I have tried Linux as a DD on and off for years but about a year ago I decided to commit to it no matter the cost. First with Mint, then Ubuntu and a few others sprinkled in briefly. Both are “mainstream” “beginner friendly” distros, right? I don’t want anything too advanced, right?
Well, ubuntu recently updated and it broke my second monitor (Ubuntu detected it but the monitor had “no signal”). After trying to fix it for a week, I decided to wipe it and reinstall. No luck. I tried a few other distros that had the same issue and I started to wonder if it was a hardware issue but I tried a Windows PC and the monitor worked no problem.
Finally, just to see what would happen I tried a distro very very different than what I’m used to: Fedora (Kinode). And not only did everything “just work” flawlessly, but it’s so much faster and more polished than I ever knew Linux to be!
Credit where it’s due, a lot of the polish is due to KDE plasma. I’d never strayed from Gnome because I’m not an expert and people recommend GNOME to Linux newbies because it’s “simple” and “customizable” but WOW is KDE SO MUCH SIMPLER AND STILL CUSTOMIZEABLE. Gnome is only “simple” in that it doesn’t allow you to do much via the GUI. With Fedora Kinode I think I needed to use the terminal maybe once during setup? With other distros I was constantly needed to use the terminal (yes its helped me learn Linux but that curve is STEEP).
The atomic updates are fantastic too. I have not crashed once in the two weeks of setup whereas before I would have a crash maybe 1-2 times per week.
I am FULLY prepared for the responses demanding to know what I did to make it crash and telling me how I was using it wrong blah blah blah but let me tell you, if you are experienced with Windows but want to learn Linux and getting frustrated by all the “beginner” distros that get recommended, do yourself a favor and try Fedora Kinode!
edit: i am DYING at the number of “you’re using it wrong” comments here. never change people.
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I love Fedora. But, part of my day job is also managing linux servers. I tend to recommend things that I think are the easiest to get running. Although Fedora is super easy to get running (at least to me), I find the installation process of mint or pop os to be much easier overall. Between those two OSes, I have moved several people from windows to fulltime linux and I’m not entirely sure that the conversion would have been as successful with fedora and without more help from me during the install process.
I’m salty on Red Hat and won’t touch anything near it.
I recommend Zorin because it’s Debian based and I’ve been running Debian Stable for over 20 years. If there’s an issue I can probably help.
I’m switching to COSMIC on Debian Stable when that becomes an option. Until then, It’s Fedora with Qtile Wayland (and Hyprland as backup).
Edit: though I have a Debian VM where I’ll try to get Qtile Wayland set up via pipx and document the process so might go to Debian before then.
That’s funny, you’re the second person today to mention Cosmic to me. I hadn’t seen it yet – now I’m interested as well.
I tried the prealpha and it’s missing a few things I want (they’re WIP). I’d suggest checking out some Youtube videos of it, and not to expect too much, as it’s still not there imo.
I’ve actually tried Zorin and was really impressed! My favorite use of GNOME I’ve seen for sure. Though it’s technically Ubuntu based (which is Debian based).
Good point! I forgot Zorin is actually based on Ubuntu. Thanks for the reminder.
I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.
My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.
There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.
I think Fedora is solid choice. I will tell you why I do not recommend it to new users myself.
1 - Fedora is very focused on being non-commercial ( see my other comments on its history ). This leads them to avoid useful software like codecs that I think new users will expect out of the box
2a- the support cycle is fairly short and whole release upgrades are required
2b - Fedora is typically an early adopter of new tech. It is not “bleeding edge” but it may be moreso than new users need.
3 - it is does not really target new users like say Mint does though it does target GUI use
4 - I do not use it myself anymore and I do not like to recommend what I do not use. What I do use has a reputation for not being new user appropriate ( not sure I agree ).
Nothing wrong with Fedora though in my view. I would never discourage anybody from trying it.
Fedora is generally liked by the corporate world for testing environments and desktops. As long as people understand that it moves quickly then they are happy. I’m not sure why you think it is anti commercial. The Fedora trademark is owned by Redhat
I generally do mention that I like my Fedora KDE, but I’m a little worried about SELinux. I have had two or three run-ins with it, and I think that would be hard to diagnose for a noob.
I would not encourage anyone to join the EL universe as I don’t consider it as stable as others.
