Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing, tinkering with some self-hosted stuff that is on separate hardware.
I don’t like the way Ubuntu is moving with snaps. And LTS version falls behind too much. So I decided to move to Fedora.
My plan is simple:
- I will install Fedora on a fresh nvme drive. I want disk encryption, so I’m going to have LUKS over btrfs for /home, and the root will remain unencrypted.
- I will copy all files from old /home to new /home, with the exception of dot-files.
- I plan to make use of flatpaks, so I don’t think configuration for my apps is easily transferable. I’ll have to install and configure apps from scratch, unless I’ll have to use an RPM package.
Does all of this make sense? Is there a way to simplify app re-configuration in my case?
And as I never used Fedora extensively (booting from live image doesn’t count), are there any caveats I should be aware of?
Don’t move to Fedora. They are Red Hat and recently shat all over Free Software principles and broke the GPL by making Red Hat Enterprise CLOSED SOURCE.
They are dead to the Linux and Free Software world. You’ll be going from bad to worse.
I HIGHLY recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition 6. It’s based directly on Debian (one of the oldest distros ever and the best), is Free Software loving and 100% Community. No Greedy Corp Inc in sight.
It runs the excellent Cinnamon desktop and the Mint team have set up all the apps etc perfectly. And because it’s Debian it’s super reliable and has massive amounts of apps etc .
They are_ sponsored_ by Red Hat. That isn’t an equivalent to being Red Hat.
Literally the majority of the developers working there are full time Red Hat employees. It’s Red Hat disguised as community.
The last time the project leader measured it, only about 40% of Fedora contributors were known to be Red Hat employees. So while it’s a big chunk, it’s not a majority.
It’s basically the opposite. Fedora is the community based upstream, and some of it reaches RHEL, but Fedora isn’t Red Hat.
What Red Hat did was limit who they distribute the source code to to paid customers, and add provisions to their TOS to give them the right to end their paid contract with you if you redistribute it. You aren’t prevented from doing so, but choosing to do so prevents you from getting future versions, which you were only entitled to through said contract. They also still open-source to CentOS Stream, just upstream of RHEL.
Now, do I think it was a good move by RH, no. Was it legal, probably, yes, but IANAL, eventual courts will tell. Did it go against the “spirit” of the GPL, maybe, yes. But is RHEL open-source? No, it’s objectively not. Please, don’t spread misinformation.
Imagine working on big parts of the Linux desktop and projects just use your source code and build exact clones off your Distro, while all the developers you pay need the income to keep contributing to awesome modern software.
It is difficult but businesses are asked if Linux Desktop needs money, not hobby users.
You better hope that Cinnamon migrates to Wayland before Red Hat stops supporting Xorg. Despite the deeply researched and evidence based opinion above, Red Hat is the the primary contributor to many of the technologies propping up Mint. Xorg is MIT licensed of course and Red Hat has no obligation to share their changes for Xorg with Mint but they do. Most of the original software Red Hat writes is released under the GPL and used by every other distro. The very first program that Debian runs when it boots was written and is maintained by Red Hat. Fedora was founded by Red Hat to explicitly be community based and they pay the salaries of many of the prominent contributors. Regardless of what you think of Red Hat’s behaviour, I am embarrassed for anybody that honestly believes Red Hat is closed source, even without the all caps.