I used Fedora 36 for 3 months. It's a good ride, actually. Unfortunately, I hit a road block. I wanted to use my mirrorless camera as my webcam, which required a third-party kernel module called v4l2loopback to be loaded via modprobe.
However, an unsigned kernel module can't be loaded on Fedora, see the kernel module signing process on Fedora docs. Therefore, if you need to modprobe anything outside the default kernel module, you'll have a lot of extra works to do instead of just sudo modprobe things. Moreover, if you upgrade the kernel, which happens very often on Fedora, you'll need to sign the module again. I don't plan to work on a system that would break my tools now and then. Here's how to sign the v4l2loopback module, directly from a Linux expert.
Well, but no, thanks, I moved on 🦎
Welcome to openSUSE Tumbleweed
In terms of popularity among Linux users, openSUSE might not be as popular as Ubuntu, Fedora, or even Arch and Manjaro. Then, why do I choose openSUSE Tumbleweed instead of those Linux distros. The answer is simple, I get the new improved kernel, drivers, and packages before anyone else. For instance, I get the latest stable version of Mesa (my Intel GPU driver) like I would get on Windows with the official Intel Driver & Support Assistant (Intel DSA), instead of having to wait for another 6 months on Ubuntu, or even a year or 2 if I stick with their LTS release. This is the benefit of using a rolling-release Linux distro.
Then, why not using Arch or Manjaro? Well, I don't want to spend too much time setting Arch, nor I want to disable secure boot for Manjaro.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is the sweet spot for me. I get the latest tech for my hardware, with good default settings and tools, then the flexibility to modprobe.
In my opinion, Fedora won't become, and never become, a new Ubuntu like many have told you lately. There's too much hassle for the end users to find it productive or useful. Sorry, if it's too harsh. Therefore, I will end my Fedora review series here. And I will write my openSUSE Tumbleweed review series later.
Thanks for reading.
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Top comments (18)
I Started with fedora, Distro hopped a lot during my college days, Currently settled with Manjaro on my work system, and solus for my daily driver.
But Fedora will always have a special place in my heart. From my personal experience, every student that I taught when I was a tutor, the students that started with fedora/redhat stuck with linux longer than students that got ubuntu as their first distro, they switched back to windows almost as soon as their course was over. YUM/DNF is a great package manager, Only other package manager I like is Solus's eopkg.
Wow, thanks for your input.
I believe that Ubuntu need to up their game on the end users market. Otherwise, for me, I think Windows is a better OS to use, i.e. better hardware support, also newer and wider software and drivers available. Nonetheless, it's a good distro for devs with huge supports from the communities, companies, and from a lot of individual projects as well.
Other distros, on the other hand, are actually present Linux techs, wow factors, reasons to move from Windows to Linux. Someone might call those features quirks 😂 But for the fans, this could be their playground, both in terms of technical and political.
From my personal experience with APT, DNF, and Zypper, Zypper is the worst as it's not playing in harmony with PackageKit (backend updater in GNOME Software). There's also no ETA when I can expect my download to finish. DNF looks more modern to me. But the best is APT, as there's a
purgewhich can also remove configuration files (in the system, not in the home directory). For the end users,purgeis huge, as they could purge any stupidly mistake that they did, a reset button for them. I don't know in deep details of those package managers, though. This is my view as an end user.This might be personal preference but APT still has a long way to go, even though it is a big improvement over apt-get situation. About APT purge, dnf and eopkg does that out of the box when you remove some package. dnf remove is equivalent to "apt remove && apt purge". Also, I have frequently noticed purge to break dependencies of other packages, it is actually a big issue.
I actually did a reunion with my former students few years ago, it was at that time when I noticed that the students in batch which used fedora used linux longer than the students in batch which used ubuntu. Especially for their home use, despite the fact that online resource is better for debian based systems and fedora at that time had a pretty bad codec support. Some of the students who had to use Ubuntu at work actually hated the fact there was different command for doing different part of package management.
As a home user, DNF and Eopkg, has a cleaner command line experience, and these are the only two package system that has proper delta support and better debug symbols. APT and Pacman doesn't have official delta package support and community solutions are outdated. And APT dependency resolution is not good at present. DNF does a much better job than any other package system in my experience.
