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I am really considering moving from Arch to Fedora. What's your experience with this?
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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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It may be fixed and perfect, now, but I will never forgive Redhat for RPM, and by extension, every derivative. Fedora. CentOS. Anything rpm-based. I'm not a huge fan of debs, either, but I have never experienced dependency hell as bad as on rpm systems.
Lots of people like it. It's really popular for installing on a desktop configured to run an obscure, but mission-critical, service, putting the computer in a closet, and then later walling up the closet so that the physical computer can never be found again. It's great, as long as you never upgrade it.
On the topic of things to never forgive Redhat about, aren't there other things that are more pressing? Like, inventing a whole scheme to circumvent the idea of the GPL license via service contract blackmail?
Yes, but only one of those hurt me viscerally. The other was too abstract to take precedence.
If you're not on RHEL-likes manually installing piles of out-of-tree software or randomly dumping RPMs into your system blindly hoping that things will "just work", all is good on most rpm-based distros (RHEL, Fedora, AlmaLinux, OpenSUSE Leap, etc.). Updates don't have issues and system upgrades (where possible) have had minimal problems within the past few years on all of my systems.
Which is - in my experience - another way of saying "if you don't care that you're running hopelessly obsolete versions of software, and don't have access to about half the software available written in the past several years." Even if you compile yourself, it's often a game of bisecting a project's history to find a point in the when it'll compile against the ancient versions of libraries available on the system.
That's been my experience, anyway.
For desktop/workstation users: the simple answer is just use the flatpak from Flathub or from some other source if you need a user package that doesn't align to the ethos of your chosen distro. In most cases desktop Linux users have gone beyond self-packaging for specific library versions and just use a separate set of common libraries to power application needs beyond the out of box experience of any given distro. It's part of why immutable distros are starting to take off and make more sense for desktop/workstation use-cases.
For servers, it's in the nature to become part of the technical debt you are expected to maintain, and isn't unique among RHEL, OpenSUSE Leap, Debian, Ubuntu, or any other flavor of distro being utilized.
I experienced it back in the early 2000s before Yum. I used CentOS recently and it really isn't as bad as it used to be.
I don't know how people find themselves in dependency hell nowadays. It takes an effort to break things.
I can believe this. If they hadn't improved, they wouldn't still be around, because it was truly awful.
But I can hold a grudge. And, honestly, I have no reason to try it again, so it costs me nothing to be petty about RPM.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA same!!!