Hello. These questions are self-hosting related, but I feel they do partially belong here as they are also about fedora linux in general. I have a server which is currently running Debian. It has an arc GPU, and no matter what I do, video encoding refuses to work. I was thinking I might move it to Fedora, but have some questions first.

  1. How are Fedora’s updates? I believe they are about once a year, so how is it to switch between versions? I can deal with annual maintenance, but don’t want weird issues causing downtime.
  2. Also about updates, how should I do auto updates on fedora?
  3. I am currently on apparmor. I know seLinux has more features, but I have also heard that it can be annoying to deal with.
  4. I mentioned the arc GPU. Has anyone managed to get video encoding working on it on fedora? If so how?

Edit: also, how is it to move a raid over. It is mdadm raid 5 with ext4. It is VERY important that nothing happens to the data, unfortunately I have not yet implemented a backup, although I do intend to soon.

  • aleph@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    I’ve personally had issues with Fedora’s version updates - once with Fedora and another with Nobara (which is Fedora based). In both cases, dependency conflicts broke the update and they were a considerable pain to fix. It was enough for me to switch to a rolling release distro and never look back.

  • yoevli@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    To answer some of your questions:

    1. Fedora has two major releases per year. I’ve only been using it long enough to do one upgrade, but it was basically seamless and the same as any normal incremental update, except it took longer to apply.
    2. I can’t speak for other DEs, but the Plasma spin provides a system setting to apply updates automatically. I haven’t used it myself, but it’s literally just a radio button so I imagine it’s pretty easy to get working.
    3. SELinux for the most part is unobtrusive, but it can definitely be a pain when trying to do more advanced things on the system. For instance, it needs to be specially configured to allow systemd-hibernate to work, and I still haven’t gotten hibernate-after-sleep to work at all (though that might not be SELinux’s fault, I haven’t found time to follow up on it. You can also disable it, though, if it gets too much in the way.

    I can’t speak to Arc support or RAID specifically, although if the data on the RAID array is vital then you NEED to have at least one backup before you even think about installing a new OS.

  • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
    1·
    9 months ago

    It’s about once a semester (the updates) and I’ve only personally seen one, but it was fairly painless. Regarding your other questions, no idea

  • swooosh@lemmy.world
    1·
    9 months ago

    I just moved the other day with an arc from fedora to ubuntu because i couldn’t manage to get hw encoding with jellyfin and podman. It ran without issues on ubuntu with docker. In case you manage to get it working, ping me, I’d love to move back to fedora and podman. Might have been podman problems all along.

    I never had weird issues with fedora. Updating is seemless.

    You just have to know what you do with selinux. With containers, you have to know that you have to append :z or :Z to the path you’re passing to it.

  • tuxed@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    9 months ago

    If your data is very important you should definitely prioritize implementing your backup for at least the most important stuff. You could probably move it over, but in case something happens your data will most likely be gone, or best case very hard to recover.

    Fedora is a great distro, but they are decidedly bleeding edge on purpose and IMO not the best choice for a server hosting critical data.

    A better option would be running a hypervisor like proxmox (you can even convert your existing Debian install, but I havent tried this personally) and passing your GPU to a virtual machine that runs fedora.

    This gives you both a very stable environment for your data and and a bleeding edge environment where your hardware decoding likely works great. I do this exact thing personally and it works great.