 So, I've been using Fedora now for three weeks and I have to say that I'm really, really enjoying my time on Fedora. So what I thought I'd do today is talk about five things that I really love about Fedora and a few things that I'm still having problems with. So first of all, I just want to say this, nana nana boo boo to all those people who said I wasn't going to stand Fedora for more than a week. I have proved you wrong and I'm still going strong on Fedora. So that is a completely immature thing to say. I am completely aware, but I can't help it. I was devastated that some of my loyal viewers in the comment section of my switching to Fedora video just had no faith in me whatsoever. They all thought, I mean, even some people that I consider friends have come up to me and said, Matt, there's no way you're going to make it more than a week on Fedora. And I was like, I can do this. I can do this. And damn it, I did it. So anyways, that is just something that I had to get out of the way. So let's talk about five things that I have truly enjoyed with my three weeks on Fedora. And the first one is the lack of updates. Now I am a longtime arch user. Usually it's an arch based distro, but we won't talk about the whole is that arch or not debate. When you're using arch, one of the things that is absolutely true is there are a lot of updates. When you run Pacman dash SYU, you're almost guaranteed to get updates and you can run that command multiple times a day and you're always going to have updates. If you wait once a week like I usually did, I usually actually waited more like four days, you're going to have hundreds of updates, like just dozens and dozens of new libraries and packages and applications and stuff like that. And it gets worse the more stuff you have in your system because you're going to have all the Python libraries and all the Haskell libraries and it's just on and on and on and those things are getting updated all the time. So every time you do an update or every time you run the update command, you have all of these updates. And there is this pressure when you run arch to be updating as much as possible without being crazy about it, if that makes sense. You don't want to wait so long between updates that you have the threat of breaking your system because the longer you wait, the more likely it is that you're going to run into a problem where there are dependency conflicts and stuff like that. So you want to update at a frequency that kind of ensures that you're going to have a successful updating process. And what that means is that you always have this pressure to update pretty much on a set schedule. Like I was always updating every four days pretty much without question. And like I said, I always have, you know, 70 to 100 updates. It's just nuts sometimes even more than that. And Fedora, it's not a rolling release. It's not as stable or as static as like Ubuntu or Debian in that it has newer applications. But every time I run an update, which has been once every week now, you know, I have maybe 10 updates or so I could easily get by doing an update once a month on Fedora. And it would work just fine. I have found myself just enjoying that a lot. And while it's not a big deal, it's definitely not something that, you know, I was never on ARCH saying like, Oh, I hate these updates. But now that I'm away from that kind of pressure, I found myself enjoying it. Number two on the list is ButterFS. Now I ran ButterFS on my last four or five ARCH installs. And I was in the process at that point of learning ButterFS and I still consider myself in the process of learning ButterFS. But during those times, I was using ButterFS on my own. I had to format my drives with ButterFS. I had to install the tools that allowed me to create snapshots and stuff that I did all that stuff on my own. And it was OK. It worked just the way it should. But there is something about having it automated. So Fedora uses ButterFS or BetterFS or BTRFS, whatever you want to call it. Fedora uses that by default. So it just installs that way. It also installs the main tools that you need to actually have it automate snapshots. So every time I do an update, it creates a snapshot and you see it in the bootloader when you boot up in your system. It's all automated for you. And while I got to that point on ARCH after some work, having it just set up and working is a great experience because I just know that it's there. And I don't have to worry about running TimeShift every so often. I mean, TimeShift has a cron functionality where it will do it for you once a week or however often you want. But I was always doing it manually because I'm kind of paranoid that way. The point is having Fedora do it for me has been a great experience and I'm kind of happy with it. Also, it's kind of made me realize that ButterFS is still just a fantastic file system. And for those of you who are wondering where my ButterFS video is, it's in the works. Let's just put it that way. It will be here eventually. Make no promises on the schedule and that kind of thing. But anyway, it's moving on to the next thing. The next one is a little bit controversial in that I have found myself liking Flatpacks more and more. Now, I've never been against Flatpacks per se. And really my interest in using Flatpacks has grown over the last few months because I was using Flatpacks quite often, even on ARCH. There were certain packages that I just installed the Flatpack of because it was either easier or because that was the official package, whatever happened to be. So because of that, my interest in Flatpacks has kind of grown even before I started using Fedora. But now that I'm on Fedora, I have like 30 different Flatpacks installed. I've been using Flatpacks as maybe the primary way of installing quite a few pieces of software. If it's a GUI application, I'm probably installing it via Flatpack. And the experience with Flatpacks have been fairly good. I have had some theming problems, so that still remains an issue. There have been no real performance issues when it comes to Flatpack. And the versioning on the Flatpack items that I've installed have all been up to date. So I have the latest version of Audacity, the latest version of Discord, and so on. And that is a nice thing to do when you're using a distro that doesn't necessarily always have the most recent packages. And with the addition of Flatseal, it allows me to have control over the permissions, which means I can broaden the functionality of a lot of applications that