I am currently running Xubuntu on all my systems but there are so many things that feel rather unstable/buggy - I am sure it is not all Xubuntus/Xfce’s fault, but my knowledge is limited so I just attribute it to that.

Therefore, I am currently considering switching to Fedora. I feel like it is time trying out a new desktop (KDE) and a more up to date kernel. I am not entirely sure what I am hoping from this post, but maybe a “yea, it is worth it” would ease my mind a bit.

Also, I am a bit unsure how to easily move between them (programs and data).

To name a few of the bugs I encountered in the past:

  • When connecting screens, quite often the created profile is ignored, screens get disabled, overlapped, … By applying the profile multiple times eventually you can overcome this issue
  • Dell specific: Webcam does not work, system sometimes freezes after closing the laptop lid even if sleep mode is deactivated
  • Certain shortcuts are bugged (WIN+Left works, WIN+Right doesn’t. When you reset WIN+Right, it works until the next restart)
  • wakko@lemmy.world
    4·
    6 hours ago

    I’ve been running Fedora steadily since Fedora Core. I’ve used just about every version of Red Hat’s distro since RHL5. I’ve used a whole lot of other distros, too.

    Fedora is the upstream of CentOS and RHEL. Anything targeting RHEL will first show up in Fedora. Fedora has a long history of pioneering new technologies. The release cadence is twice a year, versions are supported for 1 year from release (2 subsequent release cycles).

    Your programs and data will move just fine between different Linux distributions. You’ve got nothing to worry about there.

    Display issues are generally a WM/Compositor/Driver problem. If the bugs aren’t in the drivers or in Wayland itself, then you might see differences in e.g. Gnome-Shell versus KDE. This isn’t likely to be a distro-specific issue, though. It is possible that some of the distro-level patch work may have fixed the bug.

    Keyboard shortcuts are fully configurable. Not a distro-specific thing, but each distro does it a little differently depending on which software they’re using. You can make any key combination do anything you want. But persisting changes may not always happen depending on how you’re setting it.

    Most of what you’re talking about just requires a little deeper know-how than you’ve currently got. One detail that you’ll need to understand before anything else - The differences between Xubuntu and Fedora are a whole lot smaller than the differences between Mac and Windows or either of those and Linux. Yes, each distro is opinionated about how it’s out-of-the-box configs are set. But, they’re running more of the same software than not. So, now it’s just time for you to learn how the sausage is made. Hit the man pages and start learning how to solve some of these problems. :)