I am trying out Fedora for multiple unrelated reasons (use RHEL at work, new config, it might be more optimized) and I noticed a number of concerning caveats, even in mind with the fact that I already use RHEL:
- Software support seems lacking. I have a growing number of software neither the repo, nor rpmfusion has. In any other case I would need to use copr for installing community maintained packages. However copr feels relatively abandoned and unreliable. That mainly comes down to packages being undiscriminately displayed without download stats or upvote status (unless you look them up one by one). Also a large part of packages are incompatible because they were made specifically for Fedora 38 with no 39 fixup in sight. Rpmfusion is weirdly empty, I expected it to have majority of the stuff I need so I dont inevitably have to rely on copr. I already had to download executables from upstream.
- Install Groups. They are not getting listed properly! It only lists the most basic meta groups. This is combined with the lack of actually being able to search for groups and you got yourself a lot of random groups you wont find unless you start looking it up online.
- Xorg wiki page. Ex fucking cuse me?! Did I mistype something, because I clearly remember trying to use one of the most popular and allegedly well put together distros. At this point why even have a wiki page?
- base-x group contains everything needed for running Xorg. I will actually eat my hat if you can tell me I can find that info without stackoverflow. Cant search for the group, nothing is documented about it.
I would agree with the sentiment that I could technically write the documentation and package all the things I need in copr, but Im having serious doubts if this “platform” developed by the same guys who dont document it is actually worth the hassle.
I guess the positive thing to say about it is that it performed better for gaming than my Arch install, and I had done zero optimisations on it yet.
Trust me I’m more on your side than you think, what you described should indeed work as you expected. If I selected the Window Managers group during install and it specifically installed things that need Xorg, I’d be surprised if they weren’t working on first boot because of missing Xorg. The Anaconda installer that Fedora uses has generally been very reliable for me, but I haven’t installed Fedora in that specific way, I’ve always chosen a graphical desktop and then installed other window managers or DEs on top of it, or gone with a minimal server install for headless deployments with no GUI at all.
The fact that this was hard to troubleshoot is not a good look for Fedora either, even if this is a somewhat non-standard setup. It’s bad UX that base-x is not documented or easy to find, though on the positive side, I’ve never needed to know that base-x contains all the Xorg packages because Fedora has, for me, seemed to manage this on its own without needing me to know this detail. One more implementation detail I don’t have to deal with is a positive in my book, right up until you have to deal with it, then it’s super frustrating.
I think Im starting to realize why these 10%> distros are where they are. Every time I go out to try something like OpenSUSE or Fedora it is always the same kind of issues. This 0 hour “what the hell, why cant I find a basic thing” questions that come up even well into being an advanced user.
The Debian and Arch sphere are well deserved to be having the largest share these days. I guess I made a mistake throwing off Debian every time just because I wanted something “cooler”.
Thats it. That is indeed THE main issue (or ballpark of issues) of Fedora. Like it should actually be needed to get fixed to get somewhere.
Full agreement. I tried out Fedora and OpenSUSE, but the lack of documentation, lack of googlable answers and weird lack of some basic functionality drove me back to Debian every time.
Slackware is a notable exception: It has basically no up-to-date online documentation and googling your issues usually doesn’t help cause hardly anyone uses it.
But it ships with easy-to-understand text files that are usually right in the directory where you want to configure things, written by the main developer himself. And if you ask a question on linuxquestions.org, chances are you may get your answer from one of the dev team members.
After reading this I feel like I made the right choice dual booting linux mint debian and garuda arch.