Fedora and the Dell XPS laptop are the current best of breed developer machines. Top notch keyboards, brilliant OS and a futuristic architecture (Silverblue - all containers all the way down).
My compan has a couple hundred cheap AMD ryzen laptops with Fedora giving macbook pros a run for their money! I spend about 500$ on them (which includes a SSD). Its the world class desktop OS for the developing world!
I'd love to share your enthusiasm but until we get macOS-level consistent touchpad gestures, rock-solid stability, instant wake from suspend without draining battery consistently, great GPU drivers, ...(I can go on), it is difficult to proclaim that.
I love developing on Linux too, and I really want it to be the best, but it's just not there yet.
Mac OS supports exactly one line of hardware. So let's pick exactly one line of Hardware to run Linux so it's a fair comparison. I nominate either thinkpads or Dell XPS. Now then, in a fair comparison...
> consistent touchpad gestures,
GNOME has this.
> rock-solid stability,
Yep.
> instant wake from suspend without draining battery consistently,
Has that even been a problem this decade?
> great GPU drivers
I defy you to claim that great GPU drivers exist on any operating system, but as long as you're not using Nvidia Linux is perfectly good.
>> instant wake from suspend without draining battery consistently,
> Has that even been a problem this decade?
Actually, it was, when PC vendors decided they don't need ACPI S3 state, and Connected standby is enough. Connected standby requires support from OS, and when it was introduced, only Windows 10 supported it.
But not that Macs don't have their sleep issues either. It is a lottery, whether a Mac connected to a TB dock will wake up or not (it will after disconnecting the dock).
NVidia Linux is a battery destroying monstrosity. My laptop fans go crazy with nVidia driver, making the laptop unusable. Using no driver gives a pleasant audiable experience (no HW acceleration). Heck, even Haiku with raw framebuffer driver runs more pleasantly than Linux with nVidia driver.
Officially, Nvidia doesn't support laptop GPUs under Linux. Given the Nvidia attitude towards Linux or third-party drivers, it is no wonder that the current state is as it is.
Why someone would purchase such product is up to their decision. They surely should know, that they are getting into unsupported territory, where nobody did any integration. But it is their money they are throwing at Nvidia.
Well, it's getting better thankfully. Given that most CUDA workloads run in Linux now, we've started seeing a much nicer cadence of releases. Though I agree on the desktop/laptop side there is definitely not feature parity.
is this for gaming ? the Dell XPS 13 is pretty decent when it comes to gaming. I have a 4 year old XPS and it plays a lot of games at lower XPS - im assuming the newer ones are even better.
The Ryzens are obviously in another league altogether here, but unless we get a Ryzen XPS, the Intel XPS are not bad.
I have a thinkpad X1 carbon and been running Fedora 30 beta for a month now. I am yet to see any issues in touchpad or stability. Gnome shell crashes every now and then but if they didn't notify me about it, I won't even know about it. S3 suspend works great and flicker free boot is a nice icing on the cake. I switched over from 2014 macbook pro and love the weight, keyboard and overall black finish with matte screen. I dual boot F30 and Windows 10. I don't boot up windows unless I have to do something in MS Office. The app ecosystem is worse than the hardware support for me. I don't have outlook or any of the MS products as native app (I use web version of O365 which works well). I miss a native app for Notion. Other than these, F30 has been amazing. I won't ever go back to Ubuntu on a laptop. Against, OS X, app ecosystem still lags but tolerable.
Why still this obsession with battery life? Every where I go trains, bus, hotel even cafes, airlines offer free power.
Look at health!
Ideally for helping keep my eye sight I need proper matte screen.
Staying with dell/thinkpad lines are the only option
In my own opinion, the keyboard on my XPS is unsatisfying and the trackpad is average. I'm considering trying a different model sometime soon because of it. Also, the 4k screen is too many pixels for the cpu to keep up with and if I downscale the display resolution, the ui is noticeably smoother. Maybe newer models are better?
It works great with linux though, very happy with that part.