TLDR; Redhat’s being absorbed into IBM and they don’t care about RHEL. RHEL (in my view) is dying a slow death. Without RHEL, there is no Fedora or Centos Stream. There’d also be no Rocky or Alma, as things currently stand.
(Although if that happened, I’d not be surprised if the users of Fedora merged with Rocky and Alma in some form of new and fully independent distro - we’ve already seen how well such disasters can be worked around)
Longer reasoning: Redhat, in my view, have made some unpredictable and frankly terrible decisions over the past few years with RHEL which have caused a great deal of concern in the business sector about its stability as a product. (Prematurely ending Centos 8 six years early, paywalling the source code, and more recent anti-rebuilder steps. They also treated the community team working for Centos appallingly throughout these leading to many resignations.) Further more, these were communicated without warning or consultation and have sometimes come across as petty and spiteful, rather than as professional business decisions.
IBM bought Redhat shortly before this happened, mostly for its cloud services. It seems from the outside that RHEL is being squeezed. There have been two major rounds of layoffs. In all, this paints a picture of a company that is in decline and we’ve seen a reduction in contributions to the excellent work done by Redhat in the foss world. IBM have a long history of buying and absorbing companies - I don’t see why Redhat would be any different and RHEL doesn’t make enough money.
Our company is moving away from EL and I know of several others who are doing so. We’re all choosing Debian.
For anybody that does not know, Fedora was founded by Red Hat to be their “community” dostro. Before Fedora, there was only Red Hat Linux and it was trying to be both commercial and community. Red Hat founded Fedora to be an explicitly community distribution and then released the first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ). This resolved their commercial / community conflict.
Fedora is explicitly NOT an enterprise distribution. They are annoyingly committed to only free software. They release often and have short release cycles. Fedora is certainly not aimed at enterprises.
Rocky and Alma are RHEL alternatives and are absolutely aimed at the enterprise. Fedora merging with either of these projects would be super surprising indeed. It would make no sense whatsoever.
The “community” enterprise option from Red Hat is not Fedora, it is CentOS Stream. Alma has rebased onto CemtOS Stream ( which is what RHEL is also derived from ). That makes sense.
I have fewer comments on the health or future of RHEL or Red Hat itself or how much IBM. Ares about it. I guess I will say that I have never seen so many ads for it. I think revenues are at record levels. It does not feel like it is dying.
I don’t use Fedora or RHEL but Red Hat is one of the biggest contributors to Open Source. So, I hope this cynical poster is wrong. GCC, Glibc, Systemd, Xorg, Wayland, Mesa,SELinux, Podman, and the kernel would all be massively impacted by less Red Hat funding.
Rocky and Alma are RHEL alternatives and are absolutely aimed at the enterprise. Fedora merging with either of these projects would be super surprising indeed. It would make no sense whatsoever.
It would make a lot of sense to Rocky and Alma though - as if RHEL went there would be a huge vacuum and their models would be impossible. I know there was a lot of talk in both companies when the source was paywalled about building directly from Fedora’s sources (Alma may actually be doing that, I’m not sure). Both R & A have significant user bases, both Enterprise and Community, and there would be considerable desire to keep the wheels turning. Some sort of collaboration (or just downstreaming directly from Fedora) feels inevitable as a choice if that were to happen.
The “community” enterprise option from Red Hat is not Fedora, it is CentOS Stream.
Centos Stream is not community by the way - it’s entirely owned and run by Redhat (AIUI, They took over the name from its community origins and replaced the board with its own employees. The vote to end traditional Centos (which was community run) was given as an ultimatum with a great deal of bad feeling) Stream’s purpose is as an upstream staging area for new releases of RHEL. Redhat state it’s not suitable for production use, so it’s of no real benefit to anyone that isn’t part of that test cycle. (In some defence of Redhat here, Centos was struggling with low resources for a long time before this and point releases often took weeks or even months to appear behind RHEL)
RHEL don’t publish sales figures afaik, so they’re the only ones who could say whether they’re up or down. I’m just one guy who’s worked in a mostly EL based world which has been negatively affected by these decisions, so I’m keeping half an eye. I could be completely wrong, but the facts we do know aren’t healthy for someone wanting to enter into a business relationship with them, which is what a corporate company does when choosing a supported distro like RHEL.
And yes, I am quite cynical - you’re right to point that out. I also hope I’m wrong. If I’m not, I have a lot of confidence that the world will continue with or without RHEL, but yes, it would be a big loss to the FOSS contributions they have made and continue to make - as well as a lot of good people losing their jobs.
