[Daegalus]

I've honestly started suggesting Fedora over anything Debian/Ubuntu based. Ubuntu stability has gotten worse and worse over time, and their approach to software package management has gotten kind of crazy with Snaps.

I usually recommend Fedora for stability and up to date packages. And this is someone that has used Ubuntu since 4.04 and recently a ton of Arch/Manjaro usage. I have personally switched to Fedora with how little fiddling i need to do and how stable everything is, and things just work. If you want to go Arch, I recommend EndeavorOS for that.

I would recommend PopOS as a 2nd option after Fedora though, its the better distro of the Debian descendents.

[lproven]

Um... there wasn't a 4.04? The first release was Warty Warthog, 4.10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#Ubuntu_...

I find it interesting that you say that, though, if only because Warty is when I personally moved from SUSE to Ubuntu, and I've never seen any reason to switch. My occasional trials of Fedora seem to have drawn the reverse conclusion to you.

* There are no stable releases. For boxes I work on, I want something slow-changing and stable. For boxes I experiment with, I want something fairly fast-moving and agile. For me, the LTS/short-term split is perfect for that.

* Ubuntu is more pragmatic about proprietary drivers and so on. Fedora makes it a pain.

* Ubuntu's 3rd party driver support is the best in the industry, AFAICT.

So I am curious to know in what ways you find Fedora better than Ubuntu.

[Daegalus]

You are correct, 4.10. it's been a while and I forget which month Warty was.

For me, Ubuntu has too many old packages, so it's too unchanging. The 6 month span is plenty for stability for me.

To me stability revolves around stuff breaking between updates, or installing packages causing incompatibilities that eventually degrade the system. I had a lot of that with Manjaro.

While Ubuntu has little of that, it's also too safe, too behind. There were so many times I needed a slightly newer version than what Ubuntu offered, so I would need to hunt for PPAs, manually maintain Deb files, or find other means of keeping stuff up to date. My sources.list.d would be littered with extra repos.

Fedora is a lot more up to date, their repositories are a lot more filled out. I found stuff in the repos that is not in the Ubuntu repos. They are usually fairly up to date, or at most x.x.1 behind kind of thing.

* 2 years is too old. Might be stable but outdated.

* I have had no problems with proprietary drivers. Most of my machines are amd GPUs, but I have a Nvidia 2070 laptop that works fine. Just installed from dnf and it works.

* I haven't hit any 3rd party driver needs. Printers, PC components, accessories. They all work fine without third party drivers. But it could also be because Fedora has a more up to date kernel.

Anyways, I value a balance of up to date software, stability, and just getting out of the way. Which Fedora, especially Fedora 36 that I'm using, does better than Ubuntu and it's derivatives do.

I will say, I just recently switched to Fedora after last trying it many years ago and hating it. I had a bit of hate for the RPM world since old Red Hat Linux days before I made the jump to Ubuntu. So it might be a honeymoom phase, but I'm so much happier with Fedora than the Debian based ecosystem.

[lproven]

OK, fair enough. Thanks for the info!

I write about this stuff for a living these days, so I am trying to widen the range of distros that I try, that I use, and to learn more about why people choose particular ones.

[Daegalus]

Totally fair, and I appreciate you asking with an open mind. I have nothing strong against Ubuntu or any debian/ubuntu derivatives. Its still a good distro to recommend.

Also Fedora relies a lot on Flatpaks for most desktop software, so the repos only come into play for command-line tools or something more system related or if you want a native copy of something. Like Discord, Slack, Element, etc are all flatpaks on my install.

Then tools like exa, ripgrep, and so on come from Fedora repos or `asdf` if not in the repos or if i temporarily need a fix in a latest version that is a bit behind in Fedora.

For everyday users, the difference isnt huge if they want to word process, browse the web, play some games, print stuff, get some photos off a camera, etc.

I think in the end I just wanted something between Ubuntu and a rollign release system like Arch or even Suse Tumbleweed.

[Daegalus]

Also, I just realized who I'm talking with, loved your article/presentation on "Starting Over".

[lproven]

:-D Thank you very much!

[MonaroVXR]

I don't suggest Fedora, since it's more advanced. (I might get shot saying this...) Difficult where I need to start.