I’ve recently converted two people from Windows to Linux with Fedora Kinoite. One of them has been using it for maybe two months now without a single issue and the other just started using it with positive first impressions. I find it very modern, simple, and familiar. The atomic system just works too. I enjoy it much more than Mint
I’ve actually tried Zorin and was really impressed! My favorite use of GNOME I’ve seen for sure. Though it’s technically Ubuntu based (which is Debian based).
I tried the prealpha and it’s missing a few things I want (they’re WIP). I’d suggest checking out some Youtube videos of it, and not to expect too much, as it’s still not there imo.
I put my tech illiterates on Fedora with GNOME without issue. If you’re the one doing the installation and can install the RPMFusion stuff like drivers and codecs then yeah it’s pretty smooth sailing.
I had a similar experience on my laptop. I tried Ubuntu which broke after trying to throw on Nvidia drivers (using the official docs). I tried Mint and Debian, both of which couldn’t detect my laptop’s wifi card (after hours of trying to fix - apparently a common issue but the fixes did not work for me!). I landed on Fedora, worked great. I’m now on EndeavourOS, but Fedora was the stepping stone I needed.
My desktop I built recently is Bazzite, which is Fedora based and I love it.
I’m probably going to get downvoted for this but I’m a Linux noob overall…. Windows has historically been what I’ve used. Or Ubuntu. I did distrohop to antixLinux and other really super small distros, but they didn’t fix my problems and I ended up back on relatively bloaty Ubuntu for further testing and sadly it solved bout a third of my problems (the hardware is ancient enterprise shit with a whopping 4gb ram and 16 usb ports)
I’ve been looking for a Debian based system to replace Ubuntu because I’m a noob and Debian-based is super different from the fedora.
I’m sure fedora is great! Tons of people love it! But for a noob is can be really daunting. Especially when most Linux instructions come in three flavors “Ubuntu/debian” and 2 other things. Who knows which two. You, the advanced Linux user, probably know which two but your noob doesn’t. And doesn’t understand the difference.
I’m not a total noob but I prefer Debian because I know a person who gets Debian and can help me. If I knew a fedora user that was actually willing to help me, I’d use that, but I’ve never met one so I’ll stick with what I know.
I haven’t tried those, but I did hop a bit on a bad hard drive. mint was too much (also o just hate it, tbh). Antixlinux was too much and that’s meant to run off a flash drive so the drive was failing, and now it isn’t (new 15 year old drive!!!) and Ubuntu is still a bit too much. But it runs a web browser which is all I need for a bedroom media device. I’d like more, but it’s enough.
But since then I’m seeking a different end goal. I was looking to optimize that old pos, but now if it just runs a browser and runs Plex web, I’m happy because it’s so old I can’t expect it to download for me… it can do, but not well and I have other machines for that. I tried to use it as a download device but lol, nope, can’t handle that many p2p connections on 4g ram.
But I’ll try those on flash drives and see what they can do for me! Thanks for the recommend!
That’s why I don’t swap for fedora. That’s the kind of help you tend to get unless you know someone who knows the distro, so I guess thanks for exemplifying :)
The distros that everybody builds off of are Debian, Fedora,Arch, and maybe SUSE ( common roots with Fedora but long ago ).
I did not mention Ubuntu as Ubuntu is actually built from Debian but actually Ubuntu is the most popular and is itself used as a base by other distros ( most notably Mint ).
If you are looking for an Ubuntu alternative, Debian is the most similar. However, pure Debian is not as new user friendly.
Arch is considered an advanced distro. I think Fedora and its derivatives are solid choices.
If you are really running on a system with only 4 GB of RAM, I would actually recommend trying out a 32 bit distro. The 32 bit version of AntiX or the 32 bit version of Q4OS with the Trinity desktop are the two I would recommend.
I was recently reminded of Adelie Linux though and have been meaning to try it on an old system myself: www.adelielinux.org/about/
I quite often recommend the atomic flavors of Fedora to people and have it set up for a few people (my mother for example). I think atomic distributions are perfect for tech unsavory people, because they can’t really damage anything and it mimics/reproduces lots of the things they are already used from their phones.
