Credit: Dibakar Ghosh | How-To GeekI’ve been an Arch user for five years, and it’s been a love-hate relationship. I love having access to the AUR (Arch User Repository) and the hundreds of thousands of packages it brings with it, along with access to bleeding-edge updates as soon as they drop. But at the same time, I hate it when a buggy update just wrecks my system, not to mention the current malware mess with the AUR and all the headaches that come with it.
As such, I’ve been searching for a suitable replacement for a few months now and found Fedora to be a worthy alternative. It does everything I expect from Arch Linux while requiring far less babysitting.
Fedora is cutting-edge
If not bleeding edge
Credit: Dibakar Ghosh | How-To GeekOne of the things I loved about Arch was its rolling-release model, which gave me instant access to the latest updates as soon as the developers made them available. I used to have major FOMO (fear of missing out) when I saw other people using new software, and I didn’t have access to it. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve sort of aged out of that update model.
Sure, I still wouldn’t mind getting quick access to the latest and greatest features, but system stability ranks higher on my priority list. Unfortunately, Arch’s aggressive update cadence means I’m effectively a beta tester for all my apps. A bad update can potentially break my entire system, forcing me to start troubleshooting or roll back to a previously working snapshot. Granted, it’s not a huge deal, but it’s certainly an extra chore that I’d gladly avoid.
Now, Fedora also prioritizes quick access to the latest software but offers a much more stable and reliable base compared to Arch. It follows a point-release model, releasing a new version every six months and shipping the latest packages available at that time. What’s more, everything gets properly tested to ensure there are no bugs or compatibility issues between the different package versions.
This gives me a system where I’m never more than six months away from the latest software without having to worry about random bugs forcing me into troubleshooting mode.
Fedora runs everything I need it to
Without worrying about malware
The AUR is one of, if not the biggest, selling points of Arch Linux — and honestly, Fedora has nothing directly comparable to it. That being said, the AUR isn’t what it used to be. As of late, the AUR has faced multiple malware attacks, forcing users to be a lot more vigilant.
Now, the AUR always followed a zero-trust model by design. As a community-maintained repository, it allows anyone to upload packages, and the onus is on the user to carefully read the PKGBUILD scripts to ensure they aren’t installing anything malicious. However, for most of the time I used it, that risk only felt theoretical. I rarely (read: never) ran into anything malicious.
But that changed in 2026. The AUR has been hit by multiple malware incidents this year alone, including attacks where attackers adopted orphaned packages and injected malware into their build scripts. That means it’s no longer enough to vet the packages once during installation — I have to stay vigilant during every update as well. On a rolling-release distro such as Arch, that’s a huge, ongoing burden.
As such, I stopped using the AUR altogether and started sourcing my apps through Flatpaks instead. I also started exploring the Nix package manager on the side. Now, the thing is, neither of these is exclusive to Arch — they work on all other Linux distros, including Fedora.
Furthermore, with security being one of the things top of mind thanks to the AUR, Fedora made even more sense to me because it ships with SELinux enabled out of the box, providing an additional security layer by default.
Fedora is also great for gaming
It’s powering some of the best gaming distros
Linux gaming has come a long way, but not every distribution handles it equally well. Arch historically had the edge here thanks to newer packages and broader software access. But what was “new” then is just “standard” now — and the rest of the Linux world has caught up.
In fact, at the time of writing, some of the best gaming distros are actually based on Fedora. For starters, we have Nobara, a passion project built by GloriousEggroll, the developer behind Proton-GE — a fork of the Proton compatibility layer that makes Windows games work on Linux in the first place. Then there’s Bazzite, which is built on Fedora’s immutable variants and leans into a console-like experience, with dedicated ISOs for handhelds and HTPCs.
Now, you might object to me talking about Fedora-based distros rather than Fedora itself. However, vanilla Arch isn’t the gaming champion either — it’s usually one of the Arch-based distros like CachyOS or Garuda Linux. If you were using vanilla Arch or base Fedora, both would require a similar amount of setup to transform them into a gaming PC.
The one thing holding Fedora back
Nothing is perfect
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To GeekFedora gives me a mostly similar cutting-edge experience to Arch while being far more stable and secure, with near-equal software availability if you’re willing to source your packages from different third-party repos. It seems perfect, but it suffers from one big catch — you’re missing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers out of the box.
You see, Fedora is a free and open-source purist and only ships FOSS packages in its official repos. However, if you’re using an NVIDIA GPU, you need to use the proprietary drivers because the FOSS ones just suck. Granted, you can technically pull the drivers from RPM Fusion, a third-party repo for Fedora, but it adds a layer of unnecessary friction to what should otherwise be a smooth process.
That said, this is, of course, a non-issue if you’re running an AMD or Intel GPU. Also, even if you use NVIDIA, you can still use Nobara and Bazzite — both of which ship with NVIDIA drivers preinstalled.
