A crash 1-2 times a week sounds very strange no matter what Linux distro you’re using. I would suggest testing your RAM right away, it could be a hardware problem.
Yeah that’s not a distro’s fault that’s something wrong. I run several machines with a variety of distros and nothing crashes ever, unless I’m testing partially working software.
Yeah that’s not a distro’s fault that’s something wrong. I run several machines with a variety of distros and nothing crashes ever, unless I’m testing partially working software.
If you did a full memtest and it came out good then OK.
I’m just saying don’t discount hardware issues. Bad RAM blocks are notoriously hard to diagnose by use alone because there’s not just one symptom you can point at, and they can manifest themselves wildly differently on different apps and different OS depending how large the blocks are and how they are spread.
Luckily there’s a very simple and straightforward test you can make to put it out of your mind.
Curiously that’s not as accurate as you might think. Different systems use memory differently, even just between different Ubuntu flavors or customizations. 1-2 crashes a week is not normal, unless it was consistently happening when you did something specific. Also, what exactly do you mean by crashing? Did you get a black screen with some error or the computer would just freeze or reboot?
That being said I don’t think this is likely to be a hardware issue. One thing that comes to mind is maybe swap, did you had swap on Ubuntu and do you have swap on Fedora now? If Linux runs out of memory it freezes, having swap prevents it from doing so, so if you have low enough memory it’s possible that it would get filled up and freeze your system without swap (Windows has the equivalent by default)
That doesn’t mean anything. I once had an issue where every few hours, a random application would crash on Arch Linux, but not on e.g. Debian or Windows. But this wasn’t an Arch issue per se, but was instead related to an UEFI overclock setting (which defaulted to on). After turning it off, everything worked fine.
So while it seemed like an Arch issue, it was actually hardware/overclock related, it’s just that the other OS wouldn’t run into the trigger for the crash.
Crashes aren’t normal even in Windows. Rare crashes mean a hardware problem 99.7% of the time. Typically RAM as others have pointed out. The only way to figure that out is 4 passes of Memtest86+ without red. Yes 4 because the the first pass is a short one made to spot obviously bad RAM quickly. Less bad RAM might need more. I’ve had a case of 4 sticks that each pass on its own. Every two passed on their own. All 4 failed on the third or fourth pass. And if you think I tested for shits and giggles, I did not. I was see checksum errors on my ZFS pool every other day. No crashes. Nevertheless, if it wasn’t for ZFS I’d have corrupted files all over my archive.
@flork I would say the main reason is that the best of Fedora is under the hood, and goes completely unnoticed by the general public. Beginners don't care how and when Wayland, PipeWire, zram or SELinux were implemented.
Other reasons:
The system requires manual intervention after the initial installation (e.g. RPMFusion)
Some choices, such as firewalld and Anaconda, are not so good for beginners
Usually people recommend what they use and like. A majority of people is on ubuntu/mint. Hence, they recommend that. I don’t like apt and I’d never send someone in the debian world unless they want a server. But nowadays the package manager doesn’t matter too much anyway. You should use flatpaks first, and then distrobox, nix, or native (rpm). You won’t feel a real difference between major distros because you don’t interact with the underlying system too much.
Fedora is perfect for beginners. And especially atomic versions as you said are great for beginners. Atomic versions are not good for tinkerers, so if you send someone who wants to customize his experience heavily, he’s going to have a hard time on atomic versions as a beginner. A casual pc user who will edit docs and browse internet prpfits immensely from fedora and atomic version. Fedora has awesome defaults and a new user does not need to care about recent advances in linux because fedora implements them already. Especially ublue improves upon fedora’s ecosystem.
Not really. RH provides all the hosting for the Fedora project, pays multiple people to work on it full time, and on top of that, the RPM specs (which are used to actually build packages) are all MIT licensed. It’d be like complaining bluehat steals the Linux kernel by cloning it from a git repo and making/distributing their own version of it, which is exactly what they do.
Boot from a live disc/usb, check the kernel logs. That should at least tell you where the boot process got stuck, what to do about it depends on what exactly broke.
I’ve been running Fedora OStree variants for over two years. I version upgraded and rebased between entirely different spins, rawhide and over to ublue variants then back to fedora mainline. All off the original install, keeping my userspace intact. Never once has it self destructed.
Years ago major upgrades and to lesser degree even minor upgrades made me to give up trying to keep installation running. I don’t even remember if it was Red Hat or Debian.
Eventually I realized, that I like running newest version of Desktop and I ran into cases of getting frustrated with lack of newer versions, which had fixes for issues I ran into. Then I realized that best wiki was not a snapshot distribution.
In the end I tried rolling distribution and remain happy for years.
Debian or derived distribution is easiest to get google help for and it is the simplest choice for me, when running on the cloud.
Although, Alpine is pushing through containers quite forcefully.
