In this article, let’s compare the Fedora Workstation 35 vs Ubuntu 21.10. Ubuntu, developed by Canonical, is the most popular Linux distribution of all time. It is extremely user-friendly, and the default settings make sense to most users. However, Fedora, a distribution developed by Red Hat, has gained a lot of popularity in just a few years.
Fedora Workstation 35 vs Ubuntu 21.10
Let’s now compare Fedora Workstation 35 vs Ubuntu 21.10 and find out which one suits you the best!
1. User Interface
Ubuntu ships with a heavily themed version of GNOME 40, whereas in Fedora 35, you get vanilla (pure) GNOME 41. GNOME 40 first arrived in Fedora, even before a bleeding-edge distribution like Arch.
But, because of its release cycle of Ubuntu, it usually lags behind one or two versions of GNOME and therefore Ubuntu users have to wait 6 months, or sometimes a year to get new shiny features.
This also has an advantage though – early adopters encounter a lot of bugs while Ubuntu users don’t have to deal with that.
What’s your preference? Do you want your system to be up-to-date, or do you want to have all the latest software packages and features?
2. Package Managers
Ubuntu is based upon Debian, and therefore its package manager is apt. While easy to use, installing packages via the command line requires typing a longer command when compared to Fedora. For example, to install GIMP in Ubuntu you will first have to update the repositories and then install GIMP
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install gimp
Fedora automatically updates the repositories for you when you try to install a package, for example,
$ sudo dnf install gimp
This will automatically update the dnf package manager and install GIMP.
Also, the defaults of dnf are not that good. Instead of ‘Y’ as default, ‘n’ is selected when you have to confirm to install a package. However, this can be fixed by modifying the dnf.conf file, and that requires extra work.
This comparison of package managers is obsolete if you choose to install your applications through GUI tools.
Ubuntu also ships with another package manager called ‘Snap’. But, this is not preferred by many individuals as the back end of Snaps are closed source and according to many, this goes against the Free and Open Source Philosophy.
Comparing .deb vs .rpm packages
If an application you need is not available in the software manager, you would need to download the .deb (Debian package management) on Ubuntu and then manually install the package, whereas, in Fedora, you would download the .rpm package.
This can be a determining factor for you, so please check if any software you require has an official Deb or RPM package on their official website.
Pipewire vs Pulse-Audio
Fedora is the only distribution that ships with Pipewire as default. You can however install and set up anything between Pipewire and Pulse-Audio, but that will require you to type a few commands in the Terminal. Ubuntu ships with Pulse-Audio.
What is the Pipewire and Pulse-Audio, you might ask? Long story short, if you want to do Audio related work on your system or just want to stream from your PC, you do it via either Pipewire or Pulse-Audio, they’re both audio servers.
And what is the difference?
Well, Pipewire is heavily developed and preferred among the users because it makes it easy to capture audio from multiple devices at the same time and stream it to different applications or platforms. These features are not available in Pulse-Audio, which is shipped by default in Ubuntu.
Pre-installed Software – Bloatware
Ubuntu while installation, gives you an option to choose a minimal installation or to install additional packages which include office suite like LibreOffice, and a few games like Mahjongg and Mines. Fedora, on the other hand, does not have any GUI bloat installed on it.
So you don’t have to remove any extra packages which you don’t want. Both of them however ship with the default GNOME packages such as Gnome disks, Cheese, etc., and removing them will break the dependency on which GNOME works.
Conclusion
I hope you have figured out what features do you need in your operating system and this article helped you choose between Fedora Workstation and Ubuntu.