I’m in the market to find a new distro that is similar enough to Fedora that switching won’t be as laborious as I’ve had it before. I keep hearing POP!_os is a good choice but I’m going to as the community what they think is good.
Personally, I use Debian, but it’s a different approach from Fedora. My suggestion for you is to try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling release, which means bleeding edge software as Fedora, it’s RPM based and it’s easy to rollback in case of an update breaks something. As I said, not my type of distro (I want 0 breaks), but I used OpenSUSE once while distro hopping and it’s a good distro.
This sounds like what I’m looking for. What is their support for steam, blender, AMD CPU/GPU support, and do they use flatpak, or is it more of an APK setup?
My computer is a Ryzen with AMD GPU as well. Drivers are embedded on kernel, so any distro should fit. Flatpak works fine too, but of course, you will need to install it and add Flathub - simple, but needed ( https://flathub.org/setup/openSUSE ). Steam runs fine, if I remember well. Blender I don’t know, I never used.
openSUSE does support FlatPak, just follow the Wiki entry. There is also a wiki entry about Steam Blender is in the repositories. Also keep in mind that they stance about multimedia codecs is the same as Fedora. Please consusult this wiki entry for more information. I have to say that openSUSE Tumbleweed is a fantastic distro. It is rolling release, but it is also using OpenQA to make sure nothing breaks during updates. Hope this helps.
If you’re going for a similar Fedora-like experience, with it being a rolling release that is still stable, then OpenSuse Tumbleweed is definitely you’re best bet.
Now, if the rolling release nature is something you’re less attached to, then some good options would be Pop!_OS (especially if you have an Nvidia card), another Ubuntu-spin like Kubuntu perhaps or even KDE Neon, and maybe Debian 12. Though for the last one, although it’s a fantastic distro, it looks nice, new, and shiny now, but in 6-12 months when you’re not even half way through the Debian upgrade cycle and still on old software, will that bother you? If the answer is yes, then look elsewhere. Otherwise, Debian 12 may be a good choice for you as well.
Solus just came out with a new image and they are 100% rolling, 100% community driven. I’ve happily used Solus for many years.
Solus interests me, but it was pretty much dead for a good while until very recently. I still think it’s best to wait another 6-12 months to ensure that they succeed in regularly keeping everything updated before recommending it to people.
All the power was in the hands of one person who came down with serous problems. The organization has since been reformed so that can never happen again. It is now in a good place.
I’m going to throw my hat in the ring for Pop_OS. The company that maintains it is focused almost exclusively on desktop use so it excels at this better than many other distros that have kind of a split focus on all the things. Their power manager is the best in terms of laptop battery management if you’re using a laptop. The distro is also flatpak focused. There’s even a utility in startup apps by default called “Flatpak Transition” which checks for deprecated deb packages and lets you know if there’s a Flatpak that satisfies it.
Updates seem to come fast but not as fast as a full rolling release. No major changes lately because, as others note, they’re working on a HUGE change to the distro to make their own DE. Rumors are circling this might come with a re-base of the distro off Ubuntu. Unfounded as far as I know but it would make a lot of sense.
I’ve been running Pop on my desktop and laptop exclusively for going on a couple years now. Rock solid.
Any specific reason why you’d like to move away from Fedora? It’s an amazing distro, all things considered.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Fedora, but with the things they’ve done recently, I really don’t think what I want from an OS and RH wants are the same anymore. I’d prefer to separate from them while I have the opportunity before I’m invested to the point of staying because it’s too hard to migrate.
I am a regarded linux user but my understanding is that they cutting ability of the community to package certain sections from RHEL
Suck it up and learn Debian and why .deb > .rpm.
That’s funny. When the maintainer of AT&T unix’s perf group was looking at a distro to clone and support, RPM>Deb was 90% why debs were excluded.
Maybe something changed dramatically since then.
You mean Adrian? He’s an odd duck and I wouldn’t take his choices at this level as anything other than some obscure tiny performance improvement.
My issue with RPM is even the official packages didn’t put files where the standard they wrote said. Admittedly I haven’t used an RPM distro in 20 years so it’s possible things have changed.
