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PayPalAfter a string of annoying incidents after updates causing stability problems on Fedora, there's a new proposal put forward to help improve things.
The new proposal suggests forming a Special Interest Group (SIG) focused on developing a "recommended stream of work to improve our stability and robustness, and to improve our communication with users when problems arise that compromise that stability and robustness".
In the proposal several major update issues are noted that have come up lately including a recent Mesa update that broke launching games from Steam. I only switched to Fedora KDE a few days ago, and was bitten by the Mesa update, and so I was forced into the terminal to downgrade my Mesa version just to get gaming with friends that evening - something that ideally just shouldn't happen.
The chatter on the Fedora Discourse forum around the Mesa update got a little spicy, with the maintainer who actually pushed out this particular Mesa update noting they "don’t consider closed source steam a reliable indicator of issues, it has no debug symbols" which was pretty unhelpful. And later saying "Not my problem anymore, I have quit as rpmfusion admin".
Seems like the proposal is a good idea, at least to get the ball rolling on things. Their update process currently doesn't seem to work particularly well at times. This isn't about playing a blame game as issues happen of course, but so many issues could be avoided with better processes in place. A system cannot be (as the Fedora websites advertises) "Trusted, powerful and easy" and "Reliable" if updates repeatedly break major parts of the system.
Hopefully some good improvements can come out of this.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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8 hours ago
My daughter and I wanted to watch a movie the other day. Apparently, the Mesa update was causing stuttering when watching the movie with VLC or any other video player.
I rebooted the PC into Steam OS so I could watch the movie smoothly without any issues. Later, I removed Fedora and installed Debian instead...
Rolling-release or semi-rolling-release packages often cause far too many problems for end users because they release new packages without even bothering to test them ;-(
Personally, I refuse to be treated like a beta tester of buggy software solutions. If you're leaving Windows, it's not to encounter the same instability problems under Linux... ;-(
Having a special interest group for stability sounds like a good idea though. Ubuntu has a lot of design choices I don't agree with, Mint and Debian don't update quick enough and GarudArch is too unstable for my daily driver, but Fedora's got a good balance of stability and new packages without having a load of Ubuntuisms that I don't really agree with.
Between the AI and the 32-bit fiasco I've kind of been losing trust in Fedora, but I do want to stick with them if I can. If I do end up distrohopping again however then I'm probably off to Debian land. The more I use that distro on my teritiary older computer, the more I find myself liking it.
Liam Dawe 7 hours ago
It has multiple people saying it was broken, and was still pushed out.
Turns out, laziness in updating pays !
Rolling-release or semi-rolling-release packages often cause far too many problems for end users because they release new packages without even bothering to test them ;-(
Btw it is common practice to only update to Nth release of Fedora when N+1th release comes out (so you should stay on 42 until 44 is out, then update to 43), and this is what ublue does by default iirc, their default recommended download is always one version behind Fedora. On the other hand, because Fedora is semi-rolling, I'm not really sure how effective this is, but it probably is, since people do that.
Last edited by rustynail on 26 Nov 2025 at 3:09 pm UTC
Quoting: phil995511Rolling-release or semi-rolling-release packages often cause far too many problems for end users because they release new packages without even bothering to test them ;-(
Personally, I refuse to be treated like a beta tester of buggy software solutions. If you're leaving Windows, it's not to encounter the same instability problems under Linux... ;-(
Well, openSUSE Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro and this is not true for them.
Is very common for they to delay updates for days or weeks when they detect that something is not ready.
Most of times, after some big updates for very common used things (like desktop environment, MESA, and etc.) you can find the latest version on Arch Linux and even on Fedora since the day one, but for Tumbleweed you need to wait a day or two because of the tests.
You can find the latest version on Arch Linux and even on Fedora since the day oneStrictly speaking, both Fedora and Arch have their own testing repos that everything goes through for a while and they delay things too, but it doesn't necessarily save you from everything. Same as Debian didn't save me when LTS kernel suddenly had regressions when it wasn't even new anymore, but the probability of that on Debian is much lower of course
Cloversheen 2 hours ago
It very much reminds me of an external speaker our uni teacher brought in who tried to argue for why we should stop using "negative" words like problem and instead use "positive" words like challange.
Safe to say, bringing this up in a uni environment of software engineers did not go down well. No attacks were made on the speaker, only criticism of the idea and criticising the idea that problem was a negative word. Overall we considered it a positive thing as we were taught to be in the mindset of problem solvers.
And I feel like Fedora are in the same situation as our external speaker, and consider words like criticism, and problem as inherently negative. This causes them to get really defensive as we can see from e.g. the moderator Francesco in the thread linked.
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