I was using ubuntu up until last week when I decided to switch, though up until the month before that I was using windows. I wanted a more stable experience that I was less likely to break, and I really didn’t like how snaps worked. I heard the main reason for using Silverblue was for if you wanted a really stable experience, but so far it’s turning out to be the oposite. At least for me, Silverblue has been the most unstable distro I’ve tested. I haven’t really installed or changed much, besides some gnome extensions and the appimage launcher.
The first big thing is that sometimes it will just freeze and the only way to fix it is to hold down the power button for 30 seconds to get a hard shutoff.
The other thing I noticed is that sometimes apps will just stop responding for minutes at a time for no discernable reason. The gui continues to work through this, but behaves more buggy than usual.
I have no idea what’s going on, or whether it’s a problem with my framework laptop or if I’ve done something stupid, can anybody point me in the right direction to find out?
That is ironic, as–like you say–the immutable file system approach is supposed to be more stable.
I would back off on these and see if you have better luck. Gnome just came up to 42 and they are famous for carelessly breaking extensions with point releases.
Nothing wrong with this, although I know Fedora has put a lot of development effort into Flatpak compatibility. If you have a choice between app image and Flatpak on Fedora (and stuff is crashy/buggy like you say) it might be safer to go with the grain and choose Flatpak.
Just my 2 cents…I’ve had my Framework laptop for 6 months now. When I got it I ran Fedora 34 and now I’ve been running Fedora 35 since release. I haven’t had any stability issues.
If your heart is set on Silverblue (I personally have no experience with it) you might want to try to rebase to the Silverblue 36 Beta:
I know beta doesn’t scream stable but Fedora 36 should be releasing within a month’s time so in theory it should be pretty late in the development cycle.
I confirm, full encrypted disk, 36 beta.1 (+ updated), I have some freezes where I need to turn off the computer too.
I’ll try again when the final release will be out ( ~26 april )
I’m back from testing a bunch of different distros. Seems like there are a bunch of problems all around. I’ve now tried Ubuntu Gnome, Ubuntu KDE, Fedora Gnome, Fedora KDE, Fedora Silverblue, Tails OS, and Qubes OS.
I’ve had the best luck with Ubuntu so far, but Ubuntu KDE was just as unstable as Fedora KDE. I’ll try Fedora Gnome again, maybe a different version this time, and see if the problems I was having have been fixed since then.
Tails OS and Qubes OS just aren’t very compatible with Framework as it is, and it takes too much tinkering to get them to work for me to seriously consider using them.
Tails OS in particular had a very nice bootloader, which didn’t conflict with my windows installation at all. Unlike Ubuntu and Fedora, which regularly cause strange behaviour if I unplug the USB drive they were installed on.
And I’ll admit that after trying a bunch of different distros, my previous problems with Ubuntu were actually rather minor, and Apt is a really nice and stable package manager all things said.
Thanks for the suggestions, and I’ll take them into account when I try my next distro.
@Alfine_Online When you say Fedora Gnome are you referring to just the main Fedora 35 Workstation installation?
Not trying to hijack this thread but what issues did you run into on that Distro?
I’ve been daily driving it on my Framework since release day back in November and the only issues I had were with intermittent wifi issues that ended up causing me to swap the wireless card.
I’ll be honest and say that i dont quite remember what bugs I ran into, I tested fedora more than a month ago and my memory isnt that great. I’ll be testing it out again today, and its been long enough that most of my problems have probobly been fixed by now.