they wouldn't normally have. So for example, out of the box, the Discord Flatpack does not have access to the file system outside of the downloads folders. So if you use Flatseal, you can give it permission to have access to your pictures folder or the rest of your home directory, whatever you want it to do. And that's a good thing. Same thing with a bunch of other Flatpacks that I use. Those need those permissions to be changed. The fact that you have that granular control is really nice. Now this one here is a little bit wishy-washy because it's both something that I've noticed and contrary to some things that I've experienced. So let me explain. I have noticed over the last three weeks that Fedora uses constantly lower resource usage than Arch did. And I'm not sure why. So I run i3 WindoManager, or specifically i3 Gaps. And on Arch, I routinely saw my memory usage go above 15 gigabytes. Now sometimes that was when I had like multiple Firefox instances open, audacity, OBS and stuff like that. And I have no problem using 15 gigabytes of RAM because I have 64 gigabytes and it's not that big of a deal. However, on Fedora, I have the same things running now that I usually had on Arch running. So I have multiple instances of Firefox. I have mark text. I have multiple terminals. I have Todoist, Discord, OBS, audacity, multiple things running in scratch pads, all that stuff. And I'm using 7.91 gigabytes right now. I don't know why it's so much lower. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever because I was using the flat pack version of OBS. Usually the OBS is the big culprit when you're using that much RAM because it uses a lot of stuff while you're recording. Right now 7.92 now, gigabytes of RAM used and I'm using OBS and I'm using audacity. They're both recording at the same time and that's what I'm using. The reason why I said this was a bit wishy washy is because there are some things that still run pretty slow on Fedora, which I don't actually understand why. So DNF I believe is one of the slowest package managers out there. So the one thing that is for sure with DNF is that that initial first run that you're going to do once you've installed Fedora is the slowest experience you'll have with a package manager you'll ever have probably outside of zipper. And that experience is just not a good one. Even if you preempt that by enabling parallel downloads, it doesn't matter because it's going to take quite a while to figure out what mirrors to connect to. And it's going to take a while, like I said, it's going to take a while to do that, which means that that first run is going to be astonishingly slow. After that first run, DNF is not as slow as it used to be, but it's still not as fast as something like apt and it's definitely not as fast as Pacman. Like it's not just it's just not as fast. The last one on the list is the one that I've really enjoyed the most out of all of this. My entire experience has been nearly flawless. Now there have been some little things. I'm going to talk about those in a minute. But for the most part, I've never had this good a time on Linux out of the box. Now, it's not like I've had a horrible time with Linux when I was using Arch. Usually when I installed an Arch-based distro where I installed the vanilla Arch, it took some time to get it up to snuff. I had a whole bunch of things that I had to install. A whole bunch of libraries that needed to be installed, a bunch of dependencies and all this stuff that would usually would take me about two or three weeks in order to get my system up to where I would consider perfection, perfect for me. Yes, it would always have flaws, but it was the best I could possibly make it. It would take, like I said, quite a while to get to that point because you'd be using your computer, there'd be something that you forgot to install. So you'd have to go and install it. And that process would always happen over the course of two or three weeks because they're not things that you use all the time, but that you do need. So you would come across a situation where you would just have to install something and it would over the course of two or three weeks, you just have to go through and do that. With Fedora, yes, there's a lot of stuff I had to install, which is just the way Linux works. You have to install all of your stuff. But once I've gotten to that point, I haven't had that setup period. I haven't had that painful period where some things just kind of don't work and you have to kind of finagle things to and caress things in order to get them to be the way you want them to work. I've installed all my stuff and it has worked. And it has been astonishingly stable, like really, really stable. So I'm not saying like Arch was unstable. It's just more I feel with Fedora that my system is working like a well oiled machine and I'm not worried about an update breaking. I'm not worried about installing something that is a little weird or broken that's going to affect my system in any way. I'm not worried about anything. And that is an experience that I've just not really had in a long time on Linux. Like I've had many good experiences, but this so far has just been chef kiss. It's been so good. And I don't know what it is about Fedora, really, that has made me feel that way. Some of it may be that it's just worked well without so many bugs. Like I haven't seen any screen tearing. I haven't seen any failed dependencies or anything like that. It's just worked really, really well. And that has made me feel kind of warm and fuzzy about Fedora. And maybe I'm looking at it right now through rose colored glasses because it is a different experience than what I'm used to. That might be possible. But like I said, my time so far with Fedora has been just really, really good. So what I wanted to end the video on are some things that are not so good. So first of all, it may just preemptively say none of these are deal breakers and none of them are really bad. They're just a couple of things that I had problems with. So the first one is pipe wire. So I've made many videos about pipe wire over the last year. And I'm beginning to expect that the reason why I've never had a good experience with pipe wire in the past is simply because I didn't know how I was doing. There are a lot of things about pipe wire that I just didn't really know that you had to do. There's a lot more intricate control with pipe wire that you actually have to take part of. So when you use pulse audio, everything is done for you out of the box. And