I'm assuming you're talking about the cheap laptop - its an Acer Aspire 3 with Ryzen 5 (equivalent of intel i5 + GPU) . It has conveniently removable slots at the bottom for HDD and RAM. I upgraded the RAM to 12GB by putting an additional 8gb and swapped the HDD to a Crucial MX500. It comes to roughly 500$ here in India.
There are two ACPI bugs (because of Acer bios issue), but the latest kernel (viz Fedora 30) has it working fine.
Love this, switched today! Definitely the most easy to use distro out there and, especially in the case of Silverblue, the most modern by far (containers only!).
Silverblue is pretty incredible, but after a month of using it (Fedora 29) I did hit the occasional RPM I couldn't install because OSTree didn't support layering packages to that directory. It's also weird about third-party repos. I also wish more software was available as a Flatpak - unfortunately Ubuntu's mindshare means more developers are aware of the proprietary Snap format.
I'm super excited about it though and will keep using it every month, it finally solves the dependency problem most distributions run into.
The fact that the Canonical store is hard-coded n the source code of the package manager does not make it proprietary, I suggest you use the actual facts and not FUD, proprietary has a clear meaning so let's not make it vague,
The central store controlled by Canonical is pretty central tenet of snap design. If you start removing it, you can pretty much switch to entirely different packaging/delivery/sandboxing system.
First of all I did not contradicted this, I just want to use the correct terms. So please use proprietary,free software, open source, open format, open standard as it is correct and not as you like to promote your preferences.
Just think about it, your full argument is FUD because you try to imply that some open source code is proprietary when in fact it is not.
On the other topic, did Debian or other big distro submited a patch to include support for configuring third party stores, did they submit test code for the changes and it was rejected? If yes please link that instead of the FUD.
I wasn't the OP, so accusing me of FUD is somewhat misguided.
On the other hand, the design of snap, despite the code being open source, does not mean that the system (system as a collection of code, network services, network effects, network control, bizdev relations, etc) as a whole is non-proprietary. For similar story, see also: Android.
This is still false. Android is open source, see the forks. What is not open source is the services on top. The development process is not open for Android but you did not provided any fact to show contribution was not accepted by Canonical.
You are complaining that an open source tool is not using your preferred thing, you want snap to point to a Debian store, get the source, replace the Canonical store url with a Debian store, then create the store backend and implement the APIs.
Do you have any complaint about the Canonical store? Did they censored your favorite thing or your issue is that you can't just from principles.
Edit
About my FUD accusation, maybe you should not get involved in a comment where I correct the OP about him spreading FUD in a vague attempt to protect him. The comment thread was not about what format is better is all about what proprietary means and not have fanboys use the terms wrong.
Too bad they didn't get Sway 1.0 package in time for Fedora 30. That's the issue with non rolling releases, you miss the train and now we have to wait months.
I also tried out Silverblue, but it was super unpolished, not a lot of documentation, and there's rpms I couldn't get installed that I needed for work.
Fedora is still my favorite Linux distro for just getting things done. Red Hat is a focal point for kernel and systems developers so you know you're getting no frills quality.
>Too bad they didn't get Sway 1.0 package in time for Fedora 30. That's the issue with non rolling releases, you miss the train and now we have to wait months.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I first tried out Fedora a few weeks ago. It was a terrible first impression because there were banner ads in the installer. They were relevant to Fedora, but still, they were banner ads sticking out like a sore thumb. I've never seen anything like that when installing a Linux distro before and it was a major turn off.
Yes, I got it from the official website. Yes, I checked the hash.
The impression probably would have been a lot different if the messages were delivered in a format that didn't look exactly like banner ads on the WWW.
The banner ads will likely not be in the new release, but for a different reason. The top-level screen where they are shown no longer hosts any configuration screens during default (Fedora Workstation) live installation and only two screens on network installation, which will also be soon moved to the previous "summary" top-level screen.
Due to this the "adds" might look out of place as the rest of the screen is empty. At the moment it is unclear if they will be replaced by some new bigger artwork or just by a bigger and more fancy installation progress reporting.
Uh, I only remember some highlights for some of the bundled software... Something like "if you need a office suite, libre office is available in the store" ...
Are you seriously complaining about that? Or is it something else I just didn't see yet?
