hi, ‘Fred’! happy that you’re happy! but bloat, imho, is s**t that i do not need. in ubuntu, that includes firefox, libre office, timeshift,and snap. so; in my LMDE 6 machine, the above are nowhere to be found. and i just happen to like cinnamon. almost as comfy as windose, only cheaper...
i looked at spiral too; very versatile, i thought. for me LTS till 2028 is no big deal, but it may be convincing for others. and 28 is a still a long way off, by that time LMDE7 may have turned up. and to have to do all that cleaning up again that i did in LMDE 6 is somewhat discouraging ..as spiral comes with almost the same package; firefox, and libre office..
LMDE5 lasted just two years, 6 will probably be the same with 7 just around the corner. As Mint supply their own packages and with support being withdrawn so quickly upgrading/reinstalling the OS is going to be a pain, pure Debian [which Spiral is] seems a more sensible route. My preferred browser is Firefox and I use LibreOffice if I need an office suite, its pretty good with a bit of tweaking. Spiral is lighter with fewer installed programs but anything missing that you like in Mint seems to be available in the repositories via Synaptic, the App store thingy is a bit lacking and leans toward Flatpak for some reason. As I live in the UK and it will probably rain from now until May I really don't mind spending a a couple of wet afternoons switching my PCs over lol Debian 13 Trixie is due anytime, I think Ill hang on for that.
Well, I actually had always been on the Debian branch, but never 'directly' on Debian or LMDE. This is the first time I moved to another 'branch', this time Fedora. The system is different, so I have to change my habits a bit. For instance they use dnf as package manager, not apt and they use rpm packages, not deb packages. What I also noticed is that they release more updates. Almost every time there are some. That's normal since I am now on a point to point release, not LTS. Instead I have much more recent versions available. Nvidia driver is at 560.35.03, LibreOffice at 24.2.6.2. Kernel: 6.10.12-200.fc40.x86_64 Yesterday I installed the windows game "Alone in the Dark" which is quite recent, it runs fine. I purchased it on gog and run it via Lutris. Time will tell how Fedora develops. It is now my main OS from where I write this post. Would I get an update in the future which screws the system? I don't know. Therefore it's important to me to have proper snapshots. And BTRFS snapshots are really great. I restored one for the sake of testing. It's great and fast. It's now 5 days old. Whether it's a good idea or rather not to have moved away from LTS....ATM I would say yes for sure. It's snappy, stable and up to date. Keep you informed.
Fedora is good and it is a good idea to move away from LTS / point release distros. I like to always have the latest software on my system so I am running Arch. People think that Arch Linux, Fedora and OpenSuse Tumbleweed are unstable because they are updated frequently but that is not the case. What I don't like about these point release distros is that they are bloated and it's not possible or not easy to make a minimal install, with the three distros mentioned above it is possible to make a minimal install. I am running Arch for years and I almost never encountered issues which breaks the system. I have been using snapshots too in the past but now I am using XFS file system instead, it's quite a bit faster then BTRFS and I don't feel the need for snapshots.
very smart. over the years, i suppose most distro’s have become much more reliable, unless you are a compulsive distro hopper. better stick to one distro that you can become more or less familiar with, i think.
I also think reliability has improved over years and that generally. Also some distro / desktops had their 'crisis'. KDE4 for instance was sluggish and full of bugs. And even Kubuntu LTS 2018 still had got updates which rendered the OS being unbootable / blank screen. (Especially at driver updates).. I think the major difference now to have switched from LTS to a half year point to point release is the fact that now everything changes slowly but constantly. At LTS for instance you always had the same desktop version all the time and in the past even the same kernel version until EOL. Now my desktop already changed from KDE 6 to KDE 6.1 and soon to KDE 6.2. What I noticed is that the changes affect my settings. Suddenly something had been reverted. Suddenly something has moved to another place / has changed itself / has got different options. You have to get familiar with the fact that there's actually anything developing and changing. IMHO KDE 6 is not perfect yet. Some things are still not working the way they should.
funny indeed! canonical recently gave me a kernel update to version 6.8.0-45. now i have an usb wifi dongle running that was unsupported in ubuntu until about 2020; it prevented me to migrate from windose for a long time.this kernel is marked as installed too. but; when i checked what driver the pc was using; big surprise! it was the old kernel; driverversion=5.15.0-122-generic. it’s relatively large; 108 MB. i like to clean up after updates, so deleting this thingy is not a good idea; it seems that the new kernel does not support that dongle [yet.]
I am using Linux as my main OS. It took a while to get rid of using windows as main OS and to readjust to Linux.... I have now changed the distro to Fedora. IMHO when changing too much at once you might lose effectivity when working with it. At work I still have to use windows and its window manager. I am actually used to use two monitors to arrange my workflow. I cannot see an advantage using a tiling manager such as Sway or Hyprland. It's so to say too much hard-wired to use a windows like (stacking) manager....even if a tiling manager would be better at the end of the day, the period of suffering by readjusting to a tiling manager would be dominant. But I would like to try it for the sake of curiosity....maybe I'll install it in the future at some day.
