutions.
Using more hard drive space than needed and not being able to control the service are show-stoppers for a lot of people, and it looks like the permissions issue has another solution.
So one should configure an alternative user for each group of permissions that any arbitrary app might need? Then what happens the day that I do decide that my weather app should access e.g. my location? Now I should move all its data and update my launch scripts to the new user?
I happen to dislike snaps as well. The hard coded install directory is a passion point for me. But at least the permissions issue they are getting right.
I wish that desktop distros would adopt the Android permissions paradigm.
Here’s why not Linux Mint. It’s a few years old so I’m not sure if these issues are solved but I’ve never heard of Debian or Fedora having these issues: https://lwn.net/Articles/676664/
Fedora is a nice busy, but power user and developer experience: only rolling for the parts you would care about with a year of security support.
Fedora is especially useful for a new hardware workstation with that year of support. Any longer than that in my experience you tend to run into issues. For example: DXVK, for Windows games with Steam/Proton, just moved to requiring Mesa 22.0 as a minimum and Fedora 35 has Mesa 22.1 something. Similar issues with Ruby development in the past.
Updates are more limited, with a few select packages kept rolling compared to a true rolling distro like Arch. When a new kernel series is release (6.0 => 6.1) Fedora holds off for a few weeks to test until 6.0 goes EOL. Gnome is kept to it's major release with only minor versions to fix bugs. Mesa is updated until a Fedora is released. Firefox is kept up to date and I use the snap for VSCode and Chromium based browsers. Most other packages are not updated to major new versions, except for Vim (and Emacs if I remember).
My main gripe with RHEL based distros is the lack of support for in-place upgrades.
I know you shouldn't do it, etc but for small servers that can benefit from newer kernel versions, its annoying.
Also dnf-autoupdate doesn't support auto restarts to update the kernel.
RHEL is free for up to 15 instances (including prod), and 9.1 has pleasantly current packages. It’s a solid choice for startups and small teams who need to minimize time spent on infrastructure.
Unfortunately Fedora has been making a lot of similar decisions to Ubuntu lately, although it's still better IMO. I'd say coming from Ubuntu, Mint is probably a lower learning curve anyway.
What decisions? Fedora is my daily driver and I follow Fedora dev pretty closely, so far they haven’t done anything like Ubuntu. Maybe the custom Flathub repo? But that’s a requirement for them since they can’t host proprietary software for legal reasons.
I haven't seen a decision made in the past that would be relevant, but there is one for future fedora releases https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/269 about installing certain apps as flatpaks rather than rpms by default. These would be fedora based flatpaks rather than from flathub.
It does not actually say how it interacts with existing rpms or whether said rpms will continue to exist or be maintained in the future.
I would say it's too early to get up in arms about just yet.
Me personally, I agree with this approach, but a lot of other people clearly won't.
Fedora should not be recommended anymore for personal desktop use for the simple reason that they removed hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding support. Must all run on the CPU now.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Fedora disabled hardware video decoding support in their Mesa builds, which mostly affects AMD GPUs. Intel has hardware video decoding in the GPU driver (or in the firmware or wherever), and it's not dependent on Mesa having it enabled. NVidia of course does its own thing.
It's still a shame for AMD GPU users, of course, although understandable from the point of view of legal risk management.
I use openshift at work, it’s way way more than k8s with batteries. It has downstream, secured, stable versions of open source projects built into one supported product. I see what you mean though.
