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I'm in a similar situation. Distro hopped quite a bit, (OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian).

For 5 years now, I've ran Fedora on an old laptop that resides at my parents house, 5000 KM away from me. In that time I have not once physically been in contact with that server. I've done all updates via ssh, including full system upgrades (e.g. Fedora 32 -> Fedora 33) without any hiccups.

To me, that's amazing.

I've upgraded the Fedora install on my laptop continuously through Fedora 19 -> 33 without reinstalling now. That's about 8 1/2 years. Not bad at all.

100% in agreement with you. I liked the idea of Manjaro but the way they deployed Nvidia driver updates made it feel like absolute luck of the draw whether you'd have a login screen waiting for you after rebooting post-update. I've had more Nvidia driver issues on Manjaro in a year than I've had in the past decade+ on Ubuntu or any other distro.

Switched to Fedora a week ago which I like a lot so far, but I still very much miss the AUR.

Flatpak + user maintained copr's have been mostly able to fill that void for me. The only package I've had to compile so far (that would have been available in the AUR) is wrk, a HTTP benchmarking tool. There is a copr available for it, but it doesn't seem to have builds for Fedora 34/35.

Why not use Homebrew? wrk seems to exist.

And it can work across any Linux distribution.

agreed Fedora is spectacular. Rock solid. Everything works. It has all the components tightly integrated.

>Nvidia’s proprietary driver now includes massively enhanced support for Wayland thanks to tight collaboration between the Fedora, Red Hat, and Nvidia teams.

No surprises there - Fedora sponsors most of the devs for the kernel as well as components like PipeWire, etc

Gnome is beautiful. I have had people carrying Macs ask me what OS im running - on my cool looking carbon fiber white Lenovo Yoga.

>> Gnome is beautiful.

I've been using Fedora since 2005 and the one thing I don't like is the gnome desktop. I run a 55" 4K screen and spread out my windows like work on a real desktop. If I want to start something I have to move the mouse 5 miles to the upper-left corner (where there is no visible cue) to get the launcher-bar to appear. And then the bad appears, but all my windows magically rearrange and shrink, and the launcher now appears at the bottom of the screen, so I have to move my mouse 7 miles down to start something. I'd love to have the launcher ever-present and optionally on the left, right or bottom. But as people say, the gnome developers "know what's best for people" and do it how they see fit.

Most everything else about gnome is OK, and Fedora in general is great IMHO.

You can get the launcher/overview by pressing the Win key, no need to touch the mouse.

I don't want the overview. I know someone spent a lot of time on it and is probably proud (as they should be) of their dynamic ordering of the windows so you can see them all, but I don't want that view. Also, like I said I want the launcher available all the time - I've got tons of space for it and don't want to have an extra step to get it. I also don't have a Win key - maybe it's disguised.

But I have never ever did this use case. I generally do Super + typing the program I want, or some version of the above.

You can install an extension (i.e. dash to dock) to make the launcher ever-present on whichever side of the screen you want. The main downside is that the extensions always break on GNOME upgrades and take a little while to get fixed.

I'm a little surprised. I've been running Arch since 2011 and it's been rock stable for me. I've run Fedora on secondary machines, but I never stuck with it because things would break during updates.

I suspect hardware has a lot to do with it. My Arch laptop is a ThinkPad with Intel graphics, and my secondary machines have been whatever is around.

The other variable is the desktop environment. On my primary laptop I used to run LXDE, and then switched to i3, and now sway. I ran ALSA instead of Pulse, but now I'm dipping my toes into PipeWire. When trying out Fedora I would always try Xfce which seemed like a good compromise since Gnome is definitely not for me. Xfce may not be much of a target for Fedora developers though, so it may not get the amount of attention that Gnome or KDE would get.

My experience with Arch from 2015 to 2018 was too rock solid on Thinkpad. (I gave up on Arch for completely different reasons than stability.)

On the flip side, I've been using Manjaro for years without issue, but when I updated my Fedora 33 workstation to 34, KDE showed a black screen oh boot. No matter how hard I tried I was unable to solve this problem, so I will be skipping Fedora from now on..

Yup, folks have different experiences a lot of the time when it comes to distros. I'm not claiming Fedora is always more stable than Manjaro - just that it has been for me.

I remember at the time of setting it up Fedora was the logical choice because they had some of the first support for AMD new graphics card (RX5700?). It was quite stable on my other computer and I recommended it for a while.