Full disclosure - I do not use any of these enterprise distros anymore although the stance taken by Alma makes them attractive to me. I am looking for ways to use them.
If we had more time and maybe more beer, I would be interested to get into a discussion about what “community” is.
CentOS pre-Stream was not a “community” distro in my view as I do not see “downloads that cost no money” as the backbone of what makes a community.
CentOS ( pre-Stream ) could not innovate their own distro. They could not even fix a bug without breaking their “bug-for-bug” RHEL compatibility promise. All they did was recompile and redistribute RHEL packages with the trademarks removed. What kind of community do you have if you do not produce anything? Everything from CentOS was actually provided by Red Hat. It was just literally “RHEL without paying”. There was no diversity.
CemtOS Stream is managed by Red Hat for sure as its primary purpose is to become the base for a future version of RHEL. However, it is Open Source and developed fully out in the open. Contributions are possible.
Unlike CentOS of old, the “community” can contribute to and debate the future of CentOS Stream. Alma has contributed bug fixes for example. It has been a bit painful as Red Hat is used to being the only one in the sandbox but the process is evolving. CentOS Stream has multiple contributors ( not just Red Hat ). This means that others have some influence on what RHEL looks like in the future. “The community” can build on that.
In my view, CentOS Stream is already a lot more of a “community” distro than the original CentOS was. You do not have to agree of course. Anyway, I hope other projects join with Alma and Red Hat in contributing to CentOS Stream.
For all their flag waving about “the community”, distros like Rocky and Oracle have shown no interest in contributing to CentOS Stream. They continue to clone the distro that Red Hat forks from CentOS Stream. They don’t get involved until all the work has been done. Then they make money off it ( the only reason they are there ).
All good points and I appreciate and enjoy the discussion.
In my view, CentOS Stream is already a lot more of a “community” distro than the original CentOS was.
This is possibly a semantic point, but for me, a community distro is owned and operated by the community without any corporate control. All the points yonu make are true and valid, but ultimately, Centos is owned by a very large corporate entity that could stop it whenever they want to and nobody else can do anything about that.
Some examples of community owned distros are Debian, as well as Rocky and Alma Linux. Both of the latter have commercial arms, but are are fully independent legal entities owned by the distro. Rocky is owned by Rocky. This point was particularly important because that’s what the community thought Centos /was/, but it turned out that Redhat owned Centos. I don’t think either of the new distros would have been as trusted if the same thing that happened to Centos - a corporate entity ultimately deciding what happens - could have happened to them. When abandoning a sinking ship, it’s prudent to check you’re not boarding another with a big hole in it.
I did happen to look follow Rocky’s path closely, and our company chose it to migrate our doomed Centos8 machines to, because our developers didn’t have time to rebuild everything for Debian in that particular window. That decision was largely based on that legal standpoint because we didn’t want Centos repeating on us. It was also reassuring that Rocky was founded by Greg Kurtzer, who founded Centos and had that project effectively stolen from him, and he least of anyone wanted the same thing happening. (BTW, Rocky was named after the other co-founder of Centos, who has since died - a nice gesture)
My cynicism of Redhat and their motives are real and may be misplaced, but I don’t think they’re done piddling in the EL swimming pool just yet. I adored the company once and had nothing but respect for what they achieved. But that was then and this is now.
Being cynical about Red Hat is fine as long as we keep it factual. I enjoy their contributions but otherwise have no skin in their game.
I am not as enthusiastic about Rocky. I cannot see at all how you can compare them to Debian. It seems unfair even to Alma to lump them in with Rocky as Alma is taking the high road. Best of luck with Rocky though. Truly.
Your make a good case that “community” means “cannot be shut down by a corporation”. Thank you for that. Can a “bug-for-bug RHEL clone” be community though? If Red Hat cancels RHEL ( unlikely ), is there still a Rocky Linux?
Rocky is only comparable to Debian in terms of the licencing model, but IANAL. Both are owned by a non-profit organisation that can’t be bought.
Would Rocky survive? Nobody knows - but that’s why I said I think Rocky and Alma will pool resources with Fedora in the interests of all. R&A could just rebuild downstream of Fedora and invent their own release cycle, so they may do that.
IBM has to file public financials. Tracking rough Red Hat revenues is not all that hard. They have done very well.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/red-hat-high-growth-streak-151126295.html
I won’t get back into the Fedora thing. I bet the whole dollar though that, if RHEL disappeared, Rocky and Oracle would take no interest in Fedora.
