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by ceinewydd 761 days ago
Best for what, and for whom? Just saying “Best Distro” feels like an extraordinary claim.

To give two examples of where it might not be best — running Fedora on a server, or running Fedora on a workstation where you need long-term stability and support for running CAD/CAM or CFD software which doesn’t play nicely with major OS changes every few months.

4 comments

Fedora does have a Server flavor that has all the nice default settings you hope for in a server/headless environment.

But on long-running machines (i.e. not containers or temporary boxes) I concur. I use either RHEL or AlmaLinux for those. But given that RHEL and AlmaLinux are based on Fedora, I don't really consider them to be different. Everything you know and love from Fedora (for the most part) will be the same there. For example most of my setup scripts I write for Fedora work without change on AlmaLinux, and package names, config files, etc are very (though not entirely) consistent.

Software like CAD/CAM is indeed a lot more painful on Fedora, although IMHO that has basically been solved by distrobox. For softare like that that wants a specific Ubuntu version or whatever, I just install it in a distrobox and export it back to the host. My biggest complaint is that it usually works so well that I sometimes forget it's inside a distrobox :-)

What is the problem with cad/cam and cfd software? Is it just horribly packaged?
> support for running [...] software which doesn’t play nicely with major OS changes every few months

Half-kidding, this is a normal experience for people with macbooks coming from macos, ie updating the os and praying that all software will be working properly after. So it is probably not such a big deal in this case.

You can put off upgrading for a year. Fedora N gets updates until Fedora N+2 is released.