Do you use an Nvidia GPU? I think nouveau had issues with KDE Plasma on Fedora 34. Though I believe you could still boot, it would just hang while logging in. I had to install nvidia's proprietary drivers to fix it, though eventually switched to Gnome and haven't had any issues.

Sadly, I couldn't make Nouveau work neither for recent cards (20x0) nor for old ones (7x0). I hated Nvidia; now I'm a happy AMD user :)

Yep, I'll be making the switch to AMD once my machine could use an upgrade. :/ Props to the nouveau team, but AMD is so much more linux-friendly.

It's an AMD GPU. Maybe I'll try updating it to 35 just for the hell of it, even though I'm sure it won't have an effect...

As I recall, 34 is where there were some dracut bugs that caused booting to fail too. I don't think it even depended on AMD or not, but perhaps presence or absence of certain peripheral hardware.

I had a working 34 system that suddenly wouldn't boot after a kernel update, while booting with an older kernel worked. But, this was because the older kernel was installed with an older dracut producing its initrd image. It took a while to sort out before it was finally stable again. During that broken period, a network install of 34 would produce the same result and there would not be an earlier boot entry to try instead. As I recall, one could rescue it with a rescue disk, downgrading dracut, and rebuilding the initrd.

I've been using Fedora since around 2004 I think, and this was one of the rare few software-prevents-boot regressions I can remember (as opposed to me-breaks-config or hardware-fails). It was also an example where the default "quiet boot" obscured what was really going on, as a black screen hiding a bunch of boot activities getting stuck and timing out for many minutes.

Nothing in Linux-land excites me anymore as much as running everything in unprivileged userland. Having the most bleeding edge software is overhyped, since it introduces instability into your system... especially if you carefully design it such as with Arch Linux. I can't believe using MacOS 12 and homebrew taught me the values of this. Flatpak or bust!

For example... I have Steam and Chromium happily running in a Flatpak install and it has zero more privileges that my non-sudo user account has.

No sudo in sight and for a start this gives me peace of mind. Zero trust needs to be a bigger deal in the Linux community.

In what context would you run Steam and Chromium with more privileges than your regular account?

> I got tired of running `pacman -Syu`, rebooting, and having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change, or something else.

I did get an update that disabled the trackpad on my Asus laptop around Fedora 32 or so. It was an upstream kernel bug that got fixed in a few days, but it was still pretty annoying. This was during a regular dnf update within the same major version, not an update from 32->33 (the kernel gets updated regularly, not just between Fedora version updates).

So personal anecdotes and YMMV.

The really nice thing about `dnf` is that you can easily downgrade or rollback an update. There's also an easy way to see all of the packages that have been installed by the user to help track down when or what broke a system (which I haven't had to use yet, but it is nice to have).

the really nice thing about not having to downgrade or rollback an update is, you don't have to do anything.

How is Fedora's package management compared to Ubuntu's? I guess I've been spoiled by being able to apt install just about anything and 99% of the time there are 3rd party repos with most up to date versions too. Say what you want about Ubuntu, but if there's software for linux out there, the maker will at the very least make sure it works on Ubuntu, but I'm not so sure about other less popular distros.

Its exactly like that with Fedora.

For the rare packages you can't find in the default repositories you can get through RPM Fusion.

> having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change, or something else. I never had a smooth update with Manjaro

Ironically, this was my experience of Fedora 10+ years ago when I dabbled with Linux as a desktop OS. I especially remember spending hours on IRC talking to Fedora folks trying to debug audio issues. I think it was around the time they transitioned from ALSA to PulseAudio.

> I liked Manjaro because I could get newer packages in the repositories (when compared with Ubuntu) and because of access to the AUR.

> I made the switch to Fedora 34 a few months ago from Manjaro. It has newer packages than Ubuntu

It's interesting to compare the release policies of the those distros.

Manjaro is a rolling distro; Fedora releases every 6 months, with 1 year support; Ubuntu has a mixed model (LTS: release every 2 years, support 4+ years, non-LTS: 6 months release/support).

Technically speaking, Ubuntu can have more up to date packages, if one goes the non-LTS way (I personally don't suggest that, though).

With the LTS versions, there's also the alternative of using official PPAs, repositories and self-contained package managers.

I do upgrade every two years (and I even find it too frequent) and use official PPAs/repos, but 1 year sounds appealing for users wishing out of the box recent packages, without using a rolling release.

