fedora workstation 40 does not install on raspberry pi 5

I attempted to install Fedora Workstation 40 for aarch64 systems on my Raspberry Pi 5, and it failed to install. It barely booted, then stopped at a “recovery” shell prompt. Not much else I can add to that. Fedora Workstation installs and works just fine on x86_64 systems, as I have it installed both on hardware and as a virtual machine. Works exactly as advertised. But I think that the Fedora developers really need to get with some Raspberry Pi 5 owners and hammer out a better version to work on that platform. Right now, as far as I’m concerned, Ubuntu 24.04 for Raspberry Pi is the best distribution you can install on the Raspberry Pi 5.

switching away from that ubuntu update due to instability

Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop Raspberry Pi 5

As of today, a little less than 48 hours from when I switched back to 23.10 and updated, I’m back on my “pure” Ubuntu 24.04 desktop on my Raspberry Pi 5.

I don’t know why, but the updated installation proved to be unstable, with the system randomly rebooting after the update. I suspect that it was the extension manager coupled with the desktop clock that you will note is not running in the lower left corner. I had written earlier how very unstable the extension manager was after the initial 24.04 installation and how I had removed it completely. Apparently even grandfathering it in via the 23.10 -> 24.04 update proved to be as unstable as a clean install. Live and learn.

And since I’m living and learning I don’t think I’ll update to 24.10 in spite of what I wrote in the last post. I cherish stability above all else in my operating systems, both personal and professionally.

You might ask why I didn’t remove the desktop clock and the extension manager. Because I already had a clean stable install of 24.04 ready to go with very little effort to swap in. And just because I suspected it was those two applications, I couldn’t prove that was the issue. I didn’t want to run the risk that it was something else. So I just simply made the swap.