from flork@lemy.lol to linux@lemmy.ml on 25 Jun 20:51
https://lemy.lol/post/27226766
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.
threaded - newest
Is it because Fedora is usually considered bleeding edge?
Yeah, it might be easy to install but you are also a beta tester of things that will be in more stable distros two years from now.
But with that said, I love Fedora, but with Gnome. I use Nobara for the gaming simplicity but with the vanilla Gnome spin. I’d recommend it to anyone, most Linux distros these days are pretty user friendly once installed.
Huh? Fedora Workstation is built on stable releases, made by people who actually do QA.
Beta is the wrong word, but there is quite a difference in stability between Fedora and Debian.
Sure but Debian really, REALLY is not a newbie distribution.
That was literally more than 10 years ago.
Maybe GNOME got more stable… but the non LTS kernels often cause issues, and KDE is currently unstable again (while it worked perfectly on Plasma 6.0)
In 10 years of using Fedora (granted: my current main Linux system is SteamOS but I do have hardware running Fedora as well but with Gnome as desktop in that case) I once had a kernel-related bug, IIRC involving some fairly new AMD hardware.
Unless you’d be so kind to point me to a direction that showed that your instability is because of Fedora and not some bug that suck into Plasma 6.1, you’d have the same bug under any other distribution with Plasma 6.1.
Fedora simply takes what KDE offers, and the whole VRR etc. additions seem to cause tons of bugs.
Already reported, not sure how helpful.
But being the first to implement KDE releases… is problematic.
Like any other distribution with KDE software.
That comment makes little sense. Someone has to be the first. It’s impossible for everyone to wait. Also waiting forever means that existing users are stuck with old bugs because the update is not coming out. The first Plasma 6.1 update has been released yesterday. Don’t think Fedora users will have to wait forever for this.
Btw, Plasma is not the default desktop of Fedora. OP mentioned it but OP also talks about noobs who should stick to defaults anyway and also not make experiments with Atomic editions either.
Kubuntu deviates from upstream, which is problematic but shows that it can be done differently.
Arch unstable, Fedora Rawhide, Debian Testing…
I think I have it since a few days on Kinoite?
Not yet, but a close second.
Noobs should absolutely use atomic editions. Totally. Every bad behavior should just break so they dont mess up.
The system is resettable which is so valuable. It has transparent changes. It has integrated backups.
But taking Fedoras defaults is difficult, as Fedora Flatpaks and Toolbox are not really great.
I mean, Ok
Yes, that article is wrong
I don’t use Fedora, so I believe you.
Here’s another comment with more detail
Someone explained it to me this way:
If knife is a newest feature, then
Any snapshot distribution by definition is on bleeding edge.
Any rolling release is by definition on the cutting edge.
Newer, less stable packages. I’ve been on Fedora as a daily driver since 2009 and have had yum updates break things. I do RHEL full-time so I’ve got the know-how to unravel it, but it’s not for the noob / non-technical, at least not at first.
Ah yes, when yum was the package manager, you had some breakage. As context for the readers here: dnf replaced yum in 2015, almost a decade ago: lwn.net/Articles/640420/
Also, “noob / non-technical” users just use Gnome Software and not command line package managers.
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.
Generally Fedora’s purpose is to make sure nothing gets into redhat (RHEL) Linux. So if there are breaking changes to things, you’ll be getting them.
Historically if people had wanted to learn I’d push them towards Ubuntu because its Debian based, meaning familiar enough to most of what runs the modern internet that I could eventually (I’m not a Linux admin) fix.
These days if you just want to use it I’d pick Linux mint, just since they seem to be orienting towards that way. Arch or SUSE based something if you want to learn more about how the packages you install work together. But the choice in distro honestly feels more like an installer and package manager choice than anything. a distro is just a choice of which thousand things to hide in a trenchcoat.
I just ideologically don’t like IBM and would rather hand in my bug reports to the volunteer ecosystem.
No, Fedora has a policy against compatibility breaking updates mid-cycle. That’s why Gnome is never updated to a new major release on a Fedora release. You’ll have to wait for the next Fedora release to come out for such upgrades.
I didn’t mean to imply they’d roll in buggy packages, by virtue of release; just that Fedora’s function is typically regression testing for the money making product.
The testing is for the much more marketable enterprise window.
Fedora is not an LTS distribution but Fedora itself has as robust, if not more robust, QA leading up to a release as any other distribution.
Installer is a big part.
2nd biggest part is how system is configured.
Debian is not afraid to create its own version of default configuration. Take some mail software as example.
Arch on the other hand is most likely just going to ship original application configuration.
Debian might be nice and easy, until configuration change is necessary. Suddenly, original application documentation doesn’t apply. Debian documentation may be obsolete or absent. And that is the beginning of reading all of the configuration files. Normally, it is not a problem until something like email system configuration is necessary.
That’s when Arch philosophy of making fewest changes to software comes to shine. Original documentation usually works and applies well.
The problem with Fedora and especially the atomic versions is that when you Google “how to do X on Linux” you pretty much always get information for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives. The atomic versions have it mildly harder because now you also have to learn how immutable distros work, and you can’t just make install something from GitHub (not that it’s recommended to do so, but if you just want your WiFi to work and that’s all you could find, it’s your best option).
It’s not as bad as it used to be thanks to Flatpak and stuff, but if you’re really a complete noob the best experience will be the one you can Google and get a working answer as easily as possible.
Once you’re familiar and ready to upgrade then it makes sense to go to other distros like Fedora, Nobara, Bazzite, Kionite and whatnot.
I don’t like Ubuntu, I feel like Mint is to Ubuntu what Manjaro is to Arch, Pop_OS is okay when it doesn’t uninstall your DE when installing Steam. But I still recommend those 3 to noobs because everyone knows how to get things working on those, and the guides are mostly interchangeable as well. Purely because it’s easy to search for help with those. I just tell them when you’re tired of the bugs and comfortable enough with Linux then go start distrohopping a bit to find your more permanent home.
Those Ubuntu “as easily as possible” answers on the web often revolve around adding random PPAs which cause breakage over time, especially the more PPAs are mixed and mashed. If anything, those easy answers from random Ubuntu forums and websites, last updated 2014, cause more harm than good.
M’lady…
U dropped ur fedora, king
You joke, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's at the back of some people's minds.
There's also the whole association with Red Hat, and since Red Hat got bought, went corporate and murdered CentOS, Fedora is tainted somehow.
These things aren't necessarily good reasons to not recommend Fedora, (for those see other comments) but they're reasons nonetheless.
Ehh that is rather unforgivable and I did not even know!
Deff no fedora for me now!
They didn’t murder centos, they changed its development so that its upstream of RHEL, one point release ahead. For 95% of deployments it makes no difference, for the last few percent RHEL proper is available for free for non-commercial purposes and if it’s commercial then buy a license or use another clone.
Most people have bought into FUD, and spout off the same BS points, and were never centos users to begin with.
a lot of reasonable for the money shot tho
You say that like it was a small thing, but small things don’t create such bad feeling, cause most of the Centos volunteer team to resign, create off two entirely new distributions (Rocky and Alma). The subsequent paywalling of RHEL sourcecode and its accompanying spiteful communications make it clear where Redhat’s focus is - or, rather, isn’t. People judge companies by what they say and do, and I and many others are deeply concerned for the future of RHEL after the IBM takeover and are moving away from it.
