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?
Why not move to Debian? Ubuntu was born in a time when Debian stable had a really long release cycle and wasn’t desktop ready. But times have changed. Debian is a great desktop without all of Canonical’s Ubuntu “experiments” like snap.
I second this. I have been using Ubuntu for at least 10 years by I really do not like snaps or flatpaks for that matter. So, after some disappointing attempts using Debian in the past, I had a new go at it 1-2 years ago and I was positively surprised: Ubuntu without the useless bloat - kind of normal because Ubuntu is based on Debian. For sure the my next PC will be using Debian: efficient, highly configurable, and quite user friendly once you understand it’s ways of configuring things.
That still wouldn’t answer their dilemma of older versioning of packages, unless they went to Sid.
Debian stable has newer packages than Ubuntu LTS. Debian has pretty regular releases these days.
Enable rpmfusion for media codecs and things like libdvdcss or unrestricted mesa drivers: https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/installing-plugins-for-playing-movies-and-music/
Fedora comes out of the box with a curated flatpak repo. You might want to replace that with flathub: https://flatpak.org/setup/Fedora
Imho, there’s no reason not to enable disk encryption for root. Luks configuration during setup is very straightforward.
If you don’t have nvidia graphics, enable uefi and secure boot (no legacy options). Fedora works well with it out of the box.
Honestly, if you like Ubuntu but dislike Snaps, Linux Mint might be a better choice than Fedora if you’re not as comfortable with Linux. Mint is basically “Ubuntu without all Canonical’s garbage.”
Do not use Mint. Ubuntu uses GNOME which is modern and secure. Mint will need a year or so to get Wayland support, and it will always be behind on security updates. Just run unsnap, install the apps and Gnome tweaks you want I would say.
I really like GNOME. I know not enough about security of it compared to Cinnamon
Why is using Ubuntu against it’s nature, by removing snaps, preferable to moving to a distro that aligns more with OP’s preferences?
You remove snaps thats it. No custom repos or old X11 desktop
I guess, but Canonical keeps trying to stand out against the crowd with one thing or another. Mir, Snap, etc. Unless you buy into their supposed vision, why bother?
Flatpak apps will use the same dotfiles as apps installed via traditional methods, however the storage location will likely be different. Most dotfiles will be contained within their respective flatpak app directory under
~/.var, so you can cherry pick which settings you want to bring over.Oh, that’s neat! Thanks!
Are you leaving behind the dotfiles because you don’t want to bring over any of your old configuration?
For whatever it’s worth, you can remove Snap support from your Ubuntu system. If you want more current software, AppImage and Flatpaks are good for that.
Removing snap is somewhat unwise. Ignoring it is the safe way to go. Ubuntu might ship a system component you’re not aware of via snap. If you kill snap support you may end up with a broken system. To avoid headaches, simply ignore snap.
If one dislikes snaps, the even wiser choice is just skipping Ubuntu altogether.
Yes. However the level of difficulty increases.
You don’t have to use an LTS version if you don’t want to stick to it… Also Fedora is on a yearly upgrade cycle too, just so you know, it’s not a rolling distro. You can actually upgrade sooner on Ubuntu because it’s on a 6-month upgrade cycle.
Not really. Dnf is slower and Fedora prompts to reboot to install updates.
There also is a slight different system setup with a different kernel and different automatic mounts. It won’t make any difference unless you are tweaking your system at a fairly low level.
