[afiori]

> To me most of the bad reputation of desktop linux seemed to come from people refusing to use Ubuntu for demented reasons...

My experience is completely different. I spent 7-8 years using linux on a laptop about 4 of those using either ubuntu or derivatives, my experience was that after about 6 months it was time to reinstall the OS.

Since I have installed fedora and it has been the most stable and resilient system I have ever used, I have also been treating it badly as an experiment (like powering off randomly if my 50 reddit tabs where causing too much lag) and it has no problems at all.

Currently I am using mostly my office laptop with debian and it has the same issues as ubuntu.

From my point of view I cannot understand why fedora is not more popular.

[the_af]

Reinstalling every 6 months? Why on earth?

I'm still using Ubuntu 16.04, which I think I might have reinstalled once (after I upgraded to an SSD, so it doesn't really count), and dragging my feet about upgrading because it simply works marvelously and I don't like change. It does everything I want, coding, watching movies, gaming.

[afiori]

I believe that, we probably did something subtly different.

I am not saying ubuntu is bad, but it was not a good fit for me

[Myrmornis]

When I used to maintain a linux machine about 10 years ago, upgrading the kernel was a huge pain on a fedora system (basically required reinstalling the entire OS IIRC) but could be done using the package manager on ubuntu and thus was incomparably less painful. Has this difference gone away?

[afiori]

I never directly did that, my experience was that major version upgrades on ubuntu rarely were painless and on fedora they mostly worked.