I think there is a lot of nostalgia about the great work that Redhat did (and still does, at a smaller scale) and are overlooking what it’s become but RHEL as a business product is not the force it once was. I think it’s entirely possible that Redhat/IBM will simply pull the plug on RHEL and the entire EL universe will need some serious remapping if its to survive.
(Was a Centos user, still maintain 180 EL servers, am quite aware of the FUD, much of which originated and still does in the other direction from Redhat and its employees. The Centos 8 announcement came just after I’d manually migrated 60 vms to it, which then needed migrating again to another distro - so this did cause us some significant work and cost.)
The centos volunteers never resigned because of RH. The reason RH got centos was because centos almost didn’t get a few major releases out. It wasn’t until other companies started providing support for their own RHEL derivatives that they chose to restrict sources.
RH had taken over the Centos project and Board by that time. You’re right that Centos was already circling the drain in terms of resources (I remember waiting many weeks for point releases), but the way they did this was brutal and poorly communicated.
And remember those downstream ‘rebuilds’ only appeared to fill the vacuum caused by Centos disappearing. That they’re both doing very well does make you question whether Centos could have been sustained in its traditional form. (As opposed to Stream, which is only of benefit to Redhat and those in its testing cycle)
They murdered it, hollowed it out, then re-used the name for something completely new. Granted, what’s new is far from a bad thing, and despite having half the support cycle, the cycle itself is way more consistent and constant because there is no lag time between minor updates (because there are none). Releases are still apparently checked by RH QA, and bug fixes now come a little faster, too.
I’ll do you one better: the centos users got exactly what they paid for, and were able to step in at any time to keep centos from turning into centos stream by making their own supported distro. Nobody did until centos original was gone, and were somehow surprised that a distro with a fixed 10 year support cycle takes a nontrivial amount of resources to run. I guess Oracle kind of tried to make their own version of centos with OL before the advent of CentOS Stream, though it was far from being “by the community, for the community”.
I’ve actually had someone thumb their nose at linux because of that name. “You mean the hat OS? The one those weird guys use? No thanks.” I’m paraphrasing but ya, that association is there for some people.
Because on Fedora sometimes you are required to use terminal for some stuff like installing nvidia drivers and you dont really want to send a total beginner to Fedora
idk I have only needed the terminal once, with Ubuntu/Gnome it was a daily occurrence.
What were you using the terminal for that now you don’t need it? I personally prefer KDE to GNOME as well, and I think lots of it can be related to that and not the distro itself.
Nvidia can be installed through the App Store (or whatever it’s called) now. You just have to enable the non-OSS repo in the settings.
I’m a little lost here…when I started using Fedora I was pretty much a complete beginner (used Ubuntu a little bit before but not extensively, only GUI applications) and stuff like this wasn’t an issue. Just copy and paste from some online guide. Didn’t have to use the terminal frequently either.
Fedora is pretty easy.
I’m not the biggest fan of Gnome’s defaults but the regular, non-techie users want a browser (maybe Chrome instead of Firefox, depending on preference) and possibly Steam for gaming. Both are on Flathub, available from Gnome Software.
The software that isn’t available, isn’t of interest to newbie/non-techie users.
If anything causes breakage, it’s those web tutorials telling inexperienced users to add a bunch of PPAs to do shit. “So you use Ubuntu but video playback is a big laggy on your super new, hardly upstream-supported Radeon graphics card? Easy, add this PPA with untested git snapshots of Mesa and Kernel.” Yeah, no.
This is crazy to me because of all the distros I’ve tested over the years Fedora Kinote is by FAR the one I’ve had to do the least amount of tweaking with. It’s almost boring how “just works” it is. It’s honestly changed my perspective of what a distro can be.
Wait until you try out bazzite for gaming or just the regular kinoite ublue images. Both are basically kinoite with more tweaks and added software on top.
False on Fedora Atomic.
Distrobox and Nix exists.
Mint, perhaps. For Ubuntu, this was only true in the past. And only if PPAs were used sparingly. But Snaps have been a disaster for them in this case. So much so, that even Valve told Ubuntu users to use the Flatpak for Steam instead of the Snap.
Hahaha really? That’s awesome. I wonder if Canonical will ever take the hint that nobody wants Snap when better, more open alternatives exist
Yup. Here’s the post as found on Mastodon by the developer that works on Steam on Linux on behalf of Valve.
how so?
More frequent kernel updates.
fair enough, but its generally ok as long as maintainers wait for a few point releases beforehand.
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:
fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/
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.
gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/sig/-/issues
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.
Issue
Pull request
It is already merged into Rawhide and will hopefully land in F41
I wouldn’t be confident in recommending Fedora to noobs, because its a distribution that is on the bleeding edge side. But it depends on what type of noob we are talking about. There are noobs in Linux, who are technically well versed in Windows and have no problem in adapting to a new system. If someone wants to have the newest software, then Fedora might be it.
Also not many people have experience with Fedora, therefore less likely to be recommended. Most people use or used Ubuntu, maybe even started with Ubuntu. You or me may not like it, but its proven that Ubuntu is generally a good choice for newcomers to get into Linux. And that also plays into how many people know and are able to help. In contrast, Fedora is too much of a niche.
Fedora is not bleeding edge like Arch. It’s “leading edge”; the packages are a lot more tested before being deployed.
People being more experienced with Ubuntu/Debian is a good point
How are the packages more tested than on Arch? Both systems have multiple testing stages in place, doesn’t it? In Archlinux there are 2 more stages before it lands on the actual end user. Sometimes one has to wait long time, in example for me RetroArch was updated after 6 weeks after official release. That’s not bleeding edge at all. Only the system core files get updated extremely quick. But that’s only about updating new packages.
The “leading edge” term of Fedora is about a total different aspect. It’s leading, because Fedora adopts certain technologies first, before even Archlinux adopts it. In example Pipewire. Archlinux waits a bit before the technology is adopted widespread, while Fedora is leading and adopting it early. And that has nothing to do about how often the packages itself get updated. People often mixup these two things (and so I did probably).
From this article, an interview with Fedora’s project leader:
That’s why Fedora users are stuck with e.g. the older GNOME version until the next release.
The difference between Fedora and Debian regarding stability is that there’s a new Fedora release every 6 months, while on Debian you have to wait like 2 (?) years for major updates.
That’s how I always interpreted the term “leading edge”.
By that description, Ubuntu does the same, matching the release cycle of non LTS Ubunu versions; every 6 months with breaking changes (just like Fedora). The difference to Fedora is, that Ubuntu users do not need to upgrade to the next major version, while Fedora have to, because there is only one version.
if you like fedora, have you tried endeavour?
I have not but it was actually on my list of distros to try if Fedora didn’t work out. I should give it a look.
Updates inevitably lead to things breaking sometimes. If you want to avoid things breaking as often, using something stable (like Debian) would help.
The benefits you are describing are probably because of KDE vs Gnome and not a distro thing.
Fedora does things differently than Ubuntu/Debian (mainly package management, but there are other small things). Because of this, noobs & intermediate users alike will get frustrated at things “not being how they are supposed to be”
All that said, if Fedora works for you, keep on using it. I daily drove it for about a year before switching to other things.
I usually go for gnome regardless of distribution. I have old laptop that i use to try distributions occasionally.
Same hardware, same desktop, same encrypted drive, same BTRFS choice, different responsiveness at times.
Systems heavy on flatpak tend to be noticeably slower.
