From Arch to Fedora

Hey, this is my first post here. Alright, seems cool.

Note

This is actually the first post I write on this blog. I’m not even a native english speaker, and I’m not used to writing blog articles. I will get used to it with time, but don’t expect some quality content right now.

Let’s talk about what the title itself says. I recently switched from Arch Linux to Fedora. This will require me to talk a little more about the past…

First Approach to Ubuntu

When I was 5 y/o I had a little laptop with Ubuntu Desktop, I remember it was a very old version of Ubuntu, but I don’t remember which one. It couldn’t run anything heavy but who cares, I was literally 5 years old or something.

Time passed and new laptops came, they all had Windows, and I was fine with it. I even got my desktop computer (my current one) and used Windows 10/11 for years until last spring.

Re-discovering Linux

During the last 2 years I recently re-discovered linux by setting up a home-server with a friend, and I loved it. I learned how to use a terminal and learnt a lot about computers and hardware in general.

One day I meet a friend of my friend, and he was using Ubuntu Desktop on his laptop. I obviously made a lot of questions about it, and I discovered about how many distros there were, as long as Desktop Environments, and stuff like that.

Installing Arch

By scrolling on Reddit I found a post about an Arch Linux rice and got to research more about arch itself. I discovered that it was considered one of the “hardest” distros to install and use, and I was looking for a challenge.

The thing is, I installed it following the true Arch way, by making mistakes. Turns out that instead of installing arch as a dual-boot with Windows, I wiped out the entire Windows partition of my laptop and lost pretty much everything. I must say, thanks god OneDrive exists.

Using Arch

I mean, the installation did go really well because I just used the Archinstall tool, and it worked, but even then, I was really confused. My dumb ass decided to not select most of the options in the Archinstall TUI, so there was no Desktop Manager. I did manage how to install it eventually, with sudo pacman -S gnome.

At the end everything turned out great. I and the Arch Wiki became best friends, and I also learnt a lot about linux and machines in general.

The BIG Problem

Everything was going fine, until a kernel update decided that my arch installation must not boot anymore. Without talking about the issue too much, I’ll just let you know that 2 weeks ago (when this happened) I was very ill and I just wanted to use my PC for a bit, and I couldn’t because of this.

After a while I got tired of my system’s mood swings, it seemed like it had menstruation. Monthly something would eventually break. I already know that’s Arch’s philosophy, and it was fun at the beginning until it got boring.

The Solution

One thing led to another, and I was just furious, so I installed Fedora. You can’t imagine how happy I was to discover that Fedora came already in with my favorite DE, GNOME. I riced it a bit at the beginning, installed whatever I needed, and it was ready to go.

Conclusion

I’m really happy with Fedora, but I miss Arch. I miss the AUR, the rolling release, the wiki, the community.

But seriously, getting used to the AUR is horrible. Once you distro hop to a non-Arch distro, you eventually end up managing dnf repositories like I did, and it’s not fun at all. Maybe one day I’ll go back to Arch, but for now, I’m happy with my stable system, and it’s actually pretty fun.

That’s all for now, I’m going to bed. I hope you enjoyed this article, and I hope I’ll be making more in the future.