I’ve been using Arch as a daily driver for years and love it’s customization level, then I realized I just want an OS that works. I need tips, advice, or even warnings before moving.
I used the “normal” Fedora (Workstation and KDE spin) for years and now moved to the Atomic variants.
Especially uBlue is fucking great, as it is just the default Fedora Atomic with some tweaks and QoL-changes. It basically “just works” ootb and maintains itself.
You can take a look at Bazzite if you’re into gaming for example.
It’s also very customisable, but you have to learn a different approach.
I personally would give it a chance if I were you, but beware, you have to learn a new workflow
You don’t install software to the host directly, but with containers, e.g. Distrobox or Flatpak
You can still install packages directly if really needed (e.g. drivers), but it is largely not recommended
I personally strongly prefer Atomic to the mutable version, but that’s my taste. If you prefer the traditional variant, then go for it. In that case, you don’t need to know anything particular, it’s nothing special :)
The cool thing is: you can rebase to any other Fedora Atomic variant if you want with one single command, which feels like a clean reinstall, but you keep your settings and data.
Pretty neat if you want to get the newest rolling release feature from rawhide, then rebase to KDE and then an Ubuntu clone.
You can also make your own images from skratch with the uBlue builder :)
General attitude toward using close to bleeding edge packages as defaults
Package order of Fedora rpm repos, Fedora Flatpak -> RPMFusion, Flathub -> copr -> external installation
Immutable variants of Fedora exist for the major desktops
Fedora generally prides itself on being a Wayland-focused and oriented workstation distro. There is still active support for desktop environments/window managers that run on Xorg, but you should consider moving toward a Wayland-supporting environment (Gnome, KDE, Sway, Hyprland).
SELinux (a Mandatory Access Control system) is enabled by default and has pretuned policies installed that should support most use cases out of the box. SEApplet is a useful utility to find active SELinux denials in case an application is getting permission denied issues for seemingly no reason.
If you intend to use BTRFS as your filesystem of choice and want to utilize it to its fullest (encrypted partitions, subvolume encryption, automatic snapshots), it is best to read up how BTRFS and subvolumes work before partitioning so that your subvolumes will be correct the first time. It can be tedious to edit subvolumes, move their contents, and remount portions of the filesystem after they have already been populated.
I’m sure you’re used to how things on Arch with bleeding edge works, and understand that on Arch you should always read patch notes before updating. Generally, updates on Fedora are fine to just push through. It is worth generally reading what is new when performing system upgrades to a new version of Fedora, I have noticed occasionally in over five years of usage the first target release of a new version of Fedora can sometimes have breakages that tend to get fixed within the next couple of weeks. There is extensive testing for system upgrades that can be openly viewed, but the testing doesn’t always catch everything before a new release.
By default, the best way to grab packages on Fedora is from the official repos or from the Fedora Flatpaks. Barring that or if you aren’t satisfied by a default package for whatever reason (some stuff in default repos doesn’t have ffmpeg support or others due to codec licensing issues), you can add the second-party RPMFusion repos or add Flathub to grab additional or alternative packages as well. If those avenues fail, you might be able to find someone maintaining the package you need or want to test on Copr, which is essentially like Ubuntu’s Launchpad PPA platform. Barring all else, you could manually install a given application externally, though obviously this typically isn’t the best solution in most cases. Some cases where you might want RPMFusion packages are for things like audacity-freeworld, which includes proper ffmpeg support for Audacity. This package comes from rpmfusion-free. Or you might want something like akmod-nvidia to install the proprietary NVidia drivers or steam to install Steam. These packages come from rpmfusion-nonfree. Also, if you are not familiar with Flatpak, it might be worth becoming familiar with how it works (Flatseal is an excellent application that lets you modify how certain Flatpaks are sandboxed).
Immutable variants of Fedora (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, Budgie Atomic) also exist and provide an immutable base image that won’t typically get modified across boots. Most of the custom user installation of programs is intended to be installed via Flatpaks (Fedora or Flathub) or through using toolboxes to create sandboxed environments for certain workflows. If you absolutely need to rebase the system image with extra utilities, rpm-ostree is available to modify the system package selection, though this method is not recommended to just be used to install everything (needless rebasing of the immutable image defeats the point of using an immutable distro). Obviously these spins aren’t for everyone, but are there for those who want to use them.
You have to expect not getting 80 updates per day. It is very hard to see no updates and not being able to update anything knowing that there could be hundreds of updates
Before you move, use a second drive or so such that you can always fall back if you decide that it’s not what you want.
I can highky recommend atomic fedora but fedora is already a good distro on its own. It’s still all linux.
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