My først linux experience is actually Fedora 39. I was just hooked on how it looks, (Gnome) but I don’t know anything under the hood. But I wio recommend it to noons like me, because I know there is a lot of help in the internet, and we all have to start somewhere. And BTW I’m not someone who understands all the technics and coding orstuff.
A crash 1-2 times a week sounds very strange no matter what Linux distro you’re using. I would suggest testing your RAM right away, it could be a hardware problem.
Yeah that’s not a distro’s fault that’s something wrong. I run several machines with a variety of distros and nothing crashes ever, unless I’m testing partially working software.
Yeah that’s not a distro’s fault that’s something wrong. I run several machines with a variety of distros and nothing crashes ever, unless I’m testing partially working software.
It’s not a RAM problem lmao it rarely crashed on Windows and it’s not crashed with Fedora either.
If you did a full memtest and it came out good then OK.
I’m just saying don’t discount hardware issues. Bad RAM blocks are notoriously hard to diagnose by use alone because there’s not just one symptom you can point at, and they can manifest themselves wildly differently on different apps and different OS depending how large the blocks are and how they are spread.
Luckily there’s a very simple and straightforward test you can make to put it out of your mind.
Curiously that’s not as accurate as you might think. Different systems use memory differently, even just between different Ubuntu flavors or customizations. 1-2 crashes a week is not normal, unless it was consistently happening when you did something specific. Also, what exactly do you mean by crashing? Did you get a black screen with some error or the computer would just freeze or reboot?
That being said I don’t think this is likely to be a hardware issue. One thing that comes to mind is maybe swap, did you had swap on Ubuntu and do you have swap on Fedora now? If Linux runs out of memory it freezes, having swap prevents it from doing so, so if you have low enough memory it’s possible that it would get filled up and freeze your system without swap (Windows has the equivalent by default)
That doesn’t mean anything. I once had an issue where every few hours, a random application would crash on Arch Linux, but not on e.g. Debian or Windows. But this wasn’t an Arch issue per se, but was instead related to an UEFI overclock setting (which defaulted to on). After turning it off, everything worked fine.
So while it seemed like an Arch issue, it was actually hardware/overclock related, it’s just that the other OS wouldn’t run into the trigger for the crash.
Crashes aren’t normal even in Windows. Rare crashes mean a hardware problem 99.7% of the time. Typically RAM as others have pointed out. The only way to figure that out is 4 passes of Memtest86+ without red. Yes 4 because the the first pass is a short one made to spot obviously bad RAM quickly. Less bad RAM might need more. I’ve had a case of 4 sticks that each pass on its own. Every two passed on their own. All 4 failed on the third or fourth pass. And if you think I tested for shits and giggles, I did not. I was see checksum errors on my ZFS pool every other day. No crashes. Nevertheless, if it wasn’t for ZFS I’d have corrupted files all over my archive.
Usually people recommend what they use and like. A majority of people is on ubuntu/mint. Hence, they recommend that. I don’t like apt and I’d never send someone in the debian world unless they want a server. But nowadays the package manager doesn’t matter too much anyway. You should use flatpaks first, and then distrobox, nix, or native (rpm). You won’t feel a real difference between major distros because you don’t interact with the underlying system too much.
Fedora is perfect for beginners. And especially atomic versions as you said are great for beginners. Atomic versions are not good for tinkerers, so if you send someone who wants to customize his experience heavily, he’s going to have a hard time on atomic versions as a beginner. A casual pc user who will edit docs and browse internet prpfits immensely from fedora and atomic version. Fedora has awesome defaults and a new user does not need to care about recent advances in linux because fedora implements them already. Especially ublue improves upon fedora’s ecosystem.
Friends don’t let friends use IBM software.
Fedora is upstream of Red Hat now. It’s developed by the community, then IBM/Red Hat steal it lol.
Not really. RH provides all the hosting for the Fedora project, pays multiple people to work on it full time, and on top of that, the RPM specs (which are used to actually build packages) are all MIT licensed. It’d be like complaining bluehat steals the Linux kernel by cloning it from a git repo and making/distributing their own version of it, which is exactly what they do.
Fair enough. I didn’t know that. Hopefully they don’t abuse their position, but at least it’s not a full ownership situation I guess.
Congrats, you are very lucky. But try to survive couple of version upgrades before recommending it to noobs.
I’ve been running Fedora OStree variants for over two years. I version upgraded and rebased between entirely different spins, rawhide and over to ublue variants then back to fedora mainline. All off the original install, keeping my userspace intact. Never once has it self destructed.
Years ago major upgrades and to lesser degree even minor upgrades made me to give up trying to keep installation running. I don’t even remember if it was Red Hat or Debian.
Eventually I realized, that I like running newest version of Desktop and I ran into cases of getting frustrated with lack of newer versions, which had fixes for issues I ran into. Then I realized that best wiki was not a snapshot distribution.
In the end I tried rolling distribution and remain happy for years.
Debian or derived distribution is easiest to get google help for and it is the simplest choice for me, when running on the cloud.
Although, Alpine is pushing through containers quite forcefully.
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.
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.
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.
Your second monitor was not broken by Ubuntu. Your second monitor was no longer receiving a signal. The distinction is that the second monitor was functional but not compatible.
Yeah I’m seriously sensing there’s a massive bit of info we haven’t been given. I can’t even conjure up a way that a distro would “break” a monitor lol.
It works with Fedora, Windows and Macintosh. It worked with Ubuntu until a month ago. It doesn’t work with a fresh install of Ubuntu with default settings.
There, now you have all the same information I have.
The thing is that this is not something that happens, I remember when I first started using Linux, I got lots of weird problems like that, eventually they stopped happening, and for a while I thought Linux had gotten way better, until one day I was going through some backups and I found a xorg.file with a typo, and then I had the revelation that I had been breaking random stuff without realizing it.
You mentioned that the monitor doesn’t work on a fresh Ubuntu install, but does it work on the live iso? You also mentioned having to run several commands and tweaks after installation on Ubuntu but not on Fedora, did the monitor work before those tweaks or could it be that one of those caused it?
I know such errors can be frustrating, and if you’re happy with Fedora there’s no reason to look back. BTW this is not a “you’re using your system wrong”, but you might be causing the issue without realizing it, I know I was when I was in your shoes, and probably would be angry at people telling me that because I was sure I hadn’t done anything.
It worked perfectly with Ubuntu until recently. It worked perfectly with Windows and Macintosh. It worked perfectly with Fedora.
It didn’t work with a fresh install of Ubuntu and several other distros in the same family.
Now I know what you’re about to say- you’re about to say it could have worked if I had only X Y or Z. But that’s not my point.
My point is that newbies don’t want to troubleshoot everything.
You don’t seem to understand the distinction. You monitor isn’t “broken.” It wasn’t rendered inoperable by Ubuntu. It simply wasn’t compatible with the way you set it up.
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.
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.
Fedora still feels like Redhat sort of to me (I'm old) and I wouldn't have recommended Redhat in 2001 either, I would have told someone to use Mandrake or Suse. Redhat was the "corporate/govt" OS and I know it's changed, but that's why it's usually not the first recommendation that comes to my mind. I still need to adapt.
Aw, Mandrake. That was my first.
I wouldn’t necessarily say this. RH’s still a major defense contractor, and IBM too.
If you were using Red Hat before Fedora, that makes sense. The Red Hat of old split into two: Fedora and RHEL.
Fedora was founded to be an explicitly community and non-commercial distribution. Then Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ) to be an explicitly enterprises focused and commercial distribution.