Because Ubuntu LTS works very reliably and because there’s a huge body of information and large swathes of people who can help on the Internet, and because every project and vendor tests and releases their stuff for Ubuntu/Debian and has documentation for it.
Despite the hate you see around these shores, Ubuntu LTS is among the best if not the best beginner distro. Importantly it scales to any other proficiency level. The skill and knowledge acquired while learning Ubuntu transfers to Debian as well as working professionally with either of them.
Also, with the fuckery RedHat pulls lately, it’s a disservice to new users to get them to learn the RedHat ecosystem, unless they plan or need to use it professionally. If I had to bet, I’d bet that the RH ecosystem would be all but deserted by volunteers in the years to come. I bet that as we speak a whole lotta folks donating their time are coming to the conclusion that Debian was right and are abandoning ship.
Ubuntu pulled a blinder many years ago with their LTS model. You get a new one every two years with five years support for each one and a guarantee of moving from one to the next. That gives you quite a lot of time to deal with issues, without requiring you to live in the stoneage.
For example: Apache Guacamole is a webby remote access gateway thingie. It currently requires tomcat9 because TC9->10 is a major breaking change. Ubuntu 22.04 has TC9 and Ubuntu 24.04 has a later version (probably 10). However Ubuntu 22.04 is supported until 2027. So we stick at Ubuntu 22.04 and get security updates etc.
Guacamole is currently at 1.5.5, and the next version will be 1.6.0. The new version will have lots of functionality additions. The devs will then worry about Tomcat editions and the like. Meanwhile Ubuntu will still be supported.
In my opinion the two year release/five year supported model is an absolute belter.
Also, with the fuckery RedHat pulls lately, it’s a disservice to new users to get them to learn the RedHat ecosystem, unless they plan or need to use it professionally.
We and several other companies that I know are migrating away from EL entirely directly because of those Redhat decisions. We can’t trust them not to be stupid again.
Your second monitor was not broken by Ubuntu. Your second monitor was no longer receiving a signal. The distinction is that the second monitor was functional but not compatible.
Yeah I’m seriously sensing there’s a massive bit of info we haven’t been given. I can’t even conjure up a way that a distro would “break” a monitor lol.
It works with Fedora, Windows and Macintosh. It worked with Ubuntu until a month ago. It doesn’t work with a fresh install of Ubuntu with default settings.
There, now you have all the same information I have.
The thing is that this is not something that happens, I remember when I first started using Linux, I got lots of weird problems like that, eventually they stopped happening, and for a while I thought Linux had gotten way better, until one day I was going through some backups and I found a xorg.file with a typo, and then I had the revelation that I had been breaking random stuff without realizing it.
You mentioned that the monitor doesn’t work on a fresh Ubuntu install, but does it work on the live iso? You also mentioned having to run several commands and tweaks after installation on Ubuntu but not on Fedora, did the monitor work before those tweaks or could it be that one of those caused it?
I know such errors can be frustrating, and if you’re happy with Fedora there’s no reason to look back. BTW this is not a “you’re using your system wrong”, but you might be causing the issue without realizing it, I know I was when I was in your shoes, and probably would be angry at people telling me that because I was sure I hadn’t done anything.
You don’t seem to understand the distinction. You monitor isn’t “broken.” It wasn’t rendered inoperable by Ubuntu. It simply wasn’t compatible with the way you set it up.
Not sure this will help you but windows by default does not really shutoff. Try to google (or duckduckgo or similar) about fast startup mode and how to properly shutdown windows. That might sort it if you are lucky.
Thanks, not this in specific but it was something related to not shuting down properly. I powered off from windows by holding the off button instead of clicking on shutdown (I was afraid windows would want to install updates b/c I didn’t use it for so long). So I booted windows again and turned it off properly then Debian came back to life.
Fedora’s always run really sluggishly for me on whatever hardware I’ve tried it on, so I don’t recommend it in general because my personal experience with it hasn’t been great.
Even ignoring this, I’m not sure I’d recommend it for beginners due to how it tends to jump on the latest hip new software. For some users this is a massive point in Fedora’s favour, but I’m not sure how much I’d trust a beginner to, say, maintain a BTRFS filesystem properly. Not to mention the unlikely, but still present, possibility of issues caused by such new software.
Fedora still feels like Redhat sort of to me (I'm old) and I wouldn't have recommended Redhat in 2001 either, I would have told someone to use Mandrake or Suse. Redhat was the "corporate/govt" OS and I know it's changed, but that's why it's usually not the first recommendation that comes to my mind. I still need to adapt.
If you were using Red Hat before Fedora, that makes sense. The Red Hat of old split into two: Fedora and RHEL.
Fedora was founded to be an explicitly community and non-commercial distribution. Then Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ) to be an explicitly enterprises focused and commercial distribution.
In recent years, CentOS Stream has been added which is still enterprise focussed but meant to the “community” precursor to RHEL. If anything, the need for CentOS should re-enforce that non-enterprise nature of Fedora.
linux
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.