Goodbye Arch, Hello Fedora

About 3 months ago I switched away from daily driving Arch Linux. I’m still dailying Linux, but Arch just wasn’t what I wanted from my system. Now don’t get me wrong, Arch is fantastic project. The distro provides a great light weight and minimal base to build off of, the wiki is an incredible reference regardless of what distro you use, and the AUR has basically everything you could ever want.

However, my issue comes from the fact that I don’t need it. Arch is known for having its packages on the cutting edge. This is great if you want that, but for everyone else it just means you’re forced to beta test any new software updates. There were several times during my tenure with Arch that updating my system would cause it to break something, and its even become unbootable on a few occasions. And I’ve even talked to other Arch users about this experience, but its just left me confused. An actual reply I’ve gotten was “Just don’t update”, but that just left me confused. Isn’t half the point of using Arch to take advantage of the latest and greatest software? If you aren’t updating to avoid bugs, doesn’t it invalidate the point of Arch? I know I stopped updating my system for a while towards the end, and all it did was make it a pain whenever I wanted to update/install a specific package due to half the dependencies being outdated. It just stopped making send to use Arch because I wanted something that just worked.

So, a quick backup of my home folder later, I was ready to install a new distro. There are a ton of great options to chose from, and ultimately its a personal choice. I know I tried out a few different ones before settling. Mint, Nix, Pop, and even Ubuntu are all compelling options, but I think the philosophy behind the software I’m using is an important consideration to take into account. Debian is a shining example of this, its a community dedicated to building and maintaining free software for the community. Its something I think we need more of, but ultimately I ended up going with Fedora. Partly because I’ve used Debian extensively on the server side and wanted something different, and partly because Fedora made it super easy to do an encrypted install along side an existing partition. Admittedly, I still need Windows quite often to run things that don’t work on Linux, but I still spend a bulk of my time on Linux. But don’t get me wrong, Fedora is still a fantastic project with a great community, I just question it a bit when Red Hat is such a driving force behind it.

But how is it actually using Fedora? Pretty good actually. They offer a spin with my preferred window manager, so from there it was just installing a few more packages, copying over my dot files, and I was back in business. Now, I will say the Fedora packages didn’t have everything I used on Arch, but this was barely an issue given that Flatpaks exist. Now I know issues exist, like having to redownload dependencies, sandboxing being poorly explained, obtuse interactions with themes, and some other smaller idiosyncrasies. But to me, most of these issues are completely forgivable. Flatpaks are great for applications as they not only make it easier for developers to packages their app for multiple distros, but it also allows users to access more up to date versions than their package repository. I think most people will find the downsides to be a small price to pay.

Now I wish I could say that’s that, but I still thought to myself: “does this truly ‘just work’, or is it just more convenient than Arch?” My answer would soon come as issues appeared. I was having issues where going in and out of full screen would cause my display to strobe white until I restarted. Actually, I had this issue back on Arch too. Part of the reason I was distro hopping for a bit was to try to see if any distro fixed that out of the box, but regardless of distro and window manager combination it persisted. Its probably an issue with my hardware configuration (Ryzen 7640U), but I did eventually find a fix with the following command: sudo grubby –update-kernel=ALL –args=”amdgpu.sg_display=0”.

Even without considering something as major as a graphics display bug like that, I’ve still encountered small issues running Linux every day. Nothing major enough to get me to stop, but then again, I used Arch for 3 years, I’m willing to put up with more. It just worries me that these mainstream distros, the ones that are supposed to “just work”, don’t quite work as expected. When more and more people are getting sick and tired of the practices of these big tech companies and looking for alternatives, the alternatives need to actually be viable for the average person. And I will admit, my views of the average person are still skewed, I was surrounded by people who loved computers and technology for the longest time. I forgot that people like my parents exist, people who barely know how to use a computer outside of opening the web browser and opening whatever web page they need. I forgot people my age lack understanding of fundamental concepts behind a computer. They don’t know what file extensions are or what a package manager is. These people just know that clicking the icon will make an action happen. I can’t really say desktop Linux “just works” until it just works for these people.

Maybe it shouldn’t. I mean, technology should be easily accessible by everyone. Computers are such a powerful tool and people should be able to leverage it, but the cynic in me just thinks we’ve let technology become too accessible at the cost of the user. The modern tech world is built around exploiting the end user for the gain of the company producing the software, and I find that to be appalling. Luckily, it seems that more and more people are becoming aware of this and looking towards free software as a solution. Its great, and we need to encourage it by making our free software “just work” for these people.

What was I talking about again? Uh, yeah, Fedora Linux has been really great. Having something that (mostly) works out of the box is really nice, having stable packages is really nice, updating my system without fear is nice, and flatpaks are a nice way to package software. Thank you Fedora for being good.