Fedora proposal put forward to improve "production stability and incident management"

I had Fedora installed (in addition to Steam OS) on my living room mini PC, which is 100% AMD and connected to my TV.

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... ;-(

Did I miss a big Fedora update with Mesa issues? I was still stuck on Fedora 42 until yesterday so I probably missed it. Turns out that it didn't want to update while Wine was installed.

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.

The mesa update was this one: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2025-82b66363b4 (it's linked in the chatter link in the article inside the forum post).

It has multiple people saying it was broken, and was still pushed out.

I remain confident Fedora will find ways to muck it up even with a system in place to prevent mucking it up.

Whew, must've missed this one whenever it happened.
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.

My understanding of Fedora is it's essentially a test bed for Redhat. As in it's generally stable, but if you want to depend on it, you should... probably use something else because things will happen sometimes and they will fix it, and repeat.

You can find the latest version on Arch Linux and even on Fedora since the day one

Strictly 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

Fedora, like Gnome, have gotten stuck in a mindset of toxic-positivity recently imo.

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.

This one the reasons I moved on to developing my own distro. I based it on Debian sid but I have a "staging" repo that pulls in all the latest packages and I run on this repo myself so I am always testing it then after I feel there are no major issues such as this and feel its stable I push it to my stable repo. I use aptly for all this so the way I use it even pulling in fresh packages it NEVER pulls in out right broken packages with how aptly does dependency resolving for incoming packages if you are snapshotting .. so really the only point in my staging repo is to test actual package stability and hopfully one day I have other people testing with me so my distro hopefully never has these types of issues


Last edited by tohur on 26 Nov 2025 at 11:02 pm UTC

Well I'm already moving everything to NixOS anyways. Kinda crazy that you need a specific SIG for stability and that it wasn't already a priority. Kinda tells you their mindset, especially with the constant move to new things even when it isn't even ready for half the users yet.

If you're fine with that, then Fedora is still a good distro to use, but personally I just don't vibe with it anymore. I am more of a Bazzite user, but it is similarly an Agenda first distro and I just don't vibe with their latest agendas.

I'm kind off dissapointed in the discourse here tbh (like with a lot of Fedora stuff among other things). Black and white thinking and bad faith takes are more common on GoL comment sections nowadays, which unfortunately makes the whole place less welcoming imo.

Personally, I think people are being quite harsh and unconstructive when they write of the distro after this decision, especially when they are still in the process of finding a solution. Critisizing them for making a SIG is really confusing to me, why would it be a bad thing to bring a attention to it?

We're talking about FOSS software here, most people are doing this work in their free time and nobody's perfect, and I can imagine that people get frustrated. If we look at the forum discussion, the moderator was trying to move the discussion back to something constructive. That's not the same as "toxic positivity" imo.

I have been using Fedora for years now, and it is generally quite stable, I think they're doing a pretty good job, especially considering they're at the leading edge of package versions.

Quoting: AdutchmanI'm kind off dissapointed in the discourse here tbh (like with a lot of Fedora stuff among other things). Black and white thinking and bad faith takes are more common on GoL comment sections nowadays, which unfortunately makes the whole place less welcoming imo.

Personally, I think people are being quite harsh and unconstructive when they write of the distro after this decision, especially when they are still in the process of finding a solution. Critisizing them for making a SIG is really confusing to me, why would it be a bad thing to bring a attention to it?

We're talking about FOSS software here, most people are doing this work in their free time and nobody's perfect, and I can imagine that people get frustrated. If we look at the forum discussion, the moderator was trying to move the discussion back to something constructive. That's not the same as "toxic positivity" imo.

I have been using Fedora for years now, and it is generally quite stable, I think they're doing a pretty good job, especially considering they're at the leading edge of package versions.

They SHOULDN'T NEED a SIG.. stability should be a thing REGARDLESS considering they make 6 month releases... as much people claim they are "semi rolling" they take the stance of numbered releases.. also they KNEW the mesa package was broken but push it out as an update ANYWAY because in their words Steam is closed sourced so they didn't care


Last edited by tohur on 27 Nov 2025 at 7:43 am UTC

Quoting: AdutchmanWe're talking about FOSS software here, most people are doing this work in their free time and nobody's perfect, and I can imagine that people get frustrated.

That's true, this is open source, and people volunteer. No one demanded perfection. But if you volunteer to shoulder a responsibility on behalf of a community, then it is not absurd for the community to ask you to take responsibility for what you are doing. No-one in particular were waving pitchforks, they were wondering why it happened, how it happened, and how can we (as a community) do better in the future.

If you don't want to or can't take responsibility, that is absolutely understandable but then you need to say so and make way for someone else who is able to. This is the reason I haven't shouldered that responsibility in the 20+ years I've been part of the overall linux community. I could never handle the responsiblity of maintining a major package in a major distribution, so I contributed in other ways.

Quoting: AdutchmanIf we look at the forum discussion, the moderator was trying to move the discussion back to something constructive. That's not the same as "toxic positivity" imo.

Several people including our own good man Liam tried to be professional and constructive, but were told to shut it.