Because if it's the former, I sure hope you're not using MacOS, Ubuntu, centos, opensuse or windows either to name a few. They do the same thing after all.
I get why you're getting downvoted, but staying one release behind a certainly a way to avoid bugs, and if you're on 28 then this is definitely a good reason to bump up to 29.
Can someone say if the font rendering is improved compared to previous releases? This might sound like nitpicking but it's the thing that kept me from switching from Ubuntu, which generally has superb font rendering.
Hmm, that's interesting, so this is the same ClearType algorithm as the one currently used in Windows 10? I actually hope Linux distros won't switch to Windows-like antialiasing, I definitely prefer Ubuntu's antialiasing (Windows' fonts are too thin an pixelated for me).
Yes, I run it several times, but each time the effect wasn't noticeably better. And I would prefer to have an option for an explicit configuration of the rendering properties (like "hinting: slight/medium/none") instead of going through a series of sample screens, because this is getting really tiresome after a few passes...
I recently switched to a 4K/24" monitor and I actually cannot say that the Windows fonts are pixelated, but they are still too thin. And the larger fonts don't look good - as if the hinting was completely disabled for them.
It's enormously improved over, say, Fedora 23. If you had issues with a newer version like, say, 28, I don't know. I don't personally have an issue with it.
Thoughts on Fedora vs Arch? I've been using Arch on my Thinkpad for a while now, no major complaints, but forgetting to mount my boot before a `sudo pacman -Syu` (full system upgrade) always gets me.
P.S. I know that this is a non-issue...a simple alias would prevent future woes.
I switched my desktop to Arch recently. It's decent, but I'd really only recommend it for people who want a minimal system that works just the way they want it to work, and won't mind spending time on it.
There are a lot of components that have to work together for a Linux desktop to provide the features most people take for granted nowadays. If you don't want to bother with tinkering, Fedora provides one such configuration that generally works out of the box. Arch provides you with pacman and a really good wiki.
Both perfectly good systems. Both are reasonably up-to-date though Arch is more cutting edge, and Fedora has releases rather than rolling release. Fedora has a real company backing it at some level. Arch probably has the greatest package availability of any operating system (at all, if we allow the AUR).
> but forgetting to mount my boot
...so stick it in fstab? Using -o bind if need be.
Arch is not quite a real-world-usable system IMHO, it breaks way too easily if you're not constantly updating it, which means that at some point you'll have to reinstall from scratch. Debian Testing/Unstable just tends to work better (for a rolling distro) in my view.
The Arch vs. Fedora comparison is not very sensible given how different the update models are... if you're ok with Fedora's update schedule it can be a fine choice.
> it breaks way too easily if you're not constantly updating it
I sometimes go as long as a few months between updates on my desktop – and that's been running Arch for some years now and hasn't needed a reinstall from scratch.
Has Fedora got sane upgrade paths yet? Last time I used it was Fedora 14, and the recommended way to upgrade was a wipe/reinstall from scratch. There was no supported upgrade-in-place path.
It has, a long time ago. I have been using Fedora since (I believe) version 23, now on 29. The system is heavily customized (with a lot of the relatively core stuff (like firewalld) ripped out), and I haven't had a single problem with the upgrades.
Yep. Even simple `dnf upgrade -y && dnf updrade --releasever=30 -y` should work, because difference between releases is small enough. (No groundbreaking changes). I did upgrade from Fedora 26 to Fedora 28 using simple upgrade.
Recommended command for system upgrade is `sudo dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=30` then `sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot` .
I still do the wipe and reinstall out of legacy fear, but my coworker has been doing the upgrades since F26 and says they have worked flawlessly...
Big caveat: He doesn't use binary Nvidia drivers (integrated GPU on his laptop). It seems upgrades always seem to snag on Nvidia drivers from my experience.
I have binary NVidia drivers. I have no problem with upgrades for last few releases at least (since akmod invented).
Sometimes, I need to switch from supported release to legacy release of drivers or switch back, because of NVidia politics to remove old drives from binary.
My compan has a couple hundred cheap AMD ryzen laptops with Fedora giving macbook pros a run for their money! I spend about 500$ on them (which includes a SSD). Its the world class desktop OS for the developing world!