I am running Fedora 39 right now and the last time I did a distro upgrade my graphics drivers were a huge PITA. Did your upgrade to 40 went smooth?
Absolutely. It broke any leftover intention of ever trying Ubuntu again.
I tried Ubuntu recently out of curiously. It was buggy, slow and contained a lot of promotional material. For context, I hadn’t used it since a wipe my machine after they forced snap.
All good on my device but I use fedora atomic. If it wasn’t good, I could just roll back.
No they just package the exact same versions, but differently. It uses rpm-ostree which is like Git but for operating systems (binaries).
A quick tour through Atomic Fedora
It relies on a main image, which could just be used like that. This is a minimal Fedora install, containing everything thats needed and nothing more.
You would then install apps via Flatpak, Appimage, binaries, Toolbox etc.
Or you can layer RPM packages, and you can install everything as on normal fedora. This will make updates a bit slower but is usually needed for small things like a different shell.
These packages will be kept updated in parallel to the OS. The OS is always 100% what Fedora ships, while the RPMs come from all the repos you can imagine, COPR, rpmfusion etc.
Rpm-ostree pulls down the update and the packages are added to that. But instead of modifying the current OS, it clones it, using the current one, and the differences (updates) that are downloaded.
This new image is now either complete, or gets the wanted RPMs added or removed. The new image is then set as new boot target.
You can use your system how long you want, but when you reboot (and this takes not any longer than a regular reboot) you will boot into the new version.
If something broke, you always have the last system kept. You can increase that number, so only the x-th last image gets automatically deleted. And you can manually sudo ostree admim pin 0 the current system, if you know it works well and you have for example a driver update, or a big system update, and want to be sure you will have this as backup.
You can also rebase, which means your system will now mirror a different repo of theirs. For example from Silverblue (GNOME) to Kinoite (KDE). This will change everything so that you now 100% have the packages of the new repo, failsafe.
If it would fail, the update would cancel and you dont get one.
So remember:
- the system by default is 100% the one that Fedora ships. No manual upgrades, no strange “cant reproduce on my system” conflicts, nothing.
- you can still install all RPMs you want
- you can remove RPMs from the system
- you can reset the system again to be 100% upstream
- you can rebase to a different variant. Like Fedora to uBlue, including NVidia drivers and some packages. Or advanced images like Bluefin/Aurora, or Secureblue variants
- updates either work 100% or fail
- you will always have a fallback system (not only a kernel, an entire system) and you can keep as many as you want, forever
So basically: rpm-ostree gives you the needed control to have a stable OS.
But still not everything is “immutable” /managed with rpm-ostree. Your entire /var is mutable, and /etc and /home are symlinks from that. This means you can configure and break what you want, which can also be problematic.
Note though, that the vanilla /etc files are stored in /usr/etc, so you can restore them. Make sure to exclude crypttab, fstab and a few more!
If someone is interested in the atomic concept, i would recommend looking into uBlue. It offers the Fedora atomic spins with a lot of tweaks applied that take the user experience to another level. Everything is just hassle free. Highly recommended! There are separate images with tweaks for gamers and developers.
Same, still have Kinoite 39 pinned to be safe (even though I imagine rolling back would cause tons of broken dotfiles), but didnt need that.
Dotfiles are really the issue.
I have had a LOT of issues, but they’re mostly of the papercut variety - and most of them have to do with Plasma 6 rather than Fedora 40 itself (at least I think so).
I think my CPU is running hotter on 40 than it was on 39, though.
That doesn’t sound promising, though I am using Gnome, so at least my DE is not getting the biggest upgrade :)
Yeah, Gnome 46 has been a really solid, small upgrade in my experience. I swear it’s made things smoother and more consistent, plus some of the minor visual tweaks and refinements are welcome. Turns out a lot of what they did is under-the-hood optimizations and improvements to accessibility, so the Gnome desktop update itself has been a small but welcome improvement.
So far I haven’t had any issues elsewhere I’m Fedora 40, but maybe that’s because I’ve checked for new updates pretty frequently and done some restarts since the upgrade, that might be keeping things fresh.
Yes. Numerous COPR repos not updated aside, my sddm theme broke and doesn’t detect Qtgraphicaleffects (which is installed). You know what the weirdest part is? There are 2 “dependencies” for the theme: quickcontrols and graphicaleffects, and luckily, quickcontrols was detected properly. I ended up rewriting the theme, and while it works, it is far from where it needs to be. Safe to say, I’m very annoyed.
Edit: I actually did a clean install, as I tried some other distros a few days before F40 released.
So those are either random 3rd party problems (please contact the COPR maintainers, there is Discourse integration) or direct Plasma issues :D
I was also a bit hesitant to already upgrade, as I tried Plasma 6 before and it wasnt perfectly stable, but I actually havent had any issues yet.
3rd party stuff of course
- minimal desktop indicator
- video lockscreen (ironically had a Qt5 bug with seemless playback that may now be fixed)
Some extensions have alternatives like Thermal Monitor, but upgrading was unintuitive. It needed removing and adding back.
I don’t use plasma so definitely not plasma issues. I use SDDM on the Sway Edition and then install Hyprland as my Wayland Compositor of choice.
I upgraded from 39 to 40 and I think the only issues I had were:
- Background I was using got removed, got a better one anyway
- A few gnome extensions stopped working and I had to update them or find an alternative
- Had to re-create virtual disk mapped to real disk for booting windows installation in virtual box (there is a sonicwall VPN I have to use for work which only works on Windows)
I think that was it!
I have had some strange behaviour from Firefox saying it’s become unresponsive a few times and at the same time Thunderbird but that seems to have fixed itself now
- Background I was using got removed, got a better one anyway
I had that happen a few times. This time I downloaded those backgrounds again (from gnome-backgrounds repository). Still, it’s pretty annoying to have this happen.
I upgraded just before the beta. Discovered a mutter crash, reported it, it was fixed in a day or so.
