I felt the same way with Ubuntu. It was so frustrating. I was also considering moving to Debian or Fedora but a few years ago I ended up cracking the shits with Ubuntu and installed Mint for my daily driver just to finally move on and I've loved Mint and never felt that friction that makes me want to try other distros. I was originally intending to use Mint as a stop gap until I could be bothered with Fedora oops lol

It's got sane defaults with great configurability, and the familiarity (and popularity) that comes worth being Ubuntu based helps, of course. It has been great for me and all the people IRL who I have encouraged to install it.

Give Fedora a try! If you already know a bit about Linux configuration and are not afraid of the terminal, as it's a tiny bit more hands on and blank than Ubuntu.

I switched about two years ago and it's the best Linux experience I've ever had and I do regret not trying sooner. No bloat at all. DNF is awesome. Flatpak > snap. The release cycle is a nice compromise. Really, I am in fucking love!

When I was younger, hands on felt like a good thing (we kinda had no options) and it let to learning a lot.

But, for desktop and being productive, specially now a days, the least I want is to be hands on with my system.

I kinda want something that’s mostly out of the way. Heck, when looking at platforms, depending on scale, I prefer something opinionated to something that lets me shoot myself on the foot 30k different ways.

It’s not that I don’t want to be able to tune it. It’s just that if I need to spend hours on that tweaking vs using it, there’s eventually a loss. I’m also not saying something that can’t be tweaked, just that if it has a set of best practices, let’s start with those vs trying to rewrite it all.

Fedora is not "hands on" at all in that sense. It's just not a complete Linux beginner distro in my opinion.

I did try it a couple times in the past, it just never quite felt like home. I don't know why, I couldn't give you an objective reason as to why I didn't like it. I probably should give it another try soon.

Once a debian... Also we've seen what Red Hat/IBM did with CentOS, they might pull something similar to Fedora, It's unlikely which make it very appealing for IBM

> they might pull something similar to Fedora

I don't think they could actually do that. They provide funding for Fedora's infra, but they don't make up the majority of contributors, and if you read through the actual governence model (note that the higher up the group, the less power it seems to have — the Fedora Council or whatever basically only exists to solve disputes that bubble up from lower, entirely community run and elected, groups), while Red Hat does have some influence/positions, they have far, far less power than the community just by numbers and also by who controls various things, and everything is also done by consensus to boot, so Red Hat couldn't just unilaterally change how Fedora works. At best they could withdraw funding (making Fedora less well-tested) and their people on the governing bodies, but it wouldn't amount to much. And Fedora is upstream from Red Hat Linux and CentOS and provides them with an utterly massive amount of labor and testing they couldn't hope to achieve on their own that they get by virtue of it being FOSS, so it would be a pure harm to them to shut Fedora down or make it closed even if they could, whereas the story is very different with CentOS and RHEL.

Agreed. The IBM acquisition of Red Hat, then the CentOS 8 (and onwards) shenanigans have made that entire Linux family unworkable to me personally.

Debian seems to be the remaining major family, and looks "good enough" to me. :)

Did using CentOS Stream screw you or you're just complaining for nothing?

I've been using fedora for the last year and a half and been enjoying it much more then when I gave it a try 9 years ago.

Not only did it get much needed improvements everywhere, but software availability has improved by a lot. The official repos has more software available than it used to and flatpak helps compliment it a bunch. But what sealed the deal was using distrobox to easily create containers based on any popular distros that integrate almost seamlessly with your user/session. There are gotchas and it's not meant for more casual users, but you can have pretty much any software available from other distros to supplant missing stuff on fedora.

Also RPM Fusion helps easily skirt over any copyright restricted software. It's fairly easy to install the full set of hardware accelerated video codecs for your hardware this way.

I guess, it's in a way boring and unexciting. Very in the middle of things. It's a "get things done" experience for me.

To each their own but I find Fedora upgrade cycle is just a bit too tight for my preference. Properly planned you can get away with yearly but it still feels like I'm due for a dist upgrade every few months.

I'm curious to try out Silverblue, though, where this shouldn't be an issue in the same way.

From personal experience, so far there haven't been any problems with dist-upgrades. Apart from DNF messing up bash/fish completions once, which was an easy fix.

Mind you, Fedora uses BTRFS by default, which means you could also easily do an incremental snapshot before any upgrade.