In recent years, CentOS Stream has been added which is still enterprise focussed but meant to the “community” precursor to RHEL. If anything, the need for CentOS should re-enforce that non-enterprise nature of Fedora.
I’ve recently converted two people from Windows to Linux with Fedora Kinoite. One of them has been using it for maybe two months now without a single issue and the other just started using it with positive first impressions. I find it very modern, simple, and familiar. The atomic system just works too. I enjoy it much more than Mint
Agreed on all counts! I really can’t express enough how impressed I am.
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’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 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 put my tech illiterates on Fedora with GNOME without issue. If you’re the one doing the installation and can install the RPMFusion stuff like drivers and codecs then yeah it’s pretty smooth sailing.
I had a similar experience on my laptop. I tried Ubuntu which broke after trying to throw on Nvidia drivers (using the official docs). I tried Mint and Debian, both of which couldn’t detect my laptop’s wifi card (after hours of trying to fix - apparently a common issue but the fixes did not work for me!). I landed on Fedora, worked great. I’m now on EndeavourOS, but Fedora was the stepping stone I needed.
My desktop I built recently is Bazzite, which is Fedora based and I love it.
I was totally on board until centos got screwed over ( and subsequently AM2 )
I’ll be a cold day before I touch any fedora or redhat again or even mention to another person that they should run it.
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.
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!
FedoraForum.org
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 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: www.adelielinux.org/about/
The installer is garbage in my opinion. But aside from that, the distro is probably fine.
I like Mint but their DEs are terrible and ugly.
I quite often recommend the atomic flavors of Fedora to people and have it set up for a few people (my mother for example). I think atomic distributions are perfect for tech unsavory people, because they can’t really damage anything and it mimics/reproduces lots of the things they are already used from their phones.
maybe if fedoras wold actually work id recommend it
i tried it 3 times, one time it didnt install, and the other two when i installed the nvidia driver it 1, borked, and 2. had graphical glitches
I prefer Fedora. I think Fedora lost the war on easy Linux branding to Ubuntu 15 years ago.
Yep, though the dpkg ecosystem also had more inertia than the rpm ecosystem did. Before Flatpak existed, pretty much everything that was packaged for Linux had a .deb file for it, but the same wasn’t true for rpm. So people who didn’t want to package shit themselves flocked to the Debian-based ecosystem. But these days we have Flatpaks and everything moved to the browser, so it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.
Agreed. If flatpak can continue to gain more control around GUI and hardware, I would finally be able to hop on the wagon completely.
It does happen. It’s simply not the popular choice for the following reasons:
Manjaro,MX Linux, Nobara, Pop!_OS and Zorin OS (amongst others), do put thought and effort into streamlining the experience as much as they can; especially for newer users.primarilycommunity-driven, Red Hat’s influence is undeniable. As such, people that hate corporate interest and/or Red Hat and/or IBM will favor the use of Arch and Debian.Having said all of that, I’ve been using Fedora Atomic for over two years now. Heck, Silverblue was my first distro. And it has been excellent so far. Furthermore, with Bazzite (based on Fedora Atomic) and Nobara (based on Fedora) often mentioned in conversations regarding beginner friendly distros, even if Fedora itself isn’t explicitly mentioned, the ecosystem is clearly healthy and will continue to flourish.
Yeah, package manager is a big one. Many of us got burned by rpm’s early on and just avoided all rpm-based distros since then.
Of course as you say that hasn’t been a problem for over 10 years but the scars haven’t gone away.
I’d only recommend Ubuntu to someone if I knew they knew some else using Ubuntu (so I could tell them to hassle that person instead of me when they have problems).
Otherwise, I’d absolutely recommend Fedora, because it’s actually up to date unlike Debian. I use it myself because it tends to have the best of what the open source community has to offer while not needing constant tweaking
Kinoite shows the future of noob Linux I think, but it’s still new and has some rough edges. I installed it on an ARM and couldn’t make it wake up from sleep.
KDE was far less stable for me compared to Gnome. In the end, my patience with KDE lasted for 1 week.
KDE is more exiting and familiar, but it had no tangible advantage in the end for me.
Fedora has one of the more confusing installers, it requires you to know some technical things such as repos and Flathub to set it up, and package names are different to the standard. It’s just not targeted to beginners so why recommend it to beginners? There are better options out there to show them the full power of Linux user friendliness.
As a packager I’ll just say Debian is the one with the weird package names. Fedora just matches upstream names generally, similar to Arch.
For me program names in the repos were the same on Arch and Debian but Fedora packages had architecture suffixes and sometimes weird names.
I think you are mistaken. An example:
archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/glib2/
packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/glib2/glib2/
Debian:
packages.debian.org/bookworm/libglib2.0-0
packages.debian.org/bookworm/libglib2.0-cil
This is the common case, but Debian gets really out there some times.
And I’ll just say
dnfis a much easier to use tool:dnf install /usr/bin/aprogramdnf install ‘pkgconfig(glib-2.0)’Never noticed. I don’t use much developer stuff. I was talking about regular apps like htop. Fedora names are uncommon for them.
No its not, the package is literally “htop”.
Hmm in my case many packages were in package.x86_64 format or something similar.
Every package has an architecture but you never have to care about it.
But I never saw architecture being in the name of the package that you actually type to install it.
Does Bazzite count? I recommend Bazzite
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
the ubuntu installer has always been the key difference for me specially with zfs and multi-monitor/fractional scaling/nvidia setups that it has configured well over the years where other installers leave you with a lot still to do
Mint is better
oh i didn’t know Mint supported ZFS and nvidia wayland install etc?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
…yahoo.com/…/red-hat-high-growth-streak-151126295…
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.
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.
Long-time Fedora user here. I do not think Fedora is noob friendly at all.
I really like Fedora for their newish packages without breaking constantly. I still would not recommend it for beginners.
Completely agree. I mean, I’m what you’d call a power user, and I still opt for using a flatpak for my browser (Floorp) because codecs are a pain.
What do you mean the installer is awful? I have found it quite straightforward. Select the disc, your keyboard setup, timezone and then it install itself…
It caters to a middle ground that barely exists, meaning it doesn’t have enough options for a power user and too many for a newcomer.
For example, a newcomer doesn’t know what a root account is and doesn’t have to care, yet they have to choose if they want to enable or disable the account. They can also remove their administrator privileges without knowing what it means for them. I get asked what a root account is every time somebody around me tries to install Fedora.
I recommend spinning up a Ubuntu 24.04 VM and taking a look at their installer.
They have a clear structure on how to install Ubuntu step by step while Fedora presents you everything at once. They properly hide the advanced stuff and only show it when asked for it. They have clear toggles for third party software right at the installer and explain what they do. Fedora doesn’t even give you the option to install H264 codecs or Nvidia drivers.
It also looks a lot cleaner and doesn’t overload people with too much info on a single screen. And yet it can still do stuff like automated installing and has active directory integration out of the box, where the Fedora installer miserably fails for a “Workstation” distro.
The Fedora installer works, but it doesn’t do much more than that and the others do it better in many areas.
If you’re installing an OS you should absolutely understand what the root account is. That’s like buying a car without understanding the concept of keys.
No, it’s like buying a car without understanding how the engine works, which a lot of people do.
That’s absurd. You don’t need to understand the inner workings of the kernel to know what a root account is. If you’re regularly encouraging people to install a new OS when you aren’t even confident in their ability to understand what a root account is, you’re not doing them any favors.