Yep, though the dpkg ecosystem also had more inertia than the rpm ecosystem did. Before Flatpak existed, pretty much everything that was packaged for Linux had a .deb file for it, but the same wasn’t true for rpm. So people who didn’t want to package shit themselves flocked to the Debian-based ecosystem. But these days we have Flatpaks and everything moved to the browser, so it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.
Why does nobody here ever recommend Fedora to noobs?
It does happen. It’s simply not the popular choice for the following reasons:
Fedora and its predecessors were until relatively recently simply more cumbersome in use compared to Debian and Ubuntu;
There was a time (like at least over 10 years ago) in which package managers didn’t necessarily know how to resolve dependencies. However, Debian’s package manager at the time did it earlier than the package manager found on Fedora’s predecessor. Hence, this was a clear reason to prefer Debian or Ubuntu over Fedora('s predecessor).
Freezing packages and offering stable releases with two years of support (like Debian does), has been and continues to be a very pleasant way to run your Linux OS. That’s why, even in the past, Fedora’s slower cousin (i.e. CentOS) was very popular (though being RHEL clone didn’t hurt either). Fedora, on the other hand, offers a semi-rolling release cycle of 6 months with only 13 months of support since release. With semi-rolling release, I refer to the fact that some packages are frozen and some are not frozen. Hence, you should expect daily updates. Access to the latest and greatest software is great. However, every update is a possible cause/reason for something to bork/break on your system. It’s therefore unsurprising that some prefer the predictability found on other distros. Though, for the sake of completeness, one has to mention that Fedora Atomic does a great job at tackling this problem; especially the uBlue projects.
A couple of years back, Fedora switched in quick succession to systemd, Wayland and GTK4. Thankfully, I didn’t experience this for myself. But, from what I could gather, it was a mess. Users, perhaps rightfully so, questioned Fedora’s decision-making. While Fedora wasn’t particular loved, this didn’t help to retain new users, nor did it help to cultivate a trusted environment.
Due to the previous reason, Fedora has not particularly been a very popular distro. Hence, troubleshooting your issues through Google is less straightforward compared to Linux Mint or Ubuntu. Additionally, as Fedora’s user base has primarily been more experienced users compared to the ones found on Linux Mint or Ubuntu, it’s unsurprising to find less discussion on elementary stuff. Simply by virtue of Fedora’s user base already being past that.
Fedora, like Debian and openSUSE, offers a relatively bare bones experiences. It does make a lot of sane decisions for you. However, it doesn’t focus on being particularly GUI-friendly or newbie-friendly. By contrast, distros like Bazzite, Linux Mint, Manjaro, MX Linux, Nobara, Pop!_OS and Zorin OS (amongst others), do put thought and effort into streamlining the experience as much as they can; especially for newer users.
While Fedora is primarily community-driven, Red Hat’s influence is undeniable. As such, people that hate corporate interest and/or Red Hat and/or IBM will favor the use of Arch and Debian.
Having said all of that, I’ve been using Fedora Atomic for over two years now. Heck, Silverblue was my first distro. And it has been excellent so far. Furthermore, with Bazzite (based on Fedora Atomic) and Nobara (based on Fedora) often mentioned in conversations regarding beginner friendly distros, even if Fedora itself isn’t explicitly mentioned, the ecosystem is clearly healthy and will continue to flourish.
Yeah, package manager is a big one. Many of us got burned by rpm’s early on and just avoided all rpm-based distros since then.
Of course as you say that hasn’t been a problem for over 10 years but the scars haven’t gone away.
I’d only recommend Ubuntu to someone if I knew they knew some else using Ubuntu (so I could tell them to hassle that person instead of me when they have problems).
Otherwise, I’d absolutely recommend Fedora, because it’s actually up to date unlike Debian. I use it myself because it tends to have the best of what the open source community has to offer while not needing constant tweaking
Kinoite shows the future of noob Linux I think, but it’s still new and has some rough edges. I installed it on an ARM and couldn’t make it wake up from sleep.
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