Fedora 42 Beta
48 comments
·March 18, 2025jjice
I've been feeling a pull towards Fedora lately away from Ubuntu, especially because there's apparently better hardware support for Framework laptops. Does anyone have experience for migrating from Ubuntu to Fedora? Package reinstallation isn't an issue for me, but wondering if anyone has some general tips for migrating everything between distributions, especially with different parent distros.
toprerules
Fedora uses more stock and Red Hat is a far, far bigger contributor to Linux and OS as a whole (especially the kernel and systemd). Fedora stays more true to the only OSS ethos. IMO Fedora is the better pick.
If I had to use Ubuntu I would fight to use Debian instead.
zifpanachr23
I agree very strongly with your take. Fedora (and RHEL of course) ooze professionalism in a way that no other distro ecosystem does to me.
It's rock solid AND comes with relatively new packages, AND they are close to stock. I also appreciate their willingness to put themselves forward and show leadership when it comes to adopting (or creating) new technologies that can make the platform better. I think most professionals can agree at this point that despite little qualms and some early hiccups here and there, technologies like systemd and wayland (and others) were probably good ideas in the long run, and Fedora was consistently way out ahead in promoting and adopting them.
I also tend to trust Red Hat (and yes even IBM) more than I do Canonical for a number of reasons.
akdor1154
> Canonical gives off some weird vibes and those in the know will understand what I'm talking about.
You're probably trying to write fairly and without throwing shade, but the result is this gives off vibes of FUD. Can you be a bit more specific about your issues with Canonical?
jjtheblunt
exactly same sentiment here
ndiddy
One thing to note is that you have to set up codecs/video acceleration stuff manually on Fedora because of legal reasons. Here's a pretty good guide for that, it also has some suggested configuration tweaks for GNOME that make it a bit nicer to use. https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2024/10/14/fedora-starter-pack/
ustad
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian about two months ago after my system crashed while trying to update. Since then, Debian has been rock-solid, running much smoother and more efficiently. No more dealing with Snap packages and similar annoyances. If you’re disciplined about not messing with the OS, keeping your files organized and backed up, and using containers, switching between distros and operating systems becomes pretty seamless.
wirybeige
Moving between distros I usually just have files I care about like documents and music on their own drive so I don't need to worry about moving them. As for moving from Ubuntu to Fedora, there are more steps to getting non-free software/codecs/drivers working on Fedora, you will need RPM Fusion for that. There are relevant How-Tos provided by RPM Fusion and other sources for installing NVIDIA drivers, ffmpeg (non-free), and more.
fanatic2pope
I believe these days the "extra steps" amount to just clicking an option box to allow third party repositories during install.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/workstation-working-gro...
jjice
Having all my actual files separately stored from my system files just makes so much sense. Good call. Right now they're mostly relegated to a few directories, but I'm not positive, which is part of the headache I'm worried about with a switch. Having them completely separate and symlinked is a great call.
treve
I switched about 2 years ago using my Dell XPS 13. No hardware issues and everything is just a bit less buggy. I wrote about it back then: https://evertpot.com/switching-to-fedora/
lreeves
I moved my AMD Framework laptop from Ubuntu to Fedora, no real complaints. Having the newest kernel and Mesa stuff is pretty useful if you're doing any gaming on it.
oaththrowaway
I floated between Mint and Pop_OS for years, and now I'll probably never leave Fedora Silverblue. It's awesome. I just use different toolbox/distrobox for different things I need.
Most of my dev work is in a Ubuntu distrobox and I use mostly Flatpaks for everything else.
bsimpson
For those who have heard of Bazzite, the frontrunner in gaming/home theater Linux distros, it's based on Silverblue.
runjake
I prefer apt, but on my particular PC, Fedora is noticeably faster and more stable than Ubuntu. Not that I have system crashes, but I have smoother performance and gaming, and random GNOME apps crash much less on Fedora, so I use it. And there's no Snap -- unless you want it. YMMV.
ndiddy
Fedora KDE is probably the best KDE experience I've had, so I'm glad that it's going to get equal billing with the GNOME version going forward. Shoutout to the Fedora KDE maintainers for doing such a good job.
sho_hn
KDE developer myself, and happy Fedora user since 2009. Agreed, the Fedora team does a great job, also with keeping us developers happy by e.g. providing dependencies needed by the unreleased development versions.
bravetraveler
I really like working with 'mock' and 'fedpkg'; Fedora is a modern binary distribution, of course, but source rebuilds are like the same four commands away for any package
skyyler
Excited that the partitioning portion of the installer is reworked - that has been a pain point for recommending Fedora to newbies.
Really excited that the KDE version is ascended from spin to Edition! That's what I use for my desktop at home.
wirybeige
I've been using Fedora 42 since it branched, it has been quite nice; I haven't encountered any breaking bugs with it. Has gnome 48 which comes with HDR support. Hope that chromium can get support for it soon, MPV can already do it apparently, but haven't tried it; games have been hit & miss for it, but I presume those will get ironed out over time.
null
nwah1
Excited about the new COSMIC spin, and remain excited about the progression of the existing Atomic desktop spins.
bsimpson
Nice that people have options. Setting up a desktop on your own isn't always easy.
I tried COSMIC and was disappointed that it didn't work well on a touchscreen (a common refrain for Linux environments, and a motivator for me trying it out). Then again, it's still an alpha. Would be nice to see improvements there, but since it's from a laptop vendor, I don't have high expectations.
nasir
Using Fedora 3 as my first linux distro makes seeing this nostalgic.
johnisgood
Wayland has not been working for me properly though. I may give it another go so I'll be able to provide you an exhaustive list of what is not working properly, for now though, perhaps other people could chime in.
2OEH8eoCRo0
What doesn't work properly?
oaththrowaway
My biggest gripe with Wayland is screen sharing/remote desktop. For my desktop PC I could just install RealVNC and have access to it on any of my devices anywhere in the world. I still haven't found a good solution for Wayland. I'm using RDP right now but it really sucks in comparison so far.
Slack screen share is kind of hit and miss as well. Not to mention screen capture being less than ideal.
rcarmo
Install xorgxrdp-glamor and openh264. That will give you GPU-accelerated UI rendering and a much faster video stream.
https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/01/05/1730#h-264-strea... (these packages have already been mainlined, I think)
null
modzu
literally the only thing that works better (and not worse) on wayland is fractional scaling, and it is still not great :D. but thats partly how fedora drives the whole ecosystem forward
modzu
not sure why youre being downvoted, wayland as default is probably the biggest thing to flag for new users coming from any other distro
2OEH8eoCRo0
Good work! Looks like one heck of a release!
FYI they now build WSL tarballs!
https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/42_Beta-1.4/Conta...
mythz
Been a happy Fedora Desktop user since switching from 20+ years of Windows last year. Had a few hiccups at the start of last year with NVIDIA drivers in Wayland but that's since been resolved with Explicit sync support.
Happy there's been no signs enshittification of Fedora from Redhat, it's a just a clean polished well maintain modern distro, great option if you're a dev switching from Windows.
benatkin
I’ve been using Podman on Fedora on Lima (Mac OS) with rootless containers based on Fedora rather than from Docker Hub for fullstack web dev. I’m ready to use Rocky Linux or RHEL for some production stuff if I find it more suitable for something and have used Rocky Linux a fair bit. I’ve really grown to like Fedora and have switched to it from Ubuntu. They have systems for building OCI images that are interesting and useful, and related to buildpacks. https://src.fedoraproject.org/container/s2i-base
Asahi also has the 42 Beta available today: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-asahi-remix-42-...
Notably with FEX support for running x86 binaries. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FEX