Don’t even get me started on disk partitioning. I feel like they somehow have the most obtuse partitioning setup out of every distro I’ve ever installed. It feels like if you don’t just hand over your whole disk (which, if you do that, I feel like it doesn’t make it clear how it’s going to partition it), the installer gets very spiteful and just goes “fine then, figure it out”. I’ve never had so much trouble manually partitioning a disk before, I would literally rather just use fdisk lol.
• The majority of useful packages are hidden in RPM Fusion
I agree with all your points, but this one has way more to do with Debian being a bunch of weirdos about how packages are packaged. Its really more of a Debian demerit than anything since sometimes their packaging practices can be somewhat hostile to projects not directly associated with Debian, especially since the Debian community can have a certain “Our way is the only right way” attitude. That said, the Debian packaging standards can make it easier as a developer to experiment with creating a software package to interact with an existing package. Like there’s a reason to do it that I can support and I wish Debian packagers would more often say “we package things like this so people can experiment” instead of “Everyone else does packaging wrong and our way is the only way”
Half of your complains are fixed in newer releases. For instance it asks you if you want to enable third party repos. If you hit yes it enables the repo for chrome, Nvidia and others plus it setups stock flathub.
That only applies to the GNOME variant, the KDE spin is missing the third party repo toggle.
At least the Flathub repo is fixed on the GNOME variant now. The Nvidia repo is added but the driver is not installed, meaning you still need to use the CLI to install the drivers.
rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA
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 tried a bunch on distros when I switched to Linux full time. Currently I have OpenSUSE in my laptop but I don’t think that will last too much longer. I’ve been running Fedora on my main machine for months now and it makes a lot of my other distros just feel clunky.
As I run openSuse and plan to introduce it to a few friends who want to switch: where did it go wrong for you? What pitfalls should I be aware of, that I might be blind to by now?
Fedora has no selling point at all besides being similar to RHEL.
How about
All of which are unique.
To be frank, Fedora’s unique selling points are very compelling. I wonder if you could name a distro with even more impressive USPs.
Opensuse tumbleweed.
What’s with openSUSE Tumbleweed?
Do you think its USPs are more compelling? If so, consider naming those USPs in order for them to be evaluated.
USP for me means uninterruptible power supply
Wouldn’t that be UPS?
Yes
USP: Unique Selling Point.
lol? are you trolling?
Also atomic branch? SELinux might be a fair point, but I doubt that ss unique to Fedora tbh.
You seem to be ignorant; the use of this word is not meant derogatory. In all fairness, it’s perfectly fine; we all gotta start out somewhere. So, please allow me to elaborate.
Consider checking up on where Wayland, systemd, PipeWire, PulseAudio etc first appeared; so on which particular distro.
Fedora Atomic, i.e. the first attempt to Nix’ify an established distro. Most commonly known through Fedora Silverblue or Fedora Kinoite. Peeps formerly referred to these as immutable. However, atomic (i.e. updates either happen or don’t; so no in-between state even with power outage) is more descriptive. It’s also the most mature attempt. Derivatives like Bazzite are the product of this endeavour. From the OG distros, only openSUSE (with its Aeon) has released an attempt. However, it seems to be less ambitious in scope and vision. I wish it the best, but I find it hard to justify it over Fedora Atomic.
OOTB, apart from Fedora (Atomic), it’s only found on (some) Fedora derivatives and openSUSE Aeon (which forces you to use GNOME and Aeon’s specific container-focused workflow). Arch, Gentoo and openSUSE (perhaps even Debian) do ‘support’ SELinux, but it can be a real hassle do deal with. And it’s not OOTB.
If you make claims, you better substantiate it. I just did your homework 😂. Regardless, I’m still interested to hear a distro with more impressive USPs. Let me know 😉.
I am not sure I understand what you mean by:
.
(CONTINUED)
This second comment only exists because all I wanted to say didn’t fit in the previous one.
So without further a due.
“However, it seems to be less ambitious in scope and vision.”
I will not commit to a rigorous comparison in which their respective PR talks or points related to ambition, scope and vision are mentioned. Instead, I’ll put forward reasons for why I believe this to be the case.
rpm-ostree, for the container workflow Toolbx’ inception is materialized. Reproducibility (to a very significant degree) is achieved. And, as mentioned earlier, it can even start boasting about being declarative (to a degree). By contrast, where does openSUSE Aeon stand? It’s only achieved atomicity. That’s it. No mention of reproducibility. No mention of the ambition to be declarative. Nothing. Their commitment to container workflows didn’t even lead to building in-house tooling. Instead, they "outsourced’ it by using an existing solution (first Toolbx and then Distrobox) that was derived (but ultimately became more of a superset) of Toolbx; i.e. Distrobox. Don’t get me wrong; I have preferred Distrobox over Toolbx (and will probably continue to do so). However, isn’t it painfully obvious that one is inferior (in ambition) when its has to rely on tooling provided by the other?bootchas been successfully created to tackle some problems. The ambition is clear. Meanwhile, I just don’t see the same advancements for openSUSE MicroOS. Heck, even YaST, one of openSUSE’s killer features is absent. Why? One of the reasons is because it allows for too much customization… Peculiar. Because I thought that openSUSE’s reliance on btrfs snapshots would allow them to customize a lot more easily. But, unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case.The writing above was a lot more ramble-y and unorganized compared to what I write usually.
Thank you for the reply!
I don’t understand why this is relevant. But, to answer your question, a modern system should already be on systemd, Wayland and PipeWire unless one has (for some reason) ideological qualms with systemd or if the maturity of Wayland isn’t quite ready for their specific needs.
The “should” used earlier isn’t used as my personal bias or whatsoever. It’s simply the default found on the upstreams projects. GNOME and KDE (the most popular DEs) default to Wayland. PipeWire has become default for at least GNOME (even on Debian). And systemd is the default on almost all Linux systems.
Furthermore, this set of software is not a random set for which Fedora happens to be the first to adopt. In fact, these are crucial parts of how we interact with Linux; these constitute the backbone if you will.
Firstly, no one refers to Fedora as Fedora OS. Secondly, Fedora’s release cycle is often referred to as semi-rolling release. With that, it’s meant that some packages arrive as they come (very close to how rolling release operates). However, other packages only arrive with the next point release. Though, Fedora has its Fedora Rawhide branch that operates as its rolling release branch.
However, the fact that you mention this, means that we have misunderstood eachother. I don’t claim that new versions/updates arrive first on Fedora. I don’t even claim this for any of the earlier mentioned packages. However, what I do mean is that Fedora is the first to adopt these technologies in the first place. So, the first release/version of systemd, PipeWire, Wayland etc was released on Fedora. Then, within months or years, it was adopted by other distros as well.
See previous paragraph. And, you don’t need to fathom it; I’m just stating the facts. If you do seek a reason, it’s related to Fedora’s relation to Red Hat and how most of these technologies originate from efforts coming from either Red Hat employees or made possible through their funding. Then, when it comes to testing those things, Fedora acts as their guinea pig. That’s why Fedora is sometimes referred to as Red Hat’s testing bed distro. This doesn’t only come with its positive side, because it may also come with a negative impact to its stability. However, if one is interested in what’s next for Linux, then there’s no alternative to Fedora.
Because OP actually was in praise of Fedora after using Fedora Kinoite (i.e. Fedora Atomic KDE). And then, you critiqued it (i.e. Fedora) for having no selling points. So, it was rather ambiguous.
