Linux

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

Never have I ever successfully updated a fedora system. It was always a reinstall.

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

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.

Fedora sounds like a redditor distro. That's why I never recommend it

Fedora has no selling point at all besides being similar to RHEL.

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.

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.

Long-time Fedora user here. I do not think Fedora is noob friendly at all.

• Their installer is awful
• Their spins are really well hidden for people who don't know they exist
• The Nvidia drivers can't be installed via the GUI
• There's no "third party drivers" tool at all
• The regular Flathub repo is not the default and their own repo is absolutely useless
• AMD/Intel GPUs lack hardware acceleration for H264 and H265 out of the box, adding them requires the console
• Their packages are consistently named differently than their Ubuntu/Debian counterpart

I really like Fedora for their newish packages without breaking constantly. I still would not recommend it for beginners.

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.

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.

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