Should I stay on Arch or try Fedora?
For the last month, this war has been raging in my mind. Stay with Arch or try Fedora? I have been on various flavors of Arch Linux for the last two years. What keeps me coming back is the Wiki and the ability to troubleshoot problems with a simple search. Sure, there have been times when the search lasted longer, but the solution was always found.
I have heard about the stability issues of bleeding-edge software, but in the past two years, I have gotten work done. I have never reached the point where I had to redo a system just to keep working.
Also, I have redone my computer about 10 times I am sure, so installing Arch using the terminal usually takes me about an hour at the most with interruptions. It is usually a weekend project for me. Back up my data. Wipe the drive, install Arch.
Table of Contents
Finding the Elusive Perfect Environment
Now one of the reasons for all this hopping is, of course, to find the elusive perfect environment for my workflow. When I first got back into Linux about 2 years ago, I tried Gnome and KDE. I was just coming from windows. In fact, the TPM requirement for Windows 11 is what drove me away. Why should I buy a new computer just to get 11? Therefore, I wanted a desktop environment with all the bells and whistles.
After being introduced to vanilla Arch, I continued with KDE and was bitten by a bug. I then tried openSUSE tumbleweed and realized I got the same bug. So I went back to Arch and this time tried gnome with some plug-ins. Again, I was bitten by another bug during the upgrade. So here enters the tiling window manager.
Hooked on Tiling Window Managers
Once I got the hang of the workflow with tiling window managers, I became hooked. However, with a vanilla Arch install and a tiling WM, plenty of the basic sound and printer controls are not present. So began the distro hopping of trying to find the one that sets up a nice tiling WM with all the hardware configured.
I have been using Manjaro i3 on a different computer, my company laptop, for about one year now. It is not a bad setup, but I have come to loathe pamac for one reason: if I want to install one software, it tries to do a full update first.
Cosmic DE wasn’t far off either, but I haven’t been fond of the way Cosmic handles multiple monitors and workspaces.
So I went back to vanilla Arch using QTile and I have been working on this for a couple of months. There are a few tweaks missing, and the biggest problem is to find the time to make those tweaks. Hence, the search for that elusive easy-to-install tiling window manager desktop environment continues.
In Love with Rolling Distros
Another thing I love about Arch is the fact that it is a rolling distro. I love the ease of keeping the software updated. Recently, I had the task of upgrading an Ubuntu 22.04 environment and a Fedora 40 environment. In both cases, I left them running overnight. On Arch, it takes me all but a half hour, so much easier. However, the Fedora and Ubuntu upgrades weren’t overly painful.
I noticed that Fedora has quite a few tiling WM spins. @hydn hinted that I may like them because Fedora tends to do a vanilla DE. Therefore, the aforementioned war began. The positives I can see with choosing a Fedora spin are: ease of install, stability, not too far from bleeding edge, upgradability and the necessary hardware pieces like sound and printers working.
But, I love Arch. It’s almost a thing of pride. I tell myself I can always return when I have time. But the command sudo pacman -Syu is a dream. However, one last thing that may get me over, is the availability of software. Arch’s AUR is a thing of beauty! However, most software there is maintained by someone who takes a .deb file and converts it for use with Arch. @hydn reminded me that software is usually released with a .deb or .rpm file. So if I go into Fedora, will my software experience be better?
In Conclusion
Right now, I am leaning to try Fedora 41. I know 42 is coming out soon. I am looking to try miracle-wm first, to see how this Wayland-based DE works.
So I close with my beginning question, should I stay on Arch or venture out?
@shybry747 Awesome post! I’ve featured this on the main blog. And awarded this post the Master of Unix badge. It’s a great contribution for us all as we have all been in the limbo stage of distro hopping.
So much so that within your article, I added links to the following similar articles from @tmick and myself:
…see we have all been here, or will be.
I also say there’s no wrong decision, but the process is to be savored. Thanks for sharing your thought process and approach to making this decision.
Regarding .rpm or .deb, if you stick to official repos, Flatpak, the AUR (for Arch users), or properly maintained third-party repos like Remi for Fedora/CentOS or OBS for openSUSE, the failure rate is much lower.
But random
.deband.rpmdownloads? Yeah, expect issues. However, we generally know which will have a higher likelihood of working. lol Just like with the AUR.The AUR is a bit of a mixed bag, while it has a huge selection, many packages are user-submitted and can break just as much due to missing dependencies, outdated PKGBUILDs or abandoned maintainers. But that does not happen much because, again, we kind of have a general idea of which are the working/active ones to try based on dates, discussions, etc.
A +1 for Arch is that at least you can easily inspect the build script before installing.
Fedora releases a new major version every 6 months (April and October). Each release gets around 13 months of support before it reaches EOL.
I’ll make it really simple. YW
…
I thought it’s 3 months, half year make more sense
This diagram looks pretty accurate. The times I have gotten to tinker on Arch is usually when the family is sleeping and I am still awake.
Love the diagram!
Nice Post @shybry747