That's kind of the thing for me, though: Fedora is a very up-to-date, yet very reliable experience for me. It feels, functionally, almost as bleeding edge as Arch, but with much, much less tinkering and worries about upgrades. And again, DNF is my new favorite package manager. Incredibly powerful, but as intuitive as apt. (Whereas pacman is constant suffering, for me.) Check out the `dnf history` command, how neat is that?

Tho, I love Gnome and having the newest developments available is a huge factor for me personally.

Also, Ubuntu and Debian tend to do come with configuration decisions, which are somewhat unique. Eg. Arch-Wiki (best Linux documentation of any distro IMO) seems to be more often applicable with Fedora for me, since its more conforming to overall Linux developments and vanilla systemd. But that's mostly a feeling.

However, the whole licensing limitations and RPMFusion repo shitshow, are why I don't recommend Fedora to absolute beginners. Some common needs are not addressed in a friendly GUI way, yet, and require understanding of Linux internals. Fedora is a bit too raw for beginners, but perfect for programmers and sysadmins. Oh, and if you do updates through Gnome Software, it asks you to reboot, more often than Windows. Not a good first Linux impression.

Edit: I used "for me" too much, guess I wanted to indicate, I absolutely see how it's not for everyone and your objections are totally valid.

Why wouldn't you be able to upgrade yearly? N-1 is always supported until the next release so at worst you do a double upgrade once a year. Only 2 reboots are needed.

Anyway for personal systems I don't see the issue with upgrading every 6 months. The process isn't much different than regular updates. If you are wary of issues you can always delay the dist-upgrade of a few weeks so that any quirk not detected during beta is solved after feedback from the early adopters.

I have 2 personal laptops, one on silverblue, one on regular release with data synced. One shared laptop that is mostly used by my daughters, also on silverblue, and my professional laptop on regular fedora. I usually upgrade my 2 personal laptops on release week. The shared one however is only updated some weeks later because this is the lowest maintenance one and my professional laptop is usually upgraded the last, it usually stays in N-1 until the next release enter beta.

I moved to Fedora (Xfce spin) for that exact reason and I've been incredibly happy for the last ~2 years.

The last straw for me was the calculator app being a snap. I was frenetically working on a thing, and suddenly opening the calculator app took ~15 seconds. Looked deeper into that, it (suddenly) was a fucking snap. Ubuntu developers had decided it was a good idea to mount a 500+ megabytes layer full of gtk shit in order to run the calculator. A fucking 600kb binary. And I was running a gtk based desktop environment anyway (xfce).

Nowadays I run Fedora on laptops (or systems where I prefer software abundance to stability) and Rocky Linux (basically RHEL without logos) on my home server.

I've kept myself far from Ubuntu and GNOME and stuff works and I'm happy.

I went to Mint (and Fedora on a machine that needed newer packages).

Now that the LTS has been updated, probably all machines can use Mint again.

I also moved from Ubuntu to Mint, and from GNOME to MATE. Been very happy.

The only time I got annoyed at Mint was when they recently changed the default mouse pointer into something that looks like a deformed marshmallow. So instead of a pixel at the end of the pointer, we get a fat finger. I don't understand the UX mentality that thought that this was a good idea.

It's easy enough to change, but every now and then, something clobbers my UI settings and I have to remember how to change it back to the mouse pointer that actually works as a pointer.

I totally agree, used to use Ubuntu Mate, presumably because I didn’t want to deal with constant regressions. But it kept deteriorating.

I personally use the DMZ White cursor theme which used to be a common choice, but is surprisingly hard to find these days. Not even packaged in Debian*. CADT strikes again.

Mint always has a bit of a delay before their version of the LTS system comes out.

That's fine. I wouldn't install the source Ubuntu the first month either, as others have mentioned issues in other threads.

True. I was also surprised to read that the Ubuntu upgrade route from 22.04 to 24.04 won't be supported until the 24.04.1 release in august, which goes to show that the initial release is perhaps not the most stable..

The major downside (for me) was Debian not supporting ZFS on root out of the box. :(

Now toying with the idea of using Proxmox on my main development system (R5950x desktop), as Proxmox is based upon Debian 12 and supports ZFS on root mirrored (and RAIDZ* too if desired) across multiple devices.

Would need to figure out PCI pass through for my Nvidia graphics card though. Probably do-able, but it's an unknown factor presently.

Why not try PopOs? They don't ship with snap.

As someone that loves the cozy feeling of application sandboxing, I embrace snaps.

Firejail gives more control over the boundaries of the sandbox. So deb + firejail seems superior to snaps to me from a security perspective.