Hello again everybody,

I’ve posted here before about leaving (K)Ubuntu for another distro and also picking one for my girlfriend who is going to ditch Windows because she doesn’t want Win 11 on her personal laptop.

I was going to settle on Debian stable for me and Zorin OS for my girlfriend. But after much consideration, I think I might go with Fedora after all. I don’t want Arch because it’s too bleeding edge and prone to problems and, apparently, malware if you use the AUR, which is often the only solution for some applications. Debian has old software and doesn’t support some newer hardware. Even the latest version, Trixie, is still very far behind. I realize this now.

Fedora seems to be a good middle ground with fairly cutting edge software. And, like Debian, it’s also supported by the majority of 3rd party software providers with RPM packages. I don’t like Red Hat one bit. But, I guess I should bite the bullet and just use that for practical reasons. I like that they have an official KDE desktop version now, too. I’m currently testing it out in a VM.

I haven’t used an RPM based distro since 2004, so my rpm-cli knowledge is very outdated. I know there’s DNF, which is like APT, I guess? I’ll have to get used to that. But, I’d like to mainly use KDE’s Discover Software Center for managing my software. Especially for my girlfriend who won’t like using the terminal. And I’m read about RPM fusion. It looks like it’s the equivalent of AUR in Arch. But is it safe? Can I trust that repo?

One problem I have is the installation of 3rd party, non-free codecs to play multimedia files and DVDs. (Yes I have a DVD player on my PC and I sometimes rip my DVDs to stream them on my TV.) I can’t seem to find a straightforward step-by-step solution for this. What do you guys recommend?

I also saw something about Fedora 44 breaking Steam because it doesn’t support 32-bit libraries anymore. Is that still an issue?

  • VikEnglish
    61·
    20 hours ago

    FWIW most of us don’t like red hat and absolutely despise ibm 😅

    rpmfusion is generally safe in my experience. They have dedicated repos for FOSS, as well as nonfree ones, including steam and nvidia’s proprietary gfx drivers. I’d sooner equate fedora copr to aur rather than rpmfusion, which I think is more thoroughly scrutinised.

    You can grab the codecs directly from Discover directly from the Fedora project. This is how it looks for me on gnome: .

    You shouldn’t need to enable any third party repos, though i think the option is presented to a user as part of installation onboarding.

    I’ve never had issues with the steam rpm or flatpak on fedora. I use the former almost daily.