Another update...."My Experience with Fedora so far"... Last week I played a lot with running windows games on Fedora. (setting wise) I have got games from gog and a few from steam. Gog games I run with Lutris and steam games I run with their original steam client made for Linux. I wanted to understand how it actually works playing windows games on Linux. It's great and actually fascinating how people managed to get windows games running on Linux. There are compatibility layers. Steam uses Proton, Lutris can run Wine and Proton. And there is a so called 'Prefix'. It's the 'fake' windows environment. When you install a game and run it the first time, the prefix gets created. Each game gets its own Prefix. It's almost like you'd install each game on a separate windows OS and there you only install those system parts of win OS which the game needs to run. And there are tools. One is Protontricks and the other one is Winetricks. You cannot only choose different compatibility layer versions like Proton or Wine versions for each game, you also can install additional windows components into each prefix if the game needs it. It can be drivers, DLLs or dot net runtimes. You even can run regedit to edit the fake win registry. Normally you do not need those tricks to run the game, but I discovered that there are those possibilities. If you screw something, you simply delete a particular Prefix. This removes the particular windows environment created for that game. When you launch the game again, a completely new default windows environment is created. The compatibility layer tries to figure what each game needs. And that works already really great. By playing with those settings and also game settings I noticed that Fedora is really rock solid! Of course when playing with settings it takes no long time until the game crashes. And it crashes hard due to massive conflict. For instance the game freezes and the sound freezes as well with a screaming sound that hurts....but...Fedora itself never! You simply can escape the frozen screaming task, stop it on the client and the window closes. Fedora itself is like nothing ever happened. No hard reboot needed ever so far. You simply can change the setting that might have caused the crash and restart the game. I thought many times....ouch..now I have crashed Fedora, the OS itself...but no. Only the game task and that completely alone. And another rumor I want to disqualify. "Nvidia sux on Linux and especially on the new Wayland display server." No it doesn't. Wayland and Nvidia go great together! There must have been a milestone driver development...people say since version 555 and up. And they are right. Nvidia and Wayland are a great duo now! No issues whatsoever. For now I'd say Fedora is the best distro I ever used, personally! There is only one thing.... Fedora gets updates all day.....and those are not small. If you wait 2 days they can be 500MB. It's actually like a rolling release although they have half year point to point releases. This can be annoying for some people! BUT: You, the user decides when to update! I simply have set the notification period to one week. You can even go for a month or switch it completely off. Actually no big deal, but something to consider.
A last thing for now I want to post. A personal opinion to the question: Fedora or Nobara? This question I had as well. And it took a while to get an (personal) answer. Nobara is based on Fedora. The man behind Nobara distro is GloriousEggroll. He is also a major developer when it comes to compatibility layers. There are Proton and Wine versions that contain "GE". Those versions are mostly advanced. I always run GE versions of the compatibility layer. This means the man behind Nobara knows perfectly how games run and what's needed. In fact he plays a key roll when it comes to windows games on Linux. GE is responsible that more and more windows games can be run on Linux. Nobara's main desktop is KDE now. Fedora's is Gnome. I run the KDE spin of it, though. Both distros are for people who are on newer hardware, but runs on older hardware also very well.. Fedora and Nobara always get the latest stuff, although not that quick as on Arch. But quickly enough. Nobara is actually a one man show, Fedora is sponsored by RedHat. Fedora is like to publish the latest stuff and trends without to lose stability. Fedora has a big community and a lot of developers. Nobara is optimized for gaming and content creators. This means it has already anything installed and optimized needed for gaming and streaming. It also comes with an own optimized kernel. If you are familiar with Linux already and know some basic stuff and want gaming, I'd go for Fedora. You can have the same performance, but you have to install some stuff on your own. (The tools already preinstalled on Nobara for instance). You even can run the game and media optimized Nobara Kernel on Fedora. I do that for testing if and where it is better, it works and is simple to install. If you are new to Linux and want to play games and / or create contents, I'd go for Nobara. Run Steam, login into your account. Install a game of yours and try it. Eventually download the latest ProtonGE version using his tool protonUp-qt and use that. Nividia owners use his distro of Nobara where Nvidia stuff is already included. Easy. If gaming and content creation like streaming is not your purpose, I'd go for Fedora. I think Fedora is more future proof due to the big development team and community. It is safe and well tested and always up to date. Nobara comes with anything preinstalled needed for gaming and content creation. It is less efforts to start. But maybe less future proof.
Fedora 41 has been released! It comes now also with a new spin (desktop) I know nothing about, Miracle Desktop. Should be a tiling manager as well and a sort of advanced Sway.... I am waiting for my personal upgrade to 41....there is no rush.
For me personally after being on Ubuntu from 8 to 20 I simply switched to Linux Mint Debian edition 5 and then 6 just because it's super stable, less updates unless it's a critical exploit or kernel update, no micro-stuttering or fiddling with .conf file setting to fix anything. Everything is configured out of the box and uses less resources than stock Ubuntu GNOME. If it's a dev machine stick with Linux Mint main edition if you'll be using many PPAs and you're required to be using bleeding edge software versions.