[kwlug-disc] Fun video with Linus and Linus

[Jason Eckert]

I get where you’re coming from, but the points about dependency management
and stability really describe modern Fedora as well. The old “RPM
dependency hell” issues are long gone (decades gone!). DNF’s resolver,
modularity, and the project’s packaging policies make dependency management
every bit as reliable as what you get in Debian-based systems.

And while Fedora does move faster than an Ubuntu LTS, major upgrades are
smooth and predictable nowadays; the disruption risk isn't zero, but it's
so small that its mere existence would be the subject of conjecture among
theoretical physicists for decades. In my own experience, it's been zero
for a decade and a half ;-)

I’m not trying to spark a “my distro could beat up your distro” flame war
here (we’ll leave that to the Arch folks) — I’m just pointing out that
modern Fedora is nearly indistinguishable from the Debian-style stability
that folks often assume it lacks.

So the differences today are more about project philosophy and cadence than
about actual stability or packaging reliability.

On Mon, 1 Dec 2025 at 20:09, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 1, 2025 at 7:51 PM Chris Frey <cdfrey at foursquare.net> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Dec 01, 2025 at 05:49:01PM -0500, Jason Eckert wrote:
>> > The reason I prefer this distribution very much mirrors why Linus does -
>> > when you use it for a while, you'll appreciate how the Fedora project
>> > ensures that everything is both seamless and flexible. For Linus, it's
>> easy
>> > to run his latest kernel without the distro making it difficult. For me,
>> > it's easy to run new things that take a year or two to make their way
>> into
>> > other distros, and it just works perfectly.
>>
>> "everything is both seamless and flexible"
>>
>> Can you give a more detailed example?
>>
>> It's been a long time since I tried Fedora, and coming from Debian,
>> things felt subtly "wrong". :-)  But I could have very well missed some
>> winning underlying philosophy.
>
>
> To extrapolate a bit here on what Chris Frey alluded to ...
>
> Those of us who use a Debian based distro with a rich well stocked
> repository
> can't imagine how we can go back to non-Debian based distros.
> Dependency management is a solved problem, and stability trump everything
> else.
>
> With Xubuntu (desktop) and Ubuntu Server (on headless machines), I choose
> stability over having the latest stuff available, and therefore I go with
> the LTS
> release. This means if I install, say, 24.04, I know that I will have PHP
> 8.3 and
> will stay with it for at least 2 years until the next LTS release. I can
> stay for up
> to 5 years if I wanted. The idea here is that major upgrades are less
> frequent,
> and there are less disruptions from moving to one version of an application
> to the next.
>
> Fedora by design strives for the latest stuff, and therefore disruptions
> are
> expected. That is in addition to being non-Debian.
>
> As for snaps, Xubuntu and Ubuntu Server work fine without them (with the
> exception of LXD it seems).
>
> Once you get out of the mindset that Ubuntu = GNOME, you will realize
> the appeal of the Ubuntu vast repositories, without snaps or GNOME.
> --
> Khalid M. Baheyeldin
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