I see the template for Fedora 33 is available, but I think it is still beta (feel free to correct me). I am used to Fedora 32 but I am unsure if that is still in beta also. When I install Qubes from the most current version as a fresh install, Fedora 30 is the default, does that necessarily mean it is the most stable? I think consensus is that the minimal templates are the best for security, in terms of sys-firewall and sys-net and building your own from scratch.
I guess my questions boil down to… If I have fedora 32 template installed, is it still recommended that I use fedora 30 for the firewall and sys-net vms?
It is not recommended to use any out of support distribution for your templates.
30, 31 is already EOL, so 32, 33 is the ‘one’ you should choose from: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/End_of_life
The question about beta?
It depends on your expectations.
For Enterprise use, the whole Fedora line is just beta, as they are using RHEL.
for average use it is still considered a bleeding edge, as it has a very short lifetime.
Fedora 30 and 31 are no longer supported so you don’t get security updates. I have been using 33 for a few days now and haven’t encountered any problems yet. You could still use 32 for serviceVMs if you dont trust 33 yet for stability. Or use Debian as suggested.
Fedora is a cutting edge distro, but quite stable imo. That being said, you can use debian for the things you want stable and fedora for other things, or not at al.
For typical workstation tasks I would consider any current Fedora release branch stable enough. They are in fact stable releases. Development happens on the Rawhide branch.
Of course: if you happen to be in “The Enterprise” you may need to run some heavily platform dependent applications.
In that case: run whatever distribution your application relies on (typically that is not Fedora, but RHEL or Ubuntu).
Since the Fedora 33 template is fairly new a super-duper careful person might want to wait up to a month before upgrading.
Personally I never had any issue switching my Fedora AppVMs’ templates on day one of the template release.
Before the new Fedora template is announced it has undergone quite some time of thorough testing by broad parts of the community. So: I woudn’t worry too much!
If you intend to have a less frequent release cycle (which is no question of stability per se) stick with the most recent stable release of Debian that is available as a template.
This comes at the cost of running a little bit less state-of-the-art software; which is probably not what you want for average workstation use. This becomes a lot more significant towards the end of the release cycle.
True, but to be explicit, I would not encourage use of a template where
the release is now past end of life, as 30 and 31.
No one should be using those template now, unless (as you say) they are
required for some particular application.
When switching to a new template it’s important to read the release notes
already with Fedora 33 we have seen users being caught out by this.
It’s true that Debian applications lag; it’s possible to work around
this to some some extent by using the backports repositories, which
provide much more recent versions: https://backports.debian.org
