Fedora Rawhide Dec 2018 baby report!
Konnichiwa! Yesterday around the same time I was about to write how awesome and how stable Fedora Rawhide is, but BS happens when they are the least expected!
Which is a bit of a paradox, because if something always happens when you don’t expect it, then you should expect it already!
Point is that I never should had done that last update (see the Tweet) that messed up everything :)
…
For everything bad you can get something good out of it, and this misfortune gave me the opportunity to say; don’t be afraid of a broken Rawhide! It is really easy to fix it!
Background! Last day I updated my Rawhide and got a bad DBus package, and various services stop working including Network & Desktop. I got lazy to fix it yesterday, so I tried today, but things didn’t run quite as expected as you can see from the following video :)
The typical procedure when you can’t boot Fedora (or any Linux) is to boot from a live image, chroot and fix the problem, that at the worst (usual) cases will be either a broken boot-loader, so we just run grub2-makeconfig or some broken packages (as on my cases) so we just run dnf history undo / rollback
Only that in my case I couldn’t rollback because I had forgotten to set the DNF cache, that for some weird reason isn’t enabled by default, and most often you will realize it when it is too late :p
Which brings me to my next point about Fedora. This Linux is magically SOLID! Since I couldn’t restore the working DBus package, and what Rawhide (and Koji) repo had, was broken, I simply added Fedora 29 repos (tbh I already had them, b/c I use stable Kernels) and downgraded DBus from there. It worked! And it always works!
My Rawhide at this very moment is a mess of desktops (GNOME, Deepin & elementary), packages from various Fedora versions and Coprs, my /usr/localis probably the same size as rest/usr and there are even immutable (chattr +i) system files ..and yet it runs perfectly!
What may not work
People hearing Rawhide and they think it is something that breaks like crazy, but from my 3 years+ experience with Rawhide, I can tell that in many ways it is more stable than Fedora
In fact I quit Fedora at first place for Rawhide, because of Fedora bugs that were ~never get fixed! Imagine! A seriously great thing on Rawhide against Fedora (and rest Linuxes), is the very fast bug fixing! Usually at least!
What may fail in Rawhide is various applications (specially the non open source!) like Steam or Unity for example, because of dependencies and weird installers, (Flatpak to the rescue!), or Linux programming stuff (eg boards)
As a rule, people that they shouldn’t use Rawhide, are the people that they exactly know the reason why they SHOULDN’T. So if you are unsure if Rawhide will fit you, then it is certain that you will love it :p
I’ll try inside this week to make time to get a clean Rawhide and write a step by step guide how to setup the perfect Rawhide, specifically for the new Fedora users!
Bugs!
There are two kind of annoying bugs we can get in Rawhide. One is the bugs with the graphics system (XServer, Mesa), that lately have smooth releases without breakages (at least on NVIDIA), and second there are bugs with GNOME unstable releases, which is also what makes Rawhide so awesome! Not the bugs obviously, but GNOME’s latest improvements!
GNOME 3.32
Okay! We are very early in GNOME 3.32 development cycle, but it has already some pretty cool performance improvements!
If you follow my YouTube you may have watched that video I was trolling Felix!
But I will troll him a bit more, as I besides promised him :)
So Felix was on GNOME 3.30 complaining his Shell was running like shit, but when he updated to Rawhide and 3.32, suddenly became SMOOTH as Ubuntu! (aka fcuk)
Oh btw! One thing with GNOME 3.32 is that Mutter breaks some APIs, so some extensions don’t work. In fact Dash to Dock doesn’t work to me, and Dash to Panel works but with some issues, that I should really open them!
Why not Arch?
I won’t even get bother to talk about Ubuntu (coz we’ll die laughing!), but I will talk about Arch, which is a very GNOME “friendly” Linux and what most people that will read this post have anyway
Fedora today is a very good Linux. The integrity and reliability of packages and package manager is way above Arch and anything else I’ve tried (including Debian). The documentation however and community support is much better on Arch
Personally between Fedora and Arch I would pick Arch, but here I use Rawhide, and I will go with it for the the very simple reason; Fedora has GNOME development versions as first class citizen, and Arch hasn’t!
To recap! Rawhide doesn’t break, it is very good overall as Linux, we can work with whatever the rest Linux do (a guy said he had issues with Android development, but I work fine with it!), it is Rolling Release (so you don’t need upgrades), it has latest GNOME, and GNOME latest is already faster!
After all it is a very easy choice to call it best Linux for GNOME Enthusiasts, isn’t it? And I highlight the phrase “GNOME Enthusiasts”, that declares that you have to be enthusiasts enough to “fight” potential issues! That are not very often though, and workarounds are straightforwards when you get some experience with the system
Before you get Rawhide!
If you are totally new in Fedora, you may get disappointed, and quit it before you learn its “workflow”. So if you want, you can wait a few days, and I will make a starting guide that will make everything much more smoother for you!
Rawhide out of box, for the first time might fail hard! Fedora’s manifesto is a hardcore Linux afterall, but certainly doesn’t get Gentoo levels! Then again if you come from Arch, you won’t really face issues!
That was all! Sayonara!
