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by lm28469 88 days ago
I recently installed Fedora and holy shit it's still not production ready. During the initial setup you need to input your location, you have a choice between clicking on the map or typing the city, I don't remember which it is but one of them makes your system freeze, no way to get out other than a reboot. It's documented since Fedora 42, and was still there on Fedora 43

Every time my swap is full the entire system freezes for a good second, sometimes it stays stuck, no way out besides rebooting, I've never experienced that in any other OS ever

It's impossible to get more than a few days of uptimes, it's like the ram is never ever freed, last time I had to reboot my mac I had close to one year of uptime.

A friend sent me a png to print, every time I open it with the image viewer it uses 100% of my memory instantly (10+gb), causing the system to freeze. The image is 700kb and opens fine on gimp

I completely understand why people stick to the alternatives, it's way too easy to "hold it wrong" with Linux

5 comments

It's Fedora 43 and I ran into the exact same issue. The other issue I have is that I don't have any display output as soon as I install my graphics card drivers. So using Linux on my desktop is put on hold for now.
I have been daily driving fedora on my laptop for over a year now and haven't ran into a single issue. Not saying you're lying, but if you are having that many serious problems it might be a hardware issue.

The OS is definitely stable and perfectly fine to use.

I've installed and extensively used at least half a dozen different flavors of Linux on about as many computers over the last decade or two. I don't think there's been a single time where I didn't have to work around hardware compatibility issues. Just today, I tried printing a few pages on Linux, and could not get a single one to come out. I'd queue a job, it would just disappear without anything happening. I'd unplug the USB cable, reconnect it, try again, a page would come out with nothing printed on it. I'd restart the printer entirely, try again, nothing would happen. I'd unplug the USB cable, reconnect it, try again. Oh, maybe it's working? Oh no, the printer hard-failed halfway through printing the page, so I have to unplug the power cable, restart the printer, scrap that page, and try again. And so on, and so forth, for about an hour. I've been through this dance several times now and probably wasted at least 10-20 hours (re)installing printer drivers, messing with cups and boot configs, etc. This time I finally had enough, moved the printer over to my Windows machine, plugged it in, and printed my fucking pages. I have many other examples of wasting time trying to get basic stuff like this to work on Linux.
To be fair, in general "hell is empty, and all the printers are here"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQGtucrJ8hM

Picking the location odurong setup is a hardware issue? I find that hard to believe.

And do you mean hardware issue or hardware incompatibility?

The former would most likely manifest itself across many operating systems, but if you mean the latter... why would that matter in terms of a given person deciding whether to switch to Linux?

AFAIK the location lock is an nvidia driver issue... or more precisely the pitiful state of the open source nvidia drivers.

Yes the hardware you chose or is given will heavily influence your linux experience. I kinda wished the community was more proactive making lists of "certified" hardware that is likely to cause the least amount of problems...

If we’re collecting anecdata, I installed Fedora fresh on a framework a couple months ago. I like the cohesiveness of GNOME these days but i’ve seen a couple of issues like non stop notification bells on repeat or inability to wake screen when plugged in to a monitor that feel not prod ready.

I don’t know that i’d expect windows to be much better either, but that’s my experience.

Me as well. Never had any of those issues.
The same hardware runs windows and hackintosh flawlessly.
I bet this is a Windows-certified hardware. Try something designed for GNU/Linux?
Idk and I don't care, you're making my point. I'm in tech and I don't even know what "hardware designed for gnu" means, normies won't either, they have a computer, they want an os. If the os shits the bed during the initial location selection they won't swap their wifi module or motherboard for a "gnu compatible" one, they'll install windows
> I'm in tech and I don't even know what "hardware designed for gnu"

Honestly, I knew I was in a tech bubble but not that much. I mean, if you want your hardware to work with Windows/Linux/MacOS, you just buy it with the OS preinstalled. If you install something unsupported, non-working devices is your problem, not problem of the OS or hardware.

Just like MacOS will probably not work on a Windows laptop, Linux will not necessarily work on a Windows laptop.

Try arch, it's RAM management it's way better. Use Endeavouros if you don't want to deal with the arch install.

I have the same experience on Fedora, and most distros. Arch is the only distro that it's 100% smooth for me.

OpenSuse comes second.

I'm curious: what would make it so much worse in Fedora compared to Arch?
At least here, in a very low-end system, Fedora just freezes when ram is full, it's not as smooth. On Windows, there was a ton of problems, but in general, this never happened. Windows would increase the "swapfile" to 20gb, but would never let the system completely freeze.

My guess it's just the default kernel settings that Arch use instead of Fedora. Arch uses zswap, while Fedora use zram... there's other stuff as well.

It's linux in the end, so you could just change several settings on Fedora... But then... why if you can just install arch?

I think some people are very used to high RAM devices, and doesn't realize these days how some distros can be very bad on low-end systems.

Like, packagekit on Fedora it's a ram hog (and they acknowledge that). Windows these years been bad, but the situation in some linux distros is not great either.

What Linux does better, it's respecting user choice and UX.

I've been using Fedora since version 36. It can become unresponsive when running out of RAM. True. Never had any of those problems. It literally just works. Would you mind uploading that png file so I can try it?
I recently installed Fedora with KDE and ran into behavior that would have confused me if it wasn't for the setup of my home. Because the problem I was having didn't manifest directly on my PC at all, but rather on my AV receiver! When I log in, the receiver turns on and sets its source to internet music. If my PC and receiver weren't close enough that I could hear the relays clicking, I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to connect the two!

And of course when I look up the problem, the threads I land on don't point me to a thing to toggle in the UI. No, instead one of them directs me to create a config file for pipewire while another says the remove a specific package entirely. And they're not presented as a set of clear steps to follow, so good luck to your average person trying to fix the problem for themselves.