You’re mixing up Redhat with RHEL.
Redhat is a publicly traded company, so yes, their financials are strong. But my question was about RHEL, which is an internal project and not publically known.
Um. No.
Red Hat is not a publicly traded company and has not been for 5 years. They are a division of IBM. What you can know about Red Hat financials comes from IBM’s financial statements.
Red Hat has three primary product lines of which RHEL is one.
Did you read the article?
I stand corrected that Redhat are no longer publically traded - I was misled by stock prices showing prices in months, and not including the year.
But that muddies your point even further, doesn’t it? We can’t see RHEL’s value, nor even Redhat’s. (And you did mix them up!)
No. I did not. And you can. Happy to conclude things here. Good luck.
Fedora will live without red hat. It’s got a community structure in place, all infrastructure is open, etc.
Obviously it would lose some funding and manpower but other distros get by.
I actually agree with you, it would survive. It would change, but it’s big enough to have that critical momentum.
Historically Fedora has been suggested as a free way to learn Enterprise Linux skills for a career. RHEL now provide free licences so that doesn’t apply. Has this hurt Fedora at all? Probably not and may no longer be relevant.
I do. But only the Ublue variants. Bazzite, Aurora, or Bluefin depending in if someone games or prefers a Windows or MacOS style desktop. Ublue adds so much that makes things “just work” that stock Fedora doesn’t. Drivers, codecs, patches. I had to add GRUB arguments to stock Fedora to even make it boot with my Nvidia card. I never had that problem with Mint, PopOS, or even Arch with archinstall. A noob isn’t doing that.
That said, atomic distros have their own problems. The install order is Flatpak or Brew, distrobox, then layering as a last resort. What happens to the newbie when a Flatpak doesn’t work properly because of some unknown permission issue that needs Flatseal? Or when its objectively worse than the layered counterpart, like Steam? They have to move down the line and at the very least read the docs on how to install each of these things. I had to look up how to enable a Brew service for Syncthing to work just the other day because the Syncthingy flatpak wouldn’t work.
I’m probably going to get downvoted for this but I’m a Linux noob overall…. Windows has historically been what I’ve used. Or Ubuntu. I did distrohop to antixLinux and other really super small distros, but they didn’t fix my problems and I ended up back on relatively bloaty Ubuntu for further testing and sadly it solved bout a third of my problems (the hardware is ancient enterprise shit with a whopping 4gb ram and 16 usb ports)
I’ve been looking for a Debian based system to replace Ubuntu because I’m a noob and Debian-based is super different from the fedora.
I’m sure fedora is great! Tons of people love it! But for a noob is can be really daunting. Especially when most Linux instructions come in three flavors “Ubuntu/debian” and 2 other things. Who knows which two. You, the advanced Linux user, probably know which two but your noob doesn’t. And doesn’t understand the difference.
I’m not a total noob but I prefer Debian because I know a person who gets Debian and can help me. If I knew a fedora user that was actually willing to help me, I’d use that, but I’ve never met one so I’ll stick with what I know.
I see no reason to downvote you at all.
The distros that everybody builds off of are Debian, Fedora,Arch, and maybe SUSE ( common roots with Fedora but long ago ).
I did not mention Ubuntu as Ubuntu is actually built from Debian but actually Ubuntu is the most popular and is itself used as a base by other distros ( most notably Mint ).
If you are looking for an Ubuntu alternative, Debian is the most similar. However, pure Debian is not as new user friendly.
Arch is considered an advanced distro. I think Fedora and its derivatives are solid choices.
If you are really running on a system with only 4 GB of RAM, I would actually recommend trying out a 32 bit distro. The 32 bit version of AntiX or the 32 bit version of Q4OS with the Trinity desktop are the two I would recommend.
I was recently reminded of Adelie Linux though and have been meaning to try it on an old system myself: https://www.adelielinux.org/about/
What about a lightweight variant like Lubuntu or Xubuntu? 4Gb should be usable for a lot of things.
I haven’t tried those, but I did hop a bit on a bad hard drive. mint was too much (also o just hate it, tbh). Antixlinux was too much and that’s meant to run off a flash drive so the drive was failing, and now it isn’t (new 15 year old drive!!!) and Ubuntu is still a bit too much. But it runs a web browser which is all I need for a bedroom media device. I’d like more, but it’s enough.