Furthermore, Fedora has actually mentioned (for at least two and a half years now) that they intend for Fedora Atomic to be the future of Fedora. So, in a few years of time, what we’ll refer to as Fedora will simply be Fedora Atomic of today. Take note that this doesn’t mean that traditional Fedora will cease to exist. Rather, it will be referred by a different name (perhaps Fedora Classic (but I actually don’t know)).
Alright, I made a couple of claims:
“It’s also the most mature attempt.”;
First of all, we’d have to properly define what “Nix’ify” even means or what I used it for. So, in the simplest of terms, I meant it as “Taking design elements of NixOS and applying them to an existing product. And then publishing/releasing it as a new product.”
So, basically every distro that’s commonly referred to as ‘immutable’ and that’s originated from or has loose relations to an existing distro applies. Therefore, something like Guix System does not apply; because it’s an entirely new project with nothing that pre-existed it without its NixOS influences. On the other hand; Fedora Atomic, openSUSE MicroOS Desktop and the upcoming Ubuntu Core Desktop definitely do apply. (If the upcoming Serpent OS is “Solus v2” then we can also mention that one here). The addition/admission of distros like Arkane Linux, AstOS, blendOS, MocaccinoOS, Nitrux and Vanilla OS (to name a few) is murky, but (for the sake of argument) we’ll not exclude these.
So, a proper study of their relative maturity would require a lot more effort than either of us is willing to put into. But, I made the claim based on the following (in alphabetical order):
Dear lord…I will try to read the rest but you are not off to a good start. What has modern to do with systemd?
Read the rest of the paragraph and also the next paragraph if you haven’t yet.
If that didn’t answer your query, do you oppose the following statement found on Gentoo’s wiki:
“systemd is a modern SysV-style init and rc replacement for Linux systems.”
And if so, why?
Not true at all. For one dnf is very solid which is why many organizations like RHEL. Also Fedora has recent packages but still has stability and is willing to test new ideas. They also are very secure.
How does that contradict what I wrote? I even mentioned RHEL…
Fedora sounds like a redditor distro. That’s why I never recommend it
There was a time when I thought about switching to Fedora when I ditch Windows in 2025, but the frequent release schedule of Fedora has made me worried if those updates risk breaking my setup.
It will break a little but I’ve never had anything crazy major. If you are worried either run Linux Mint or update to the next version of Fedora a month after release. Also Fedora doesn’t ever release releases on time.
I consider myself long time noob ;)
Fedora for me because it’s rock solid, has cutting edge software, excellent documentation.
I,ve been updating the same installation more than 15 times i think.
Against: selinux is often overlooked when following guides written for Debian / ubuntu. So sometimes you pull out your hair.
On the other hand. Podman is supposedly the new favorite kid on the block. Fedora is on the front here
Podman, from what I can tell, is the result of people wanting a wishlist of fixes/upgrades from Docker and being met with hostility at the notion.
…redhat.com/…/how-to-run-systemd-in-a-container#e…
Largely true but Red Hat also wanted to control their own cloud / container stack.
Cloud is a big part of why IBM paid so many billions for Red Hat to begin with.
That is not really the case. They are totally separate with different designs. Also podman is way more performant with less overhead. It also runs per user which is nice for least privilege.
Selinux should just work
Never have I ever successfully updated a fedora system. It was always a reinstall.
Really? I have successfully updated for years. Did you use offline upgrades?
I can’t honestly recall or put my finger on it what I did wrong.
Choose fedora because it used my laptop subwoofer and wasn’t a rolling release. I remember each time (x2) reading about how to update the distro and each time my system was completely borked. I went to debian, read upon alsa, made my subwoofer work with a homegrown script and never looked back.
To this day I am wondering if people recommending redhat are trolls or paid.
I’ve been having a tough time with it. Maybe I’m unlucky with my hardware and setup. Spend hours this week recovering from a black screen after upgrading to F40. Issue with Plymouth + Nvidia + Luks at boot. Also getting Nvidia to work on F39, my first install. Secondary computer (laptop) macbook 2017, keyboard doesn’t work with Fedora compared to Linux Mint.
I’d recommend Linux Mint for beginners after my experiences. imho
Nvidia can be a bitch. And it’s unfortunate that Fedora isn’t particularly well known for handling that graciously.
Absolutely fair. FWIW, if you ever feel like giving Fedora another chance, consider doing it through its derivative (i.e. Bazzite).
Thanks for the recommendation, I just installed Bazzite. Had been trialling LMDE but found it frustratingly lacking. No Driver Manager on that edition made NVIDIA drivers a nightmare. Meanwhile that’s handled in Bazzite and it has a shortcut to install Moonlight? Awesome.
You’re welcome 😊!
I agree that Bazzite is very very good. So much so, that it’s the first distro I recommend in person.
Enjoy 😉!
One of these days, I’ll have to give Universal Blue a look for general computing. Bazzite is excellent, but I don’t imagine my MiL is going to care about having Steam and gamescope installed out of the box, should I ever have to do a fresh install for her.
I understand. And to be frank, I agree with you that perhaps it’s too much focused on a particular set of things (i.e. gaming).
There’s also Aurora and Bluefin (see uBlue’s website) for those that seek a very similar experience but without the focused-on-gaming part. The reason I prefer Bazzite over those two is related to Waydroid (i.e. software to run Android (apps) on Linux). However, your mileage may vary.
Finally, uBlue used to dedicate resources and documentation on their base images; i.e. relatively not-opinionated images for Silverblue, Kinoite and Fedora Atomic with basically any desktop environment you could imagine plus hardware enablement. These are perhaps still worth considering. However, personally, I’ve been having a better time on Aurora/Bazzite/Bluefin.
I always forget about Aurora and Bluefin. Thanks for the reminder!
Things should get a lot better with NVIDIA soon in distros like Fedora that want to stick with only open software.
Its not a good noob distro. Its a test bed development distro. There are going to be things in Fedora that are broken on account of those things being in development. I believe there’s a rolling release now which improves the lack of long term releases, but for a long time trying to auto upgrade between point releases was a fast track to the very worst time of your life.
Then there’s the question of whether or not its association with Redhat and IBM makes it a safe choice long term given that they’ve gone full hostile. I just don’t see the benefit to going with Fedora as a noob instead of something designed for noobs like LMDE
I tried it, but Firefox didn’t play some videos. As it turns out, it was an issue with non open source codecs. I’m not helping anyone navigate those issues, I’d rather point them out to a ready to go kind of distribution.
I just tell them to google first thing to do after installing Fedora and say “follow the guide except ‘fastest mirror’ just ignore.” Hasn’t failed anyone yet, and since I didn’t have anyone to help me it is what I did when I was new, except I’ve learned the fastest mirror part since then, so I pass along that knowledge.
Actually I think I may try and write up a script that’ll do all this for them, and make it even easier. I already have like half of it in my “new install” script but they don’t need all my packages.
There are several things like that in Fedora, which is already a good reason not to recommend it to first timers. They most likely won’t know or care about nonfree codecs, they will just see a broken machine. Linux Mint understands that as a use case and has a “magic make it work” checkbox during install.
That all being said, I run Nobara and love it, but i wouldn’t recommend it for new people.
As a daily Fedora user, this is annoying. I totally support the push for open-source, but enabling RPM Fusion on new installs to do standard stuff is a royal pain in the butt that will immediately turn off new users.
