I am currently running Xubuntu on all my systems but there are so many things that feel rather unstable/buggy - I am sure it is not all Xubuntus/Xfce’s fault, but my knowledge is limited so I just attribute it to that.

Therefore, I am currently considering switching to Fedora. I feel like it is time trying out a new desktop (KDE) and a more up to date kernel. I am not entirely sure what I am hoping from this post, but maybe a “yea, it is worth it” would ease my mind a bit.

Also, I am a bit unsure how to easily move between them (programs and data).

To name a few of the bugs I encountered in the past:

  • When connecting screens, quite often the created profile is ignored, screens get disabled, overlapped, … By applying the profile multiple times eventually you can overcome this issue
  • Dell specific: Webcam does not work, system sometimes freezes after closing the laptop lid even if sleep mode is deactivated
  • Certain shortcuts are bugged (WIN+Left works, WIN+Right doesn’t. When you reset WIN+Right, it works until the next restart)
  • bad1080@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    i found fedora hard to work with because of its hard “no non-open source” stand. e.g. i had trouble playing a x265 HEVC file with vlc where as i never encountered anything like that on any other distro and solving this was not trivial.
    i am on kubuntu rn but if i were to switch i’d go back to cachyos with KDE.

      • bad1080@piefed.socialEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        if you are aware of it and its solutions it surely is a non-issue but for me as a linux noob it was reason enough against fedora. getting into linux is already complicated enough without extra obstacles.

        • irate944@piefed.socialEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          you’re right, it was also one of the reasons I avoided fedora originally. Company of Heroes for example would work OOTB in any other distro, but on fedora it would crash as soon the game opened - unless I skipped the intro movies with the steam command. My guess it was the codecs, even though I supposedly had installed them.

          But just you know, if someday you give it another shot, you can use this link: https://nattdf.streamlit.app/

          It’s basically a script builder that helps you get fedora up and running with everything you want. Codecs was never an issue since I used it

    • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
      4·
      2 days ago

      It’s not about proprietary stuff, it’s about US software patents. The codecs are open source, but you can’t use them under US law because of patents. Fedora cares about that because they are closely tied to Red Hat which is an American company. Community distros without any corporate affiliation like Arch or Debian generally don’t give a shit since there is no commercial entity to sue. IDK how Canonical circumvents that though.

    • sneaky@r.nfEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I had issues with this and ended up just switching to the flatpak for VLC.

    • Ghoelian@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Once you find rpmfusion, working with non-open-source packages becomes a lot easier. It includes libraries for x265 HEVC for example, and they have tutorials that are usually pretty helpful.