But since then I’m seeking a different end goal. I was looking to optimize that old pos, but now if it just runs a browser and runs Plex web, I’m happy because it’s so old I can’t expect it to download for me… it can do, but not well and I have other machines for that. I tried to use it as a download device but lol, nope, can’t handle that many p2p connections on 4g ram.
But I’ll try those on flash drives and see what they can do for me! Thanks for the recommend!
Surprisingly unhelpful, thanks! :)
That’s why I don’t swap for fedora. That’s the kind of help you tend to get unless you know someone who knows the distro, so I guess thanks for exemplifying :)
I don’t understand. That’s essentially where I learned Fedora from. Where did you learn to use Windows?
I find it pretty problematic how Ubuntu is messed up and still used as default distro.
Fedora has issues with always being a bit early. I prefer it a lot over buggy Kubuntu, as I use KDE, but for example now 6.1 is too early and still has bugs, while Plasma 6 was really well tested (with Rawhide, Kinoite beta and Kinoite nightly being available)
Fedora has tons of variants and packages, and COPR is full of stuff. The forums are nice, Discourse is a great tool.
It uses Flatpak, but adds its legally restricted repo by default.
The traditional variants… I think apt is better. I did one dnf system upgrade to F40 and it was pretty messy.
The rpm-ostree atomic desktops are really good, but not complete. For example GRUB is simply not updated at all. This is hopefully fixed with F41.
Or the NVIDIA stuff, or nonfree codecs, which are all issues even more on atomic.
So the product is not really ready to use, while rpmfusion sync issues happen multiple times a year. This is no issue on the atomic variants, but there you need to layer many packages, which causes very slow updates.
I am also not a fan of their “GUI only” way, so you will for example never have useful common CLI tools on the atomic variants, for no reason.
It is pretty completely vanilla, which is very nice.
I always recommend Pop_OS! for beginners. It’s IMHO a lot closer to what Ubuntu used to be, uses apt and/or flatpaks (and no snaps), has sane defaults, a good installer, a decent company behind it, nvidia drivers included and their upcoming Cosmic desktop environment looks sick.
Also, I feel like this is a better Fedora-based distro for beginners since it’s harder to break:
Yes probably agree on PopOS, even though never used it. Also their DE will need a lot of time, I hipenthey dont ship it too early. I dual boot it, actually the Fedora Atomic image.
Yes, Silverblue is the GNOME Atomic desktop but as I said it is not finished. There are many things not done.
Being in active development does not mean it’s not ready. To recognize faults or things that can be improved upon and keeping track of those does not mean it’s not ready.
By your definition, not a single distro is ready. Which, to be frank, is a perfectly fine stance to hold if the extent of this is explored and explained. However, you pose it as if Fedora Atomic is the one with that problem (implying others don’t have that issue), which is just plain false.
It is not false.
There is a workaround for updating the bootloader, but I often use “how well does it scale” as a measurement.
Atomic should replace traditional distros, and apart from the need for improved tooling everywhere (like easily converting random files to RPMs) it has the big issue that currently GRUB is not updated.
This means the system is not possible to keep installed over many versions, without tweaks. This will hopefully be fixed with bootupd integration in F41.
This means users with secureboot get issues on newer Kernels, if they installed Atomic a few versions back.
Here is the Atomic issue tracker and I would call a few dealbreakers, while not all.
What you’ve pointed out here is definitely something that should be fixed soon. Thank you for clarifying.
When I started learning Linux years ago when I studied IT I was actually taught UNIX but the first Linux distro I was exposed to was Red Hat back in school around 2000. Fedora was derived from that and for a while I was more familiar with that. However with the popularity of Debian and Ubuntu, it seems most of the instructions out there are geared around that so I’m now pretty much just sticking with Debian.
Fedora’s always run really sluggishly for me on whatever hardware I’ve tried it on, so I don’t recommend it in general because my personal experience with it hasn’t been great.
Even ignoring this, I’m not sure I’d recommend it for beginners due to how it tends to jump on the latest hip new software. For some users this is a massive point in Fedora’s favour, but I’m not sure how much I’d trust a beginner to, say, maintain a BTRFS filesystem properly. Not to mention the unlikely, but still present, possibility of issues caused by such new software.
I had sluggish experience with SUSE. Updates were slow. Installation was very slow.
Starting apps was not as snappy.
Promise of snapshots was great, but not unique.