I do recommend Fedora. It’s what I started on (besides tails) and after a couple years I’ve moved to FedoraKDE.
Because it can’t hibernate? (But then, not sure which distros can.)
I run Bazzite, which is Fedora Atomic, that hibernates just fine. In fact, so far it’s the only one that does. Arch and Mint both would never come back from sleep.
Been running bazzite for about a month and.ooving it but, for me, it does not wake from sleep ever. Easily the most frustrating thing about switching to Linux so far
Huh. Might be hardware and I got lucky. I do agree that hibernate on Linux is mostly terrible, though I have had plenty of issues with it in Windows too. I think hibernate mostly just sucks
That has not been the case anymore for months. We have 3 different Fedora Workstation 40 computers/laptops and 1 Nobara laptop, and they all sleep and hibernate just fine, and wake up just as well.
Ok.
It’s not an option out if the box for me on Fedora 40 but maybe it’s because I started on 39 and upgraded later.
On my Fedora KDE install on 40, hibernate is now an available power option. The install has been in upgrade cycles since 35 at this point. I would imagine that barring different DEs showing different power options being a possibility, it is more on detecting hardware compatibility for functional hibernation.
Since Fedora 37 I had issues waking up from sleep and hibernation only on my laptop with an NVIDIA card, never on my 2 Ryzen PCs.
Since Fedora 40 it works everywhere now. I’ve always been on Gnome, so that could be a factor as well.
I wouldn’t recommend fedora plain, but the ublue atomic spins are great. Really solid lots of choices (use case, DE, hardware…) personally I use bazzite on the desktop and aurora on the laptop.
Yes, this is my go to nowadays for all my family and friends. Atomic makes it harder for them to break it and everything just works out of the box.
I think I crashed it less than 10 times in 2 years of usage.
Here’s the deal, most people from yesterdays started on Ubuntu or something similar. So, they suggest what worked for them. I just moved my wife away from Windows and straight into Fedora, I haven’t had to help her on anything other than once she could not find the printer (it’s on another VLAN and she was not connected to it 🙄). She is loving it and just last night told me, and I quote, “I should have changed sooner”.
Fedora just works, but another factor may be that Debian and Ubuntu based distros are LTS what le Fedora is more semi-rolling, this helps with stability, thus it makes sense to suggest something with less probability of breaking suddenly than something they may need to roll back.
As for atomic distros, YMMV. I find them sluggish during install, boot and when starting an app for the first time, and in my case, broken after a few updates (would not work on Wayland forcing me to log in over X11).
Curious how your atomic distro broke, since you can
rollbackandrebasepretty easily after a problematic update. I’m running Bazzite on a 10yo laptop, and it’s been great; I even rebased to a completely different DE, then did a rollback when I decided it didn’t work for me.Yeah, I’ve no idea what happened either, as I’m not that smart, lol. I just tend to move away from stuff that breaks easily. I searched a bit around to see if I found anyone else with this issue, but found nothing even remotely similar.
Could be that my hardware is the issue? I was running it on a Gazelle 16 (System76) with an RTX3050Ti. But Fedora Workstation has always worked flawlessly on it.
Weird. I would be interested to know what actually happened, but I am not smart enough to troubleshoot hardware to that degree! At least you found something that works.
I do. Nobara specifically since it has the non-free repos and codecs by default, and a bunch of tweaks for gaming and editing already set up or easily added in the Welcome app.
Because distros from the Debian family are more popular, any random help article aimed at beginners is likely to assume one of those distros. (If you know how to map from
apttorpm, you’re probably not a beginner.) Plus, I don’t trust Red Hat, who have a strong influence on Fedora.(Note that I don’t generally recommend my own distro—Gentoo—to newcomers either, unless they have specific needs best served by it.)
Not implying anything, but why don’t you trust Red Hat? Because they’re a big company, or because of some other reason?
Not the original commenter but Red Hat took steps a few months ago to make it harder to make complete bug-for-bug clones of their Enterprise product ( RHEL ). Basically, they stopped providing the exact build instructions and exact patch sets ( SRPMS ) to their competitors. You now have to jump through more hoops to do it ( like Rocky does ) or you have to fork your own Enterprise distribution from CentOS Stream ( like Alma now does ).
You still get everything you always did as a Red Hat subscriber ( even if you do not pay them — they have a free tier ). All the actual software is still Open Source for everybody ( subscriber or not ) and available free in CentOS Stream and Fedora. Red Hat is still one of the biggest contributors across the Linux ecosystem and, ironically, one of the biggest proponents and providers of GPL software in particular.
However, if you are a Red Hat subscriber and you share the RHEL SRPMS, Red Hat may not renew your subscription. That is their big evil move.
Many people did not like this change and the most extreme detractors have accused Red Hat of betraying Open Source or of even trying to take Linux proprietary. In my view, this is totally wrong. Read my second paragraph.
What many people do not seem to understand is that Red Hat founded the Fedora Project and, much later, the CentOS Stream Project explicitly to be open, community distributions so that they ( Red Hat ) could pursue their commercial interests with RHEL without friction from the community. I say people do not understand because some people now say they do not trust Fedora to stay Open when the entire reason it exists is to be that ( as an explicit strategy of Red Hat ).
One of the things that is annoying ( to me ) about Fedora is that it insists on being completely anti-commercial ( avoiding patented codecs for example ). The idea that Fedora is for businesses or will be “taken over” by IBM is silly. Red Hat employees have always been the biggest contributors to Fedora. It has always been Free ( as in freedom ).
The most extreme damage Red Hat may eventually do to Fedora is to stop paying so many people to work on it and the important packages it relies on. That has not happened and probably will not anytime soon ( in my view ).
Thank you for the history lesson! I can see why their decision might chafe some people or cause them to be a bit more wary (given that many of us live in an end-stage-capitalism hellscape), but as is often the case, real life details are usually mundane.
I’ve personally been impressed by their Atomic distros, and they’ve come a long way since I first tried vanilla Fedora with Gnome many years ago.
Red Hat’s interests often don’t seem to be aligned with those of the average user. The result is that they push for the adoption of software and conventions that make things better for businesses running RHEL, but worse for almost everyone else. This goes back a long way, and makes me question the long-term suitability of any distro Red Hat is involved in for any user who is not paying them for support. It’s the pattern that bothers me, not any single event (and yes, part of that pattern does arise from the fact that they’re a for-profit corporation).
It’s the sort of thing that many people won’t really care about, and if the alternative was Microsoft or even Canonical (which is prone to weird fits of NIH and bad monatization ideas), then fine, I would go with Red Hat. Still, I would recommend a community distro above anything that a corporation has its fingers in.
TBH, Red Hat focusing their attention on business isn’t that problematic for me. RHEL is specifically for businesses, and Red Hat needs to make money to keep operating. Kind of a necessary evil, if you could consider that evil. However, I completely understand why the capitalist realm makes average people squirm.
But that said, I usually prefer community projects myself (Fedora spins included), since they tend to have modified setups that are more in line with what regular users would want or need.
I do, Fedora is simply the best and meets the most use cases. It combines good privacy and security out of the box with a clean UI (at least with Workstation and KDE spin) while having a package manager that’s easy to learn and easy access to Flathub and up-to-date apps (can’t stress this enough, even windows and Mac keep apps up to date and don’t hold them back for the sake of LTS (sorry Workstation Debian fans). It also brings in newer and better technologies without breaking almost anything (at least for me).
