As a Fedora user, I find it more polished than Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint (the other distros I've used). Newcomers shouldn't be dissuaded by this "bleeding edge" description.
Wow, I always found Fedora to be awful - it used to be the selinux crashes on a vanilla install on first login and the disgusting font rendering, and now it's the unusable default gnome interface (so bad Red Hat made a shitty gnome 2 clone for enterprize customers).
I guess on some level we just prefer what we're used to.
But I seriously wonder about people who run Fedora desktops though. I installed Fedora 36 two days ago to try it again, and it's unusable. The scaling options are 100%, 200%, 300%, and 400%. I have a 43" 4k screen, so around 120dpi. 100% is too small, 200% is way too big. And gnome settings doesn't even have font size options. What the fuck.
That's fair. More scaling options would be nice. I've never had Fedora crash, but I buy hardware with Linux compatibility in mind. It even worked well with a weird Thunderbolt 3 external display setup I have, the same setup makes macOS crash consistently if I connect it under certain conditions.
X11 handles font scaling just fine. It has since the 1990's.
It's not suprising if some level of indirection on top of it broke it in some environments though. Perhaps it has something to do with gnome 3? It works with gnome 2, kde, and all the minimalist window managers I've tried.
None of those try to "scale framebuffer" though, whatever that means. If it means what it sounds like, whoever implemented it is incompetent.
Yeah, the default scaling options are unacceptable. I was able to work around it by installing GNOME Tweaks (absolutely bonkers that this isn't installed by default) and changing the font scaling factor, but until I did that my 4k monitor was really hard to use.
The font size setting is hidden under the "GNOME Tweak Tool". The good news is that over the last couple releases, the GNOME settings have improved bit by bit and now also include some things that also used to be hidden in the Tweak Tool.
Fedora 36 is still in beta. Wayland fractional scaling is an experimental feature. Have you tried the "large text" option in Settings -> Accessibility?
Fedora switched to Wayland a release of two ago, which produces frequent errors on surprisingly many hardware configs (none of my Intel or Nvidia (i)gpu machines are stable under it). Means I had to switch away. Opensuse has become my new refuge, which has packages generally as current as Fedora, but a Q&A process that prevents things like Wayland from becoming the default prematurely.
I just don't want to upgrade every 6 months is all. I stick to popos/ubuntu LTS for daily drivers and arch when I want to be cutting edge. Fedora is in some strange middle ground to me.
I used to burden myself by reinstalling the OS with every new update, because I wanted a clean OS I reasoned. Eventually I stopped worrying and it hasn't been a problem. I'm still open to doing a fresh install if something goes wrong. I still back up my data knowing that the OS or the hardware can die any time.
To update to the latest Fedora versions I run a shell command and 30 minutes later I have the new version and I can hardly tell the difference.
I've been waiting for mine to break after my last fresh install on Fedora 27 (when i got an SSD for the first time). I'm on Fedora 36 now and it's been fine. I've been waiting for a new computer to do the next fresh install.
I think Fedora release is officially supported for 13 months, which allows one to upgrade every other release, or be a release behind at all times, if desired.
They seem to do go a good job updating major components for latest-1 release: kernel, Firefox, etc.
However, I noticed that say Chromium updates are not as fast or at latest version. So using Fedora that way might not be best choice.
What I found working (although I haven't been using fedora for quite a few years now) is to skip a release if possible. Only when it seemed the N+2 is still too broken I upgraded to N+1.
"Leading-edge" would be more exact description of Fedora. They are somewhere in between bleeding-edge distributions and stable distributions (like Debian).