Dangerous opinion, I’ve recently moved to Fedora after Ubuntu and after customising it on the GNOME desktop, it’s literally Ubuntu (But better) in every way except no snaps.
Personally as someone who got the ground running using Ubuntu as my 1st Linux distro, fedora is a comfortable transfer and I really like their spins.
Sure DNF can be slow but you can fix that and sure redhat can be a little… difficult with their decisions.
What do you think of Fedora? So far I enjoy the stability combined with near-arch levels of getting new updates!
I wouldn’t call it a dangerous opinion, Ubuntu is a great starter distro and was probably top dog back then, it is just that their recent actions have been not liked by the Linux community.
I personally fell in love with opensuse tumbleweed w/ kde 6, but I do want to give fedora a try at some point as well.
Fedora is not Red Hat per se, it is upstream. Red Hat is a few things in different spaces. For one is is a great source of documentation. Secondly, a sizable chunk of kernel code is developed and maintained by Red Hat. They are known for their zero down time kernel updating system among other things.
Fedora is excellent. However, it is very different than Ubuntu by design. Fedora is primarily useful for entry level users that intend on only running software that is regularly kept up to date and maintained. You will start running into problems with software that is not kept up to date. There are relatively easy tools like distrobox, toolbox, and podman that can run most software regardless. The exception to this comes with the GPU. If you are running a GPU, you’re likely getting updates in Fedora with will break your older projects entirely. This is because Fedora is constantly updating the Linux kernel. Fedora is pushing out these updates constantly and looking for problems that might pop up. These issues get fixed and down stream to Red Hat to make it rock solid.
Ubuntu is based on a much longer term stability with even longer term LTS versions. This means the kernel and dependencies are frozen in time at a specific state. If you want to write some custom package that never gets broken when a dependency is updated, Ubuntu is the goto distro. You must be aware that, on Ubuntu, the native packages are largely out of date. You can add a ppa to the sources list in aptitude so that you get the latest packages, but these should be used only in special cases. If you want to be up to date, use the proper distro for the task.
This context is more important for servers where you want to deploy a project using a bunch of apps and packages. Once it is working, it should stay working for however long the LTS kernel is supported.
Fedora updates the kernel because maintaining backports is engineering-intensive, Ubuntu backports fixes into their kernels. I don’t think Fedora kernels affect Red Hat much at all, Red Hat does extensive back porting into a set version and their stable kernel often has hundreds of releases of the “same” kernel version.
What do you think of Fedora? So far I enjoy the stability combined with near-arch levels of getting new updates!
I switched away from other distros to Fedora (KDE spin), and am happy here.
Do I wish they were better open-source citizens, yes, of course! But they’re still allot better than Microsoft/Windows close-source solution.
And as far as the distro goes, its nice to have solid support for hardware, and a good rolling release cycle that doesn’t brick my OS, and that has quick support for gaming, etc.
If you’re the type of person who wants a Windows alternative OS to use as just a tool for gaming/business first and foremost, and not to tinker with the OS for fun (unless they want to), Fedora is the best, and what we all should be proposing to others when they ask about moving to Linux.
I’ve been using fedora since 2016 and love it. Switched to the KDE spin 2-3 years ago and love that even more. It’s the right balance of fully-fledged OS while still letting me tinker. I don’t have time for Arch-level setup BS, and distros like Mint and Manjaro and Ubuntu felt too clunky and restrictive to me.
I’m happy with it except for the inability to hibernate out of the box. Same for most distros though I think?
