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
    26·
    11 months 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.

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      41·
      11 months ago

      This is essential. sudo dnf install libavcodec-freeworld may already be enough if you dont need ffmpeg for anything.

      Or you use ublue, where rpmfusion and ffmpeg are preinstalled.

      • _cnt0@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        11 months 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.