I have tried Linux as a DD on and off for years but about a year ago I decided to commit to it no matter the cost. First with Mint, then Ubuntu and a few others sprinkled in briefly. Both are “mainstream” “beginner friendly” distros, right? I don’t want anything too advanced, right?
Well, ubuntu recently updated and it broke my second monitor (Ubuntu detected it but the monitor had “no signal”). After trying to fix it for a week, I decided to wipe it and reinstall. No luck. I tried a few other distros that had the same issue and I started to wonder if it was a hardware issue but I tried a Windows PC and the monitor worked no problem.
Finally, just to see what would happen I tried a distro very very different than what I’m used to: Fedora (Kinode). And not only did everything “just work” flawlessly, but it’s so much faster and more polished than I ever knew Linux to be!
Credit where it’s due, a lot of the polish is due to KDE plasma. I’d never strayed from Gnome because I’m not an expert and people recommend GNOME to Linux newbies because it’s “simple” and “customizable” but WOW is KDE SO MUCH SIMPLER AND STILL CUSTOMIZEABLE. Gnome is only “simple” in that it doesn’t allow you to do much via the GUI. With Fedora Kinode I think I needed to use the terminal maybe once during setup? With other distros I was constantly needed to use the terminal (yes its helped me learn Linux but that curve is STEEP).
The atomic updates are fantastic too. I have not crashed once in the two weeks of setup whereas before I would have a crash maybe 1-2 times per week.
I am FULLY prepared for the responses demanding to know what I did to make it crash and telling me how I was using it wrong blah blah blah but let me tell you, if you are experienced with Windows but want to learn Linux and getting frustrated by all the “beginner” distros that get recommended, do yourself a favor and try Fedora Kinode!
edit: i am DYING at the number of “you’re using it wrong” comments here. never change people.
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Fedora is good for people with some knowledge. Think RHEL admins or web developers.
wrong comment. ignore
why would you need anymore knowledge with fedora than with mint or popos? it has simple and easy to use installer, and everything just works.
I recommend slackware exclusively. Sometimes times it feels like I’m pissing into the wind.
Coincidentally, that’s what using it is like, too. :)
I’d be offended if I weren’t so busy managing my own dependencies.
Nice to hear that recommended! Slackware was the first distro I installed at home, thanks to it being included on a special cover CD from one of the magazines some time in the late 90s? Not touched it for about 20 years but glad to hear it’s still going.
i discovered it around the same time, but i forget how. It’s been my only daily driver since then. I can fumble my way through a .deb distro if I have to, but slackware is my comfort zone.
You should throw -current up on a distrohop partition and re-live your youth.
if you like fedora, have you tried endeavour?
I have not but it was actually on my list of distros to try if Fedora didn’t work out. I should give it a look.
I find it pretty problematic how Ubuntu is messed up and still used as default distro.
Fedora has issues with always being a bit early. I prefer it a lot over buggy Kubuntu, as I use KDE, but for example now 6.1 is too early and still has bugs, while Plasma 6 was really well tested (with Rawhide, Kinoite beta and Kinoite nightly being available)
Fedora has tons of variants and packages, and COPR is full of stuff. The forums are nice, Discourse is a great tool.
It uses Flatpak, but adds its legally restricted repo by default.
The traditional variants… I think apt is better. I did one dnf system upgrade to F40 and it was pretty messy.
The rpm-ostree atomic desktops are really good, but not complete. For example GRUB is simply not updated at all. This is hopefully fixed with F41.
Or the NVIDIA stuff, or nonfree codecs, which are all issues even more on atomic.
So the product is not really ready to use, while rpmfusion sync issues happen multiple times a year. This is no issue on the atomic variants, but there you need to layer many packages, which causes very slow updates.
I am also not a fan of their “GUI only” way, so you will for example never have useful common CLI tools on the atomic variants, for no reason.
It is pretty completely vanilla, which is very nice.
I always recommend Pop_OS! for beginners. It’s IMHO a lot closer to what Ubuntu used to be, uses apt and/or flatpaks (and no snaps), has sane defaults, a good installer, a decent company behind it, nvidia drivers included and their upcoming Cosmic desktop environment looks sick.
Also, I feel like this is a better Fedora-based distro for beginners since it’s harder to break:
Yes probably agree on PopOS, even though never used it. Also their DE will need a lot of time, I hipenthey dont ship it too early. I dual boot it, actually the Fedora Atomic image.
Yes, Silverblue is the GNOME Atomic desktop but as I said it is not finished. There are many things not done.
Being in active development does not mean it’s not ready. To recognize faults or things that can be improved upon and keeping track of those does not mean it’s not ready.
By your definition, not a single distro is ready. Which, to be frank, is a perfectly fine stance to hold if the extent of this is explored and explained. However, you pose it as if Fedora Atomic is the one with that problem (implying others don’t have that issue), which is just plain false.
It is not false.
