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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

I just switched to Fedora after almost a decade and a half of Ubuntu when I got a new laptop that I had to set up from scratch anyway. The switch was relatively seamless for me, as in: it's mostly similar to Ubuntu. The main reason for me was wanting to give GNOME 40 a try after having heard many good things about it, and also Ubuntu starting to feel a bit "off" from the intended GNOME experience. Everything feels more tightly integrated on Fedora, with e.g Flatpaks being a first-class citizen, the software centre working properly, and Pipewire being enabled. Which is weird, because the polished, integrated experience was what got me on Ubuntu in the first place.

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Thanks a lot for your description. Could you give me a little more information as to what you find better in GNOME 40? And perhaps what felt off with Ubuntu?

Pipewire may be a candidate for a something that would make me switch, only because I have some issues with Ubuntu and my bluetooth headset, where the microphone is not really working always. Also having to switch back and forth between high quality playback for music and "headset" settings is not really ideal. But I am unaware of Pipewire solving these.

It's not so much that I found things explicitly better, but that the descriptions piqued my interested and I just wanted to experience them for myself. Specifically, trackpad gestures combined with horizontal workspaces. (In practice, I usually have a keyboard and mouse so I don't use the trackpad much, although the horizontal workspaces feel slightly more natural.)

Things feeling off are hard to describe, but a concrete one is the software centre being pretty buggy and Snaps causing there to be many duplicate entries (and also Snaps being dependent on a single, closed-source Canonical server by definition).

But yes, I think Pipewire sealed the deal for me, at least in terms of giving Fedora a try once. I'm not sure why anymore, but I think it had something to do with being able to do screen sharing in Wayland?

In either case, it was mostly curiosity, and the differences really aren't that big. But it worked just fine right away, with nothing much to get used to, so I just stuck with it. Curious to see how the upgrade to v35 will go though.

Thanks a lot for your thorough explanation. I was not aware of the gestures thing. Perhaps I will give it a try when I get a new laptop. Then I can always go back to Ubuntu if I do not like it.

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