Overall slower than my regular distro experience killed it for me.
I simply asked myself: will it bug me every time I use the laptop? The answer was yes, and decided to end it.
I didn’t have any problem using Arch Linux which many say is much more newbie unfriendly but I had several problems using Fedora most related to Intel video drivers and I couldn’t solve them in any way. The fan of my Intel Nuc started to run on maximum when I opened the browser lol. All drivers were correctly installed
Because Ubuntu LTS works very reliably and because there’s a huge body of information and large swathes of people who can help on the Internet, and because every project and vendor tests and releases their stuff for Ubuntu/Debian and has documentation for it.
Despite the hate you see around these shores, Ubuntu LTS is among the best if not the best beginner distro. Importantly it scales to any other proficiency level. The skill and knowledge acquired while learning Ubuntu transfers to Debian as well as working professionally with either of them.
Also, with the fuckery RedHat pulls lately, it’s a disservice to new users to get them to learn the RedHat ecosystem, unless they plan or need to use it professionally. If I had to bet, I’d bet that the RH ecosystem would be all but deserted by volunteers in the years to come. I bet that as we speak a whole lotta folks donating their time are coming to the conclusion that Debian was right and are abandoning ship.
Because Ubuntu LTS works very reliably
Ubuntu pulled a blinder many years ago with their LTS model. You get a new one every two years with five years support for each one and a guarantee of moving from one to the next. That gives you quite a lot of time to deal with issues, without requiring you to live in the stoneage.
For example: Apache Guacamole is a webby remote access gateway thingie. It currently requires tomcat9 because TC9->10 is a major breaking change. Ubuntu 22.04 has TC9 and Ubuntu 24.04 has a later version (probably 10). However Ubuntu 22.04 is supported until 2027. So we stick at Ubuntu 22.04 and get security updates etc.
Guacamole is currently at 1.5.5, and the next version will be 1.6.0. The new version will have lots of functionality additions. The devs will then worry about Tomcat editions and the like. Meanwhile Ubuntu will still be supported.
In my opinion the two year release/five year supported model is an absolute belter.
Also, with the fuckery RedHat pulls lately, it’s a disservice to new users to get them to learn the RedHat ecosystem, unless they plan or need to use it professionally.
We and several other companies that I know are migrating away from EL entirely directly because of those Redhat decisions. We can’t trust them not to be stupid again.
I recommend slackware exclusively. Sometimes times it feels like I’m pissing into the wind.
Coincidentally, that’s what using it is like, too. :)
I’d be offended if I weren’t so busy managing my own dependencies.
Nice to hear that recommended! Slackware was the first distro I installed at home, thanks to it being included on a special cover CD from one of the magazines some time in the late 90s? Not touched it for about 20 years but glad to hear it’s still going.
i discovered it around the same time, but i forget how. It’s been my only daily driver since then. I can fumble my way through a .deb distro if I have to, but slackware is my comfort zone.
You should throw -current up on a distrohop partition and re-live your youth.
Long story short, Fedora is RedHat, RedHat is mostly aimed at companies, so most random users haven’t encountered it. I used Fedora for a few months, a Friend of mine was very passionate about it, I personally didn’t find anything special about it and disliked rpm at the time, so I ended up switching back to Mint (I think it’s what I was using at the time).
So, long story short, people are not recommending it because they’re not using it, but I know a few people who use it and swear by it, so it looks like you’re on the road to join their club, and don’t let anyone tell you you should be using any other distro, as long as you find something that works for you, that’s what matters.
That being said have you tried Kubuntu? I feel lots of what you had issues with could be the old GNOME vs KDE argument.
“Fedora is Red Hat, Red Hat is mostly aimed at companies”.
I said this in another comment but Red Hat Linux used to target both the community and commercial interests. Fedora was founded to be an explicitly community distribution that was NOT aimed at companies. Red Hat then created Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ) which absolutely targets companies ( for money ). The whole point of founding the Fedora project was for it not to target companies.
Fedora release often, has short support cycles, and is hostile to commercial software. It would be a terrible choice for a business in my view. It is a leading community distribution though.
The top foundational distros that all the others are based on are Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Arch ( and maybe SUSE — I am not European ).
In my view, Ubuntu’s best days are behind it. Fedora has never looked so good.
I use one of the other distros above but I used Fedora long ago and it treated me well. I think it is a solid choice. My impression has been that it is gaining in popularity again.
