The Q4-2024 through Q2-2025 cycle has been one of remarkable instability for Fedora kernels and systemd breaking-changes. F40 through F42 have offered more crashes, more kernel panics, and more core dumps than any triple-set of versions since its dawning into existence - and I’ve been running this distro for dev-only boxes since the first release.

In the worst of circumstances, Fedora notified me of a firmware update, which was a hands-off type of “reboot to install” EFI blob which bricked my Thinkpad X1 Nano laptop just last week. That’s an expensive failure and one which has no simple resolution (many hours, many iso to img to efi/cap conversions, and maybe soon a WSOP-8 NAND reprogramming).

I’ve been all-in on the RedHat infra train since 1999, having used it at global backbone providers, satellite infra providers, hpc clusters, media conglomerates, gaming networks, streaming services, cloud providers and hyperscalers, and just about everything in-between… and while I have my qualms on certain technical aspects and corporate strategy over those years, I still consider it one of my favorite Linux distos (top five at least), and it’s my first choice for enterprise Linux. So, I’m not just hating on the ecosystem here, I’m a vested user who’s been disappointed too many times by the direction

Unfortunately, with Fedora, I stand behind my position that Redhat has been too hands-off in conducting standards requirement alignment, in requiring a base level of stability upon which serious engineering development can be done, without having to clean up other people’s messes every few weeks.

It’s just not a great dev platform distro anymore, and yet the org markets the name as if it were a valid OS for all manner of production uses. IoT use? Never, no thanks. Edge devices? Never again. Security? Forget about it.

It’s not a “bleeding-edge issue” - as that’s Rawhide’s territory where stability of any sort is not expected. The evolving issue with Fedora is that it is uncommonly unstable for a “dev env”, and one which ships far too much untested code and pushes the equivalent of “crowd source fail-tests” where they expect the users to “just tell us if it doesn’t work”. Their release engineering and load-testing seems to occur with zero multivariate matrices sequences for all manner of performance, validation, and functional tests. I suppose they consider unit testing to be “full coverage”, but it is not. Happy to be corrected here, though I will remain disappointed and avoid any further deployments or firmware updates from Fedora.

#linux #fedora #releng #engineering #software #enterprise #rhel #distros #displeasure