In India where we still factor in data usage and data speed, just looking at a message which says download will be a third of update size, makes it a better choice. Just today, I did an upgrade in Manjaro and Solus, Solus was about 40mb of download, Manjaro was about 700mb of download, for almost same stuff. Biggest difference was size of libreoffice, firefox and thunderbird update where solus had delta packages for them but manjaro didn't.
Thanks. This is a very informative comment +1,000
From the description of your problem, you were manually building kernel modules but since it's not 2003, you don't need to do that!
To get v4l2loopback running on a Fedora system, all you need to do is install the kernel module:
The kernel module is in the RPMFusion repos, so make sure you have them installed. Their repos have kmods that track the current kernels and they fallback to akmods when a precompiled kernel module isn't available. It's all signed, so no manual steps required for secure boot.
I've probably tried more than 50 distros over the last 20 years or so, including some pretty odd (and now defunct) ones. These days I use Fedora on all of my machines, including my NAS, with the exception of my work laptop which is a Chromebook. I find it stable, easy to use, with a huge set of pacakges (add RPMFusion and Flathub!) and honestly, most stuff just works these days. Linux isn't like it was 20 years ago.
If you're happy with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, that's great! Just remember that the door is always open if you want to return to Fedora :)
Wow, thanks for the info! I didn't know that
sudo dnf install kmod-v4l2loopbackexist. However, compared to themodprobesolution, this would heavily depend on whether the module that you want (not limited to v4l2loopback) available in the RPMFusion, which also requires someone to maintain it.Now, I am very happy with openSUSE Tumbleweed. Because it's very stable, even more stable than Fedora since it's even more conservative in terms of the kernel, drivers, and packages updates / upgrades even though it's a rolling distro. Plus, I don't have to deal with the upgrade cycle.
Another thing worth mentioning is the OBS on openSUSE that lets the users to easily fix their system (if needed). For instance, if I want to re-enable the VA-API codecs, all I need to do is clone the system repo, then edit the build spec file with just 2 lines of code. It's the best infrastructure I have ever seen to date. Fedora on the other hand, would require someone to actually make the package available and maintain it on the RPMFusion.
Anyway, thanks again for your info ❤️
Nice to read your topic. I just switched to Tumbleweed after 2 years going with Endeavour, because I need UEFI Secure Boot for dual boot Windows 11 again.
Just curious about your machine? Does it have nvidia graphic card? How do you deal with NVIDIA driver? I'm following some guides to setup, the process done right, completed without error, but the graphic card was not used yet.
I don't use Nvidia card. However, I would recommend anyone who uses Nvidia to stay away from any rolling release distro, and some semi-rolling release distro like Fedora. Since the proprietary driver doesn't update along the kernel, there could be all kind of issues happen. You pretty much have to fix these anoying issues all the time.
If I use Nvidia, I would run it on Ubuntu, or Pop! OS if you want a more up-to-date kernel and drivers. In Pop! OS case, they are selling System76 which pretty much all the models comes with Nvidia cards. Therefore, Nvidia cards are very solid on their OS.
@archerallstars thank you. I've taken more than a day to setup nvidia driver on my laptop. Fortunately, everything work well now. Looking back, it's easy as same as Ubuntu/Debian or Fedora. Just use YaST or download .run file from nvidia website to install needed driver. Then use
suse-primeto switch between integrated and dedicated graphic cards. I got stuck just because I didn't knowsuse-primeearlier.Other than that, everything on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is fine. I have the same workspace setup as on EndeavourOS.
Great to know it works great for you 👍👍👍
Great thing of linux is you can always find something more suitable for you!! Enjoy the new system 🎉
Yes, gecko for the world 🎉🎉🎉
You am not use English well, too
👍
you just needed an excuse to use opensuse. i switched to debian from fedora for better stability with Nvidia gpu and general stability, but fedora is an ok distro.
I am not a distro hopper myself. Therefore, I won't change to openSUSE or any other distro by using an excuse. My reasons regarding Fedora when comparing to openSUSE are valid.
For my personal laptop (Intel GPU), I am using openSUSE Tumbleweed. And for 2 of my personal servers, I am running them on Ubuntu LTS. I put the right tool on the right job. I just don't see Fedora benefits my use case at all.
If I use NVIDIA with the proprietary driver, I wouldn't consider openSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora. I would use Ubuntu or Pop!_OS. However, I wouldn't consider buying a laptop with NVIDIA in the first place if I want to run Linux 🤣
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