SteamOS currently runs 6.1, which is an LTS kernel, it just isn’t the latest LTS kernel (that’s 6.6 released at the end of 2023). Steam also makes modifications to the kernel they use in SteamOS, so they have their own versions custom built for Steam Decks. I should revise my previous statement slightly. Debian Bookworm is on 6.1 as well, but SteamOS 3.6 (in beta) uses 6.5 (which is non-LTS). Debian skips every other LTS kernel because they release every 2 years, but SteamOS (eventually) upgrades each LTS kernel or some non-LTS between? They did the same thing with 5.13 a couple years ago (5.10 and 5.15 are LTS). I don’t really follow their releases since I don’t own a Steam Deck, so I don’t really know the rationale there. Funnily enough, looking through posts about it online, it seems that SteamOS is sometimes ahead of Debian on the minor kernel version and sometimes behind (when they’re on an LTS kernel). Currently, they are behind Debian on minor release (6.1.52 vs 6.1.76). Very strange, no idea what’s going on there.
But I specifically mean the packaging delays. There are sometimes sync issues with drivers, like this recent one with no free stuff that is used alongside the normal stuff.
Hm, interesting. I don’t recall experiencing anything like that personally since I hardly use anything from RPMFusion, but that does seem frustrating. Looks like it was fixed very quickly, at least.
And with Cisco-openh264 they cant to anything, Cisco ships the packages which is legally binding, and there are issues sometimes.
Ah yeah, I’ve heard about that. I can’t remember the last time I installed Cisco’s openh264 though since I started using VLC, which can handle video and audio formats without installing extra codecs. I think MPV can do the same? I’m not sure what comes with my browser, but it is packaged as a flatpak and seems to run media just fine. Maybe there is some other use for openh264 that I’m not aware of that just doesn’t come up in my normal use, but I don’t think I’ve installed any media codecs in Fedora for a couple years now. Granted, I don’t play videos often (but I do play MP4s when I do), and all my music is in FLAC format, so I’m probably an edge case. I also don’t game, but I remember seeing something recently in this sub where someone may have had codec issues while playing a game.
But Fedora is doing a great job, and the fact that rpmfusion exists alone is pretty hillarious. These are obviously Fedora people maintaining the stuff in secret, in a country where patent laws are not enforced (but are also in place afaik).
Well, Fedora is a community project, so it’s very difficult for anything individual maintainers do to come back to Fedora so long as the name isn’t put on it directly. If I were to speculate, most of the RPMFusion maintainers are Fedora community contributors (and I imagine they likely wouldn’t work at Red Hat, given Red Hat’s apprehension towards copyrighted material). I don’t think it’s really any different legally speaking from a Fedora contributor working on a personal project on the side. The fact that you can manually add the repo to Fedora doesn’t connect the two in a legally binding sense. So as long as it isn’t being funded by Fedora, and their branding is absent, then it shouldn’t really matter. I don’t know about the actual legal aspects of the packages they are distributing, or what country/countries RPMFusion repos are hosted in, but so long as nobody is profiting/losing substantial profit, it likely isn’t even worth pursuing any legal recourse to begin with.
You are at the bleeding edge, but I often find bugs that are simply there and need to be fixed. Once KDE Plasma 6 is on some LTS release like CentOS Stream, I may think about switching.
Yeah, that’s fair. There are definitely bugs that pop up every once and awhile, but for the most part they’re minor (at least the ones I notice). This kernel bug is among the more major bugs I’ve seen with Fedora in the past few years, but I only know about it from this post; I haven’t experienced it myself. I imagine there have been similar things (or worse) like this that have gone over my head as I didn’t experience them myself. Perhaps my experience has also been more stable because I’ve been using GNOME up until Fedora 40. I do find my experience with Fedora to be much more stable than Arch, but that is to be expected given their release models. I can only recall having experienced 1 or 2 bugs in the past year on Fedora, which is less than I experienced when I used Ubuntu many, many years ago, and the bugs were fixed much faster than they were on Ubuntu, where it would often take months for a patched version of the package to enter the Ubuntu repos. That’s all anecdotal, however.
The reason I usually recommend Fedora to people (and uBlue images by extension) is that it sits on some middle ground between the rolling release bleeding edge distros like Arch, and the stable, LTS, frozen for 2 years distros like Debian. I have grievances with both of those models that are addressed with Fedora, and that’s what makes it a good distro for me. My experience with bugs hasn’t really been any more common than when I was using LTS distros, but that may be a fluke. I will likely be moving one of my servers to Debian in the future though, because it makes sense for its purpose. Different release models benefit different uses (and people), of course.