Fedora had been calling to me for a while. Its bleeding-edge kernel, the latest in software, and clean vanilla GNOME were some of the main reasons I made the jump. I was also getting tired of a few issues that only Ubuntu seemed to have, like Snap slowly creeping into every aspect of my system. Ubuntu had treated me fine overall, but I wanted to try something else as a daily driver.

For the most part, I've been happy with Fedora since the switch. It's a fast and clean Linux distribution, and some tasks feel more responsive than Ubuntu. I was mostly worried about switching from APT to DNF and no longer using PPAs. I thought that would take some getting used to, but it was a surprisingly painless aspect of the transition.

The part of Ubuntu that I missed was the Additional Drivers tool. After a decade, I thought there would be something more interesting to miss, but there really wasn't. I had assumed that Fedora would have something equivalent, but I've now found that there's nothing quite as easy.

Ten years of hardware that just worked

I didn't realize how convenient Ubuntu made things

Drivers are a breeze on Ubuntu. You only need to open the Software & Updates tool, click on the Additional Drivers tab, and all the drivers for your hardware are listed right there. It gives me about a dozen options for my NVIDIA video card. I can choose from a completely open-source Nouveau driver, a proprietary NVIDIA driver, or NVIDIA's partially open-source kernel module. There are a few different versions of each, but in most cases you'll just want the latest one.

Everything else is there, too, like the Wi-Fi adapter and other hardware Ubuntu detects. What sets this experience apart is that I don't need to go hunting for anything. Just open the Additional Drivers screen, click on the driver I need, and install it. That process looks different on other Linux distributions, including Fedora. Sometimes a simple DNF update will fetch everything I need on Fedora, but other times I need to search for the specific package name and manually install it from the command line. When this happens, I miss Ubuntu a little.

With Fedora, I needed to enable RPM Fusion and install akmod-nvidia from the command line. This isn't the end of the world, but it did turn a ten-second task on Ubuntu into five minutes. I first had to check online for the name of the package, because how could anyone intuitively just know that? And even the name, "akmod," doesn't really tell me what it is, so I had to verify that I was actually installing what I wanted. It made me miss the human-readable names that Ubuntu's Additional Drivers list gave me.

Ubuntu uses a tool called ubuntu-drivers, which is a backend service that detects your hardware and queries a database to match up what drivers your system will need. The list it compiles is available in the GUI, or you can use the command line to get a list of available drivers and install them from there. After ten years of having this convenience at my fingertips, its absence from Fedora was a bit jarring.

Fedora does things differently, not worse

There's a strong argument for doing things yourself

Although Ubuntu's Additional Drivers tool is convenient, it comes at a cost. By hiding driver selection behind a tidy menu that you click once and forget about, it also limits how much you engage with your own system. Even after running Ubuntu for ten years, I can't tell you what driver version was running for my GPU, much less how it got there or what I should do first if something goes wrong. Fedora's approach forces you to do the research and gain more perspective on the process, which is something Ubuntu abstracts away.

There's also something more philosophical behind Fedora's way of doing things. It doesn't ship proprietary drivers, but forces you to enable their inclusion from RPM Fusion to grab them. It's still easy to do that, and it's well-documented, but it requires users to make a conscious decision about what they're putting on their system. Although I like the convenience that Ubuntu provides in this regard, I really respect Fedora for upholding that philosophy and prompting me to contemplate exactly what's being installed.

Convenience isn't the same as ignorance

It's not like Ubuntu obfuscates your drivers

Despite having the GUI frontend for driver selection, Ubuntu isn't keeping users in the dark. You can still run ubuntu-drivers list and ubuntu-drivers recommend to see what drivers Ubuntu recommends and why. The ubuntu-drivers install command allows you to pick one of those drivers and install it on your system, so you'll be more familiar with what's running on your machine. The difference is that Ubuntu will hold your hand through the process if you want it to.

I don't think that's a bad thing. For ten years, I wasn't that worried about which driver was running, as long as Ubuntu was keeping it up to date and things ran smoothly. I was more concerned with work, projects, and daily tasks, which is what I was using my computer for in the first place. Ubuntu allowed me to spend less time maintaining my operating system and get back to the reasons I was using it. At some point, being looked after by your operating system isn't a weakness. Fedora just looks after you in other ways.

The best features are the ones you never notice

Fedora is an excellent operating system, and I'm still running it. I solved the driver situation, and it wasn't a big deal. But the experience taught me something about Ubuntu that I hadn't realized in ten years of using it: the most valuable features are the ones you can't see. They're the features that keep your system running smoothly, and you don't even notice them.