This is just my opinion though, I know people like to reccomend Mint but I personally do not like it, and despise it’s desktop options (I am one of the people that do not and never have liked Cinnamon).
I decided the nuclear option using mint with kde plasma 5
Well I did switch to opensuse tumbleweed, liked kde plasma a lot so while setting up weekly backups, I ended up… uh… “overwriting” it and my last external backup was a month old mint backup, so to not set things up again I just install kde on mint and said F it.
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.
People generally recommend Debian-based distributions because they tend to be more popular, have more applications designed first and foremost to work on them, and tend to have the most community support because they are more popular.
This has been my experience. I used Fedora for a while years ago, but rpm was already second fiddle to deb. Plus, I was already selling into my “old man distro” so I kept ending up with some Ubuntu version.
I did recently Manjaro and Linux Mint, but ended up with Ubuntu again, although this time Kubuntu, Ubuntu with KDE!
No shade from me though for going with Red Hat.
Atomic Fedora, like Fedora Kinoite is probably the most noob friendly. Impossible to break.
When the time came to pick which boring old man distro to use, the people who picked and would recommend fedora all got jobs supporting rhel. They don’t have time or energy to devote to computer touching when they get home from their serious business jobs making sure the computer keeps increasing shareholder value.
Fedora is very good.
I am installing fedora kinoite to most of the people I install gnulinux to. All noobs.
No Nvidia driver support. Dealbreaker for most folks folks wanting to run games.
Have you tried Fedora recently or are you stuck in its early Wayland days?
I am not sure what do you mean. I use fedora with Nvidia (it’s a different repo to activate) and my main rig is for gaming… No problem what so ever. Using Fedora since 37, what a smooth ride.
My understanding was that they weren’t included in the ISO and had to be installed manually after the fact.
Just finished moving all 3 of my computers to Fedora and WOW it is so good compared to ubuntu. I was missing out. Everything is working on both AMD and Nvidia, even wayland.
KDE/QT is not OSS
Would you mind elaborating?
I am also genuinely interested in further explanation of this view.
lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/…/040798.html
Things might have changed, but I personally avoid it. GTK is just as good. If you’re a linux newb this might not be good advice, but I’d recommend XFCE if you hate GNOME.
I don’t really undeestand from this mail how is it not open source, but I am not well versed in licenses and technicalities either.
Err
Yes it is? It is in fact FOSS
I tried it when the first one I tried didn’t work out.
Ctrl+C hard locked it instantly every time I pushed it. I could right-click and choose “Copy”, but pushing Ctrl-C just froze whatever image was on screen. No response at all after that. Plus it was giving me a headache trying to get Nvidia drivers installed.
So then I moved to Pop since the correct driver was baked in, and it’s been mostly smooth since.
Fedora is good for people with some knowledge. Think RHEL admins or web developers.
wrong comment. ignore
why would you need anymore knowledge with fedora than with mint or popos? it has simple and easy to use installer, and everything just works.
You need to use the command line more often and occasionally something breaks
I’m a big fan personally. I an experimenting more with OpenSUSE’s distro including microOS but that not because of Fedora but more so I want to recommend options that are easy to scale into FOSS professionally for people too and unfortunately RedHat no longer offers that path for Fedora users.
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 have never touched Linux/GNU and I installed Linux after the Microsoft recall and when with standard workstation (GNOME) as a dual boot. After the first two weeks reinstalled fedora over top of windows and haven’t looked back.
That was 2 months ago and and having no issues even gaming on my machine works great.
Back when I moved over to linux I wanted to get away from the mainstream. Fedora/Red Hat were too mainstream for me at the time but I have never had any real objections to it. I eventually ended up settling on Debian and ever since then i’ve stuck with descendants of that distro because having the same toolchains of software as Debian makes transitioning distros slightly easier.
Unfortunately boring distributions don’t get recommended because users of boring distributions don’t bother commenting on distribution discussions.
And it’s really unfortunate that obscure distributions have more vocal fans, because boring distributions are much better for beginners.
Ironically this is how I feel about Arch, for me it’s worked flawlessly for years.
I don’t bother getting in ‘discussions’ about using it, because if other people have problems I’m not going to convince them that I don’t.
It’s mostly the installation and initial setup that’s a pain on arch, so definitely not a beginner distro, but very good nonetheless
Yeah totally, I think to use Arch successfully you need an opinion about what your system needs, and that takes experience with using Linux.
Installation is pretty trivial these days with the install script
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.
There are couple of concerns and how Fedora Workstation is designed for… well, development workstation. There is SELinux, that sometimes gets in a way, now they ditched codecs with loyalties by default, some default configs are a bit controversial and maybe not perfectly suited for home computer and non-tech savvy users, 3rd party packages are sometimes lacking and when you want to go beyond what’s in stock repo and rpmfusion, you can even break the system by installing random COPR packages (I mean AUR is not a whole lot better, but is more complete and less needed given how much there is to stock repos, PPAs are just as bad) or end up compiling stuff manually. But I still think that Fedora can be pretty nice for many people out of the box.
Fedora isn’t a beginner distribution
I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.
It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.
If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.
But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.
The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.
There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.
I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.
I have always wondered what advance is when ppl say Linux is difficult when you have to do something advance. Isn’t that the same for all oses? A os no matter what os (mac, android, Windows, iOS, linux) is difficult to use the first time. It doesn’t matter witch os it is everyone will have a hard time the first time until they learn how it works. Mac for example, it was extremely hard for me to find how to get to my root folder without using the terminal and when I told a friend about it who use mac didn’t they know either… I found out by accidently by miss clicking. Android depending on brand (what you had before) can also be annoying to use the first week or weeks until you have relearned.
Linux is the same, it isn’t more advance than windows or Mac the first time, it is all about learning how it works (most ppl build their Ikea furniture first and then read the manual) and windows and Linux in that regard is at least kinda similar because they don’t hide stuff as mac os does (you still ned a lot of knowledge to use windows too) and they are kinda alike, Mac is completely backwards in my opinion. I think everyone forgets how it was the first year they used a computer for the first time. Ppl laugh when studies shows that the younger generation do not know or do not understand the folder structure. It is all about experience and knowledge, if you know something exist then it is easier to find it.
The biggest problem i had using Linux for the first time was finding good alternatives for programs. And learning these new programs. You don’t have to use a terminal with most distros now days but it is a very nice and fast interface to use. It is also easier for everyone to learn and use because it is less dependent on what kind of environment you are in.
But I think we both are kinda agreeing with each other I just want to point out that all os are difficult the first time and you don’t have to make it harder than it is, linux is beginner friendly just like any other os.
What makes a beginner distribution and why isn’t fedora one?
Fedora has been my default choice for non-techies in my family the last couple of years and it has been glorious!
All they need is a browser with uBlock, maybe an email reader and LibreOffice. With Silverblue, eveything updates automatically, and upgrades between major versions is a one-click operation. Easy rollback gives me peace of mind.
All they need to know is where the Super key is located on the keyboard. When pressed, it shows the dock with all apps they use and all open windows. Double-tap the Super key and you see all apps, but that is usually not necessary.
I also use the built in remote desktop feature (RDP) in conjunction with a Wireguard connection to my home network. So nice and a joy to never have to fight teamviewer again 😝
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 typically run fedora kde, both server and desktop. I’ve a laptop using hyprland which is great once you remember all the shortcuts you’ve setup, but fedora kde is worth its weight.
Because SE Linux drove me bonkers once and I am petty.