Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing, tinkering with some self-hosted stuff that is on separate hardware.

I don’t like the way Ubuntu is moving with snaps. And LTS version falls behind too much. So I decided to move to Fedora.

My plan is simple:

  1. I will install Fedora on a fresh nvme drive. I want disk encryption, so I’m going to have LUKS over btrfs for /home, and the root will remain unencrypted.
  2. I will copy all files from old /home to new /home, with the exception of dot-files.
  3. I plan to make use of flatpaks, so I don’t think configuration for my apps is easily transferable. I’ll have to install and configure apps from scratch, unless I’ll have to use an RPM package.

Does all of this make sense? Is there a way to simplify app re-configuration in my case?

And as I never used Fedora extensively (booting from live image doesn’t count), are there any caveats I should be aware of?

  • _cnt0@sh.itjust.works
    19·
    1 year ago

    Enable rpmfusion for media codecs and things like libdvdcss or unrestricted mesa drivers: https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

    https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/installing-plugins-for-playing-movies-and-music/

    Fedora comes out of the box with a curated flatpak repo. You might want to replace that with flathub: https://flatpak.org/setup/Fedora

    Imho, there’s no reason not to enable disk encryption for root. Luks configuration during setup is very straightforward.

    If you don’t have nvidia graphics, enable uefi and secure boot (no legacy options). Fedora works well with it out of the box.

      • _cnt0@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        1 year ago

        Two more things that came to mind. If you want to use another desktop environment than gnome (default), you should be aware of spins: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/

        Spins work against the same repositories, they just come with other sets of packages preinstalled.

        Also, you said you’re using amd gpu. Fedora has the drivers for that out of the box. But due to fedora’s strict FOSS policy, some hardware acceleration features are stripped out of the amd driver. I mentioned you can get the unstripped drivers from rpmfusion. That is detailed here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia

        The relevant bit being this:

        sudo dnf swap mesa-va-drivers mesa-va-drivers-freeworld
sudo dnf swap mesa-vdpau-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers-freeworld

        Those packages work together with the drivers from the official repos. They can get out of sync. That never happened to me, yet. But if an update mentions some conflict with mesa-*, just don’t do that update until that conflict disappears. If you ever run into the issue you can also undo the last update with the dnf history commands.

  • ObsidianBreaks@lemmy.ml
    9·
    1 year ago

    Plan sounds alright. A couple of notes.

    • Don’t forget your passwords and bookmarks stored in browser when doing the copy over.
    • Personally, I’d use Full Disk Encryption (FDE) because it’s a default option on the Fedora installer and is more secure, and well-tested, and easier to configure.
    • For your planned installables, I’d keep a list of apps you regularly install in a file somewhere (even better would be a script which installs them all) then when you distro-hop it’s easier as you can just change your script for whatever package manager.
    • Some of your apps will store their configuration in your home directory in a dot file, you might be able to copy these over one-by-one for each app.
    • Have you decided on Fedora Workstation or Fedora Silverblue? Each have their merits and demerits, and its worth investigating.
    • pound_heap@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks!

      Bookmarks and passwords are taken care of. And for the apps I’ll try to get migrated to flatpaks as many as I can while still on original system.

      I also see that full disk encryption is being recommended a lot, and I don’t have any solid reasons to encrypt only /home.

      I have not given much thought on Silverblue. Is it “flatpak-only”? If so I’ll need to go through my apps to see if that could work. And my backup strategy will need to change - I use Duplicacy that is not available as a Flatpak

    • NanoooK@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      1 year ago

      This makes me think of the tool for windows to remove the bloat.

      Just use a distribution that doesn’t force snap down your throat.

    • pound_heap@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Interesting. It says that the project is in pre-alpha stage… not sure if I would be able to verify the scripts it generates

  • jman6495@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    Yes, but if you intend to mainly use flatpak you might want to try fedora Silverblue

  • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    211·
    1 year ago

    Don’t move to Fedora. They are Red Hat and recently shat all over Free Software principles and broke the GPL by making Red Hat Enterprise CLOSED SOURCE.

    They are dead to the Linux and Free Software world. You’ll be going from bad to worse.

    I HIGHLY recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition 6. It’s based directly on Debian (one of the oldest distros ever and the best), is Free Software loving and 100% Community. No Greedy Corp Inc in sight.

    It runs the excellent Cinnamon desktop and the Mint team have set up all the apps etc perfectly. And because it’s Debian it’s super reliable and has massive amounts of apps etc .