this year, like an audio engineer or a musician or something that where you really have to get into the nitty gritty details of audio. If you're just recording a video, it's pretty much done for you. And while pipe wire is pretty much that way, too, because it's a new nature of it, there's definitely some tools that you should download in order to get things working. And I'm still experiencing those tools, so I'm not going to mention them right now because I'm not sure I'm using the best ones. But I know now that there are some like Jack alternatives that you kind of really have to pay attention to when you use pipe wire. If you want to have full control over where audio comes from and where it goes, if you know what I mean. So the one biggest issue I've had with pipe wire so far, and it's not a big deal, is every time I reboot the computer and turning back on, it has forgotten my default output. So my output on my computer is a little complicated because I do have speakers up there. I hardly ever use them. So for the most part, my audio should come out of my DAC, which I have sitting on my desk and then into my headphones, these bare dynamic things that I have here. And for whatever reason, Fedora will not remember the output. And that's a pipe wire problem. I'm not sure, again, if there's something I'm doing wrong there, I'm still kind of researching the issue because I'm obviously new to this. But that's definitely one thing that I've noticed that is wrong. Another thing that I had a problem with and is something that I actually fixed was that something that I installed was forcing me to use the GTK file picker. And while normally I wouldn't care, like the GTK file picker, for the most part, is fine on Fedora, it's buggy as shit. It has a bug that is at least a year and a half old because I found bug reports for it, where when you go into type a file name to say in the save dialogue, instead of letting you, you know, name that file, it actually bring up the search box and you would be typing along. But instead of typing the name, you're actually searching for something. You enter, you search for something instead of naming something. It was annoying. So what I wanted to do was just use the QT file picker because the QT file picker is great and it doesn't have that bug. Turns out that is not the easiest thing to do. At the end of the day, I just ended up deleting the GTK and the GNOME desktop portals. And that seemed to have solved my problem. Those things are just gone. They no longer can be used. It didn't break anything. I'm surprised that it didn't break anything because usually when you delete something like that, it just causes a whole bunch of problems. But this time it worked out just fine. And I'm glad I was at least able to solve that because that bug was annoying. The last thing that I've noticed that is kind of negative is I think more of an I3 problem in that when I try to log out of I3, I don't actually get returned to SDDM. Instead, I've been I'm just kind of stuck at the wallpaper. I end up needing to go into the TTY and just reboot my computer. I'm not sure why that happens and it's not that big a deal because I don't log out all that often. Usually I just reboot my computer anyways. But if I wanted to change sessions to like plasma or to BSPWM or something, that is a problem. I don't know what's going on there. So that's just something that's either an I3 problem or an SDDM problem. The problem, the weird thing is I didn't have the problem on plasma just in I3, so I don't know what's going on there either. So those are just, I mean, as you can tell, those are really, really minor problems and I solved one of them. The pipeline of things, not really that much of an issue. I don't restart my computer that often anyways, like once a week. So that's not that big of a deal. And the logging out thing is also not that much of an issue because I don't log out that often. So if those are the bugs and the problems that I've encountered, you can see why I say the Fedora experience I've had so far has been so good because usually when I switch to a new distro, I have way more problems than that. And this time, it's just those three relatively minor ones. So Fedora has been good to me and I'm three weeks in. And at this point, that computer behind me is going to be running Fedora as soon as I'm done with my Keenawite review. So I've been working on my Keenawite review now for three months. And it is time to make that video. It really is. I'll admit, I'm kind of sick of Keenawite, to be quite honest with you. That computer back there has been running it now for, like I said, three months. And I'm ready to have that video done, but it's not done yet. So once that's done, Fedora is going on there probably permanently because I just love this distro so much. So Fedora is my new home. It's kind of great. You know, before I go, one thing I said I was going to miss from Arch is day you are. I have not missed day you are at all. Now, there have been certain situations where I've had to build stuff. So, like I said, in my switching to Fedora video and in the podcast since then, I have built more stuff on Fedora than I ever did on Arch because obviously you don't build a lot of software on Arch. You just get stuff from the AUR on Fedora. You kind of have to build it yourself. So that is an experience I've had to have more and more often, maybe five or 10 times. It might be a little bit high, but, you know, quite a few more times. Anyways, the point is that I still haven't missed day you are despite that being true. I thought that I would. I thought like every time before when I tried to switch from Arch to some other distro, the one thing that always kept me going back like almost immediately was day you are because day you are so good. And especially for a content creator who tries a lot of applications and stuff like that day you are as a guide send because all the software that you want to try is there and it's just a way away, you know what I mean? With Fedora, it's not there. But the thing is, is that I still I just haven't missed it. I've been able to find the software. I've either been able to build it or it's in the COPR or it's in the before for repositories or there's a flat pack of it. I just haven't missed it and that in itself is an experience that I've just not ever had before, at least not since I started using Arch. So I just kind of want to detect that at the end. So that is it for this video. 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