Hello guys, today I am going to bring you through a Linux distribution that I am daily-driving.

Fedora

I am currently using Fedora 34, a distribution of Linux associated with the popular distribution Red-Hat Linux, usually referred to as Red-Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Though many think that Fedora is a fork of RHEL, Fedora is actually the upstream of RHEL and where Red Hat developers test new cutting edge Linux features.

I used Arch btw

To understand why I chose Fedora, I thought it would be helpful to retrace just a little history of how my usage of Linux has changed over time. Before I used Fedora, I was using Arch Linux (“I use Arch btw”). Like all Arch installs, you start with almost nothing. But as time passes, I added in new features and arrived at a system that I found to be satisfactory.

The system had some core features that I introduced deliberately:

  • it uses the BTRFS filesystem for its snapshotting abilities. Why BTRFS? BTRFS is a modern filesystem that simply blows any other filesystem (except ZFS, ZFS is the filesystem that inspired BTRFS) out of the water with modern feature sets like transparent compression using ZSTD, partitionless management of your disk using subvolumes, the ability to send subvolumes to another disk incrementally, and finally, checksums that ensure your files do not suffer from silent corruption. BTRFS makes it easy to create snapshots and backups, and also very easy to also restore the system.
  • ZRAM. Due to great advancements in compression technology, a new way of managing swap is Zram. Usually, a portion of your SSD is set aside to be used as a cache for you RAM. This is called the swap. Swap spaces are useful for the system to off-load non-frequently used data so that the RAM is ready to take on new data. However, recent discussions have pointed out that systems have come to rely on swaps so much to compensate for the lack of RAM that it might potentially reduce the lifespan of the SSD simply because it is writing so much data to the disk. Zram solves this issue by caching non-frequently used data on the RAM itself. That makes no sense, except when paired with good compression (ZSTD), it allows for a 2:1 compression of data, making room to cache what is traditionally swap data. RAM is always faster than swap, making for a more responsive system in high RAM usage scenarios, while maintaining disk longevity.
  • Wayland is the default. Is wayland ready yet? I used to think wayland was a mess and always 5 years too early. But wayland programs do exist in the ecosystem now, and they work well! With the exception of some electron apps, most applications in my system use wayland.
  • Sway window manager. The Sway window manager is one of many environments you can use in Linux, though it is a very special one that has just the right set of features. It is a tiling-window manager like i3, but is built from the ground up to utilize wayland properly. The main pros of using Sway is its compositor, wlroots. It is a wayland compositor that makes the experience just feels… right. Everything feels fast, scrolling feels smooth. It feels polished, unlike many other environments that support both wayland and xorg. If you want to use wayland, use Sway.
  • zsh. zsh is an alternative shell to the pre-installed bash. zsh was chosen because of the ability to introduce plugins using oh-my-zsh. Things like syntax highlighting and auto-suggestions are already reasons enough to use zsh.

However, since Arch is a rolling-release distribution, you have to update the system very frequently (once every few days), and each update takes up quite a lot of data, which is bad news if you were to ever end up in areas with slow internet.

I felt that I needed a system that requires less frequent updates, but maintains all the forward looking features that I have introduced in Arch, and the answer was Fedora. It comes with many of the aforementioned features by default, but those that do not come out of the box can be installed without needing to use third-party repositories. I have been using Fedora for many months now, and it is a joy to use. Would I go back to Arch? If I have a secondary machine, someday perhaps. But for now, Fedora is sufficient in scratching that itch that Arch used to.