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by webaholic 2611 days ago
This is good distro for developers by developers. I wouldn't suggest it for everyday users though. There are too many beta quality bugs since it uses really bleeding edge releases.
4 comments

If the 6-month release cycle is too frequent for you as a desktop user, consider using RHEL/Centos. In general Red Hat's distros are top-notch and easier to reason about than other distros.
What? The software in CentOS' official repositories is horribly outdated (aka 'stable', which is why it runs on many servers). Why should a desktop system run CentOS? I'd rather recommend Ubuntu or one of its descendants. They also have LTS versions, if stability is a concern, but are not as outdated as CentOS.
Fedora is too cutting edge and CentOS is too outdated? Ok then, go off to Canonical land where everything falls apart outside the most common use cases and your entire desktop experience changes every couple of years.

Fedora isn't cutting edge compared to actual rolling release distros so if that's still too much for you then RHEL or CentOS should be enough.

Debian works just fine, IME - better than Ubuntu LTS provided that the hardware support is OK. Even OpenSuse is a nice middle ground.
Debian was nothing but trouble for me. I found myself in opposition to too many of their design choices and some packages to be too outdated. At the end of the day it lacks the polish and moddability I've come to expect from Fedora.
I'm at NASA Goddard and we use RHEL/CentOS for servers and a few desktops and Ubuntu on some desktops. I am sometimes frustrated by the age of certain CentOS packages, but having compatibility with our servers is a plus. I've avoided Fedora due to the rapid release cycle and the lack of official support by NASA (at least here at Goddard). There's no perfect solution.
I've put certain family members on CentOS.

It kinda depends upon what you're doing with your computer. E.g. if I weren't into gaming I would be using CentOS over Fedora (or Ubuntu).

Why don't you use SCL if the official repos are outdated?
CentOS 8 is not fresh enough for you?
Does it exist yet?
No. But at least RHEL 8 (based on Fedora 28) has been available as a beta release for a while now (since 25th November 2018), so it shouldn't be too long.. I'd speculate another 4-6 months and we'll have it.
I agree, but if you want to develop .Net or Swift, the available rpm's seem to originate downstream and lag the releases for ubuntu significantly. The releases of .Net core, the Swift toolchain, and Kitura, the IBM open source Swift web framework (even though IBM owns Red Hat), all come out targeting ubuntu. Because the different linux distros have significantly older or newer versions of some .so and .h files, releasing for all the major flavors is harder than it should be, and ubuntu seems to come first.
Swift is a PITA on Linux in general; the Ubuntu-only releases is only a symptom.

It is a pain to build it at all, from the sources. With the exception of the apple/swift repo, all the other apple/swift-* repos do not even seem to have tagged releases. At least not in the sense that other projects do releases.

What beta quality bugs?
F29 included bugs such as:

-Cron jobs don't run

-Package manager creates multi-gigabyte log files

-Package manager crashes on systems upgraded from previous releases

-GNOME crashes when switching to a virtual terminal and back

-Default bluetooth config doesn't work for some devices

-Ethernet runs at 10mbps instead of 1gbps

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F29_bugs

I think the Fedora community is pretty responsive when it comes to fixing bugs that are under their control, and the developers dogfood the desktop enough that they care about these things.

Also, Fedora gets new kernels all the time, and that often takes care of problems that sometimes persist in more "stable" distributions.

I have one mid-level issue per release, I figure, and it is usually patched within a couple of weeks.

I did have a bad experience upgrading from F27-29, so I've only been on F29 for maybe a month or so, and it has been smooth so far. I will probably wait a few weeks to a month to upgrade to F30 to increase my chances of a trouble-free transition.

> -Default bluetooth config doesn't work for some devices

Bluetooth (Bluez) is a trainwreck on any distro; even the version shipped with Ubuntu 18.04 (LTS!) is broken.

This is true, F29 just happened to ship with an extra-broken default config.

Though I have yet to see any BT implementation that isn't at least a little bit broken. Nobody actually conforms to the spec so you have to attempt to make your noncomforance work with the widest possible variety of other vendors' nonconformance and you'll always find device combinations that just don't work together.

Not my experience. Or, if anything, bluetooth on Ubuntu works much better than on my Windows laptop (Lenovo).
Certainly YMMV applies, however, it's important to distinguish the nature of the two cases.

Broken BT support in a Windows context generally means poor drivers for a given device - at least the Windows 10, which is almost 4 years old, has a stable BT stack. Therefore, BT problems are of particular (per-device) nature.

In Ubuntu, the problem is systemic, due to (even ignoring how terrible the BT protocol is) both Bluez's (alleged) terrible engineering practices, and Ubuntu's utter carelessness of the area. In this terms, BT problems are of universal nature.

For example, the 18.04 Pulseaudio/BT configuration is broken by default - see https://askubuntu.com/a/1050172.

This is not an exception; the Pulseaudio/BT configuration has been broken in a way or another since... forever. Very evidently, the Ubuntu devs prefer to ship a broken-but-up-to-date BT stack, than a working-but-old one.

For a more historical perspective of the Ubuntu/Bluez trainwreck, see http://www.bennybottema.com/2010/08/08/how-ubuntus-broken-bl.... Summary: "Bluez is a bunch of cowboy coders is why".

Lot of dnf issues on that list. I find using dnf more reliable than using the gui software installer. That program is really buggy.
I have had my own share of bugs, all virt-related, but I have experienced none of the bugs you've described across more than a dozen systems.

dnf could definitely work on keeping its generated garbage down to a more reasonable size, though.

What release version was that? I started experiencing issues in 29, but has been rock solid otherwise.