The difference between mainstream distros is shrinking. Soon, the most popular ones will come with pipewire, wayland and a recent GNOME with few modifications by default.

Thanks to flatpaks, appimages and snaps, I can finally have recently released software with a very stable distro. Hand compiled sofware often goes to /usr/local by default and I can install it without breaking anything. If I want bleeding edge without compiling it myself, I can still resort to guix, nix or homebrew.

The "native package manager" is not something we have to interact with so often these days. Linux on desktop has had some interesting improvements lately and the thing that was pointed by many as its biggest problem - fragmentation - is a much smaller issue now.

> The "native package manager" is not something we have to interact with so often these days

I guess one of the awesome things about Linux is how it manages to keep a wide variety of people happy. For example, one of the reasons I like to use Linux is I want to update everything at one go, and the fact that I have a Software Center app that lets me do exactly that - is awesome!

On another note, I hope Flatpaks keep gaining more popularity among the three. I really like using Flatpaks more than Snap/AppImages.

The arch updates literally never breaks my system but that's because I don't use nvidia. Their drivers are the problem and the reason for millions of failed updates in Arch. If you use Intel it's a super smooth ride with no issues whatsoever.

> having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change

Let me guess, Nvidia?

Nope, Ryzen 3500u with integrated graphics :)

There were quite a few issues with amdgpu that would get fixed in certain kernel/video driver updates, and broken in other ones.

Can second. Ryzen 3XXX integrated graphics has caused me no amounts of headache, to the extent I'm wondering if Nvidia isn't a better bet after all.

I had similar experience with Arch around 2018 but it's been amazing after that since ~2019. I've never had any problems again and sometimes I would go away from my desktop for several months, come back and update everything in a single `pacman -Syu` with no problems (sometimes not updating in time _was_ the issue before). I've heard a lot about Arch/Manjaro being not stable and breaking things frequently enough, and it was true but isn't anymore (at least for me) which makes me quite sad because the problems from few years before turned away many excited users who are not willing to try again for obvious reasons.

I feel there's a honeymoon period after we distro-hop in which we feel we've found 'our Linux OS' for good. Because it's unlikely that we jump the gun with some random distro on average, We do the due diligence on whether it suits our needs before hopping and when it doesn't match our expectations we do it again!

I think that's the beauty of Linux! There's one for everyone.

> I got tired of running `pacman -Syu`, rebooting, and having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change, or something else.

It never happened to me with Manjaro.

> because of access to the AUR

to those that switch away from Arch, what do you do about this? stop using that software? update/build it yourself from source?

I switched from Arch to Fedora in 2015. I don't miss anything from AUR. When I was on Arch, I used a bunch of stuff from AUR, but I honestly can't remember what I used.

So, it seems like it's worked out okay. I honestly got tired of using Arch and configuring everything. Things would break, and I'd have to figure out how to fix it. What broke the camel's back was when my window manager, awesome, broke. Don't get me started on the name 'awesome' for a window manager and how difficult it was to search for solutions to problems. By that time, I had grown older, and I just wanted something to work, and Fedora works fine for me.

I only used Arch (and AUR) to play around. I've been using Ubuntu and Pop as my main OS for years. I've never felt like I needed something from AUR.

I don't need the last software update right away and if I need it, I have PPA and flatpak.

Always use the Original not Manjaro but Arch, not Ubuntu but Debian etc.

No way

Why? Is there a reason behind this principle or is it just dogma?

Just my personal experience since ~2000

Try to explain?

Well it's a bit a mix of predictability and stability (not the technical one).

One example Ubuntu...first Unity then Amazon then Snaps, and ubuntu is even considered an "enterprise distro"

But i am really not a distro fanboy (super happy if one uses linux and not windows/mac), in fact i use Free-BSD (no truenas etc...again same rule, take the original (i know technically that would be netbsd)) wherever i can, and if i have/can touch linux i choose a old warhorse-distro, mostly because of future predictability/stability.

Ah well, Manjaro was a blessing for me, so much that I donated to them as well. It feels like the best of both worlds - I don't have the motivation to install the system from scratch, but I'd like to use AUR.

Oh, and as others have said, upgrades are quite a YMMV thing, Manjaro upgrades haven't broken things for me since the last few years.

>I don't have the motivation to install the system from scratch,

Archinstall is a thing now.