There is a workaround for updating the bootloader, but I often use “how well does it scale” as a measurement.
Atomic should replace traditional distros, and apart from the need for improved tooling everywhere (like easily converting random files to RPMs) it has the big issue that currently GRUB is not updated.
This means the system is not possible to keep installed over many versions, without tweaks. This will hopefully be fixed with bootupd integration in F41.
This means users with secureboot get issues on newer Kernels, if they installed Atomic a few versions back.
Here is the Atomic issue tracker and I would call a few dealbreakers, while not all.
What you’ve pointed out here is definitely something that should be fixed soon. Thank you for clarifying.
- requires a fair bit of post-installation configuration (suboptimal OOTB experience for newbies)
- Uses btrfs by default but comes with no snapshots or GUI manager pre-configured for system restore
- Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint
- More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint
requires a fair bit of post-installation configuration (suboptimal OOTB experience for newbies)
I’m not the biggest fan of Gnome’s defaults but the regular, non-techie users want a browser (maybe Chrome instead of Firefox, depending on preference) and possibly Steam for gaming. Both are on Flathub, available from Gnome Software.
Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint
The software that isn’t available, isn’t of interest to newbie/non-techie users.
More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint
If anything causes breakage, it’s those web tutorials telling inexperienced users to add a bunch of PPAs to do shit. “So you use Ubuntu but video playback is a big laggy on your super new, hardly upstream-supported Radeon graphics card? Easy, add this PPA with untested git snapshots of Mesa and Kernel.” Yeah, no.
Uses btrfs by default but comes with no snapshots or GUI manager pre-configured for system restore
False on Fedora Atomic.
Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint
Distrobox and Nix exists.
More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint
Mint, perhaps. For Ubuntu, this was only true in the past. And only if PPAs were used sparingly. But Snaps have been a disaster for them in this case. So much so, that even Valve told Ubuntu users to use the Flatpak for Steam instead of the Snap.
even Valve told Ubuntu users to use the Flatpak for Steam instead of the Snap
Hahaha really? That’s awesome. I wonder if Canonical will ever take the hint that nobody wants Snap when better, more open alternatives exist
Yup. Here’s the post as found on Mastodon by the developer that works on Steam on Linux on behalf of Valve.
requires a fair bit of post-installation configuration
This is crazy to me because of all the distros I’ve tested over the years Fedora Kinote is by FAR the one I’ve had to do the least amount of tweaking with. It’s almost boring how “just works” it is. It’s honestly changed my perspective of what a distro can be.
Wait until you try out bazzite for gaming or just the regular kinoite ublue images. Both are basically kinoite with more tweaks and added software on top.
More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint
how so?
More frequent kernel updates.
Is it because Fedora is usually considered bleeding edge?
Yeah, it might be easy to install but you are also a beta tester of things that will be in more stable distros two years from now.
But with that said, I love Fedora, but with Gnome. I use Nobara for the gaming simplicity but with the vanilla Gnome spin. I’d recommend it to anyone, most Linux distros these days are pretty user friendly once installed.
you are also a beta tester of things
Huh? Fedora Workstation is built on stable releases, made by people who actually do QA.
Beta is the wrong word, but there is quite a difference in stability between Fedora and Debian.
there is quite a difference in stability between Fedora and Debian.
Sure but Debian really, REALLY is not a newbie distribution.
Is it because Fedora is usually considered bleeding edge?
That was literally more than 10 years ago.
I mean, Ok
Yes, that article is wrong
I don’t use Fedora, so I believe you.
Maybe GNOME got more stable… but the non LTS kernels often cause issues, and KDE is currently unstable again (while it worked perfectly on Plasma 6.0)
the non LTS kernels often cause issues
In 10 years of using Fedora (granted: my current main Linux system is SteamOS but I do have hardware running Fedora as well but with Gnome as desktop in that case) I once had a kernel-related bug, IIRC involving some fairly new AMD hardware.
KDE is currently unstable again (while it worked perfectly on Plasma 6.0)
Unless you’d be so kind to point me to a direction that showed that your instability is because of Fedora and not some bug that suck into Plasma 6.1, you’d have the same bug under any other distribution with Plasma 6.1.
Fedora simply takes what KDE offers, and the whole VRR etc. additions seem to cause tons of bugs.
Already reported, not sure how helpful.
But being the first to implement KDE releases… is problematic.
Fedora simply takes what KDE offers, and the whole VRR etc. additions seem to cause tons of bugs.
Like any other distribution with KDE software.
But being the first to implement KDE releases… is problematic.
That comment makes little sense. Someone has to be the first. It’s impossible for everyone to wait. Also waiting forever means that existing users are stuck with old bugs because the update is not coming out. The first Plasma 6.1 update has been released yesterday. Don’t think Fedora users will have to wait forever for this.
Btw, Plasma is not the default desktop of Fedora. OP mentioned it but OP also talks about noobs who should stick to