Does anyone else remember growing up being told “watch what you put on the internet! it’ll be there forever!” Now it seems more and more like things out on the internet won’t be there forever unless someone specifically wants it to. I seem to having a harder and harder time digging up parts of the internet i remember from my childhood, the old parts are slowly being erased by entropy and lack of desire to keep them there.
Trust me I’m more on your side than you think, what you described should indeed work as you expected. If I selected the Window Managers group during install and it specifically installed things that need Xorg, I’d be surprised if they weren’t working on first boot because of missing Xorg. The Anaconda installer that Fedora uses has generally been very reliable for me, but I haven’t installed Fedora in that specific way, I’ve always chosen a graphical desktop and then installed other window managers or DEs on top of it, or gone with a minimal server install for headless deployments with no GUI at all.
The fact that this was hard to troubleshoot is not a good look for Fedora either, even if this is a somewhat non-standard setup. It’s bad UX that base-x is not documented or easy to find, though on the positive side, I’ve never needed to know that base-x contains all the Xorg packages because Fedora has, for me, seemed to manage this on its own without needing me to know this detail. One more implementation detail I don’t have to deal with is a positive in my book, right up until you have to deal with it, then it’s super frustrating.
I’ll give you that, documentation compared to the Arch wiki is not as comprehensive; nothing’s as comprehensive as the Arch wiki lol
I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to accomplish:
“Let me put it in perspective: You install a basic desktop”
If i’m installing a basic Fedora desktop, i’m going to their website, downloading the default ISO, and installing the default Gnome desktop. That has xorg and wayland and display drivers and all the things you need to get it running on pretty much any hardware. If i don’t want Gnome i’ll use an ISO with a different desktop, still get wayland and xorg with the default install.
If you’re installing Fedora from the minimal install and then building the desktop (or window manager, maybe you use i3 or openbox) up from scratch like you would in Arch, you’re going about it the wrong way. You can go this route but i’m not surprised you’d run into some issues there and have to solve for missing packages (as you would in Arch too, though the Arch Wiki is much more helpful with this type of install).
Sorry you’re having a rough experience, I came from Arch to Fedora and found it a much easier environment to just relax into, and for me relinquishing the extreme control and maintenance Arch gave me was freeing.
That said, I never dove deep into Arch, only had to use a few AUR packages, and never built my own pkgbuilds. Fedora doesn’t have a strong competitor to this, if you’re used to doing these things in your system, you will find Fedora lacking. I haven’t had any issue finding the software I need in Fedora repos so clearly my use case is simpler and Fedora fits me better in that regard.
I haven’t had issues with install groups, but then again i don’t really use them. I guess they probably aren’t that great or else i’d use them more. Still, hasn’t been a big issue.
Idk why you have an issue with xorg, if you want Wayland Fedora supports it out of the box and was one of the first to do so, switching to it should be easy. Wayland is still missing support for key things, for example Synergy clients just flat out don’t work, so having xorg support is still valuable, at least to me.
Overall it sounds like you’re missing the power of Arch. That’s understandable, Arch is more flexible and arguably more powerful if you’re willing to spend twice the time maintaining it. Fedora has saner defaults and is set up as a more well-rounded system out of the box, but if it’s built in a way that isn’t useful to you and you feel like you have to bend it to your will, Arch is probably the better option.
Agreed. If you’re a device maker and you haven’t considered the possibility of your users plugging in their devices for long periods of time in your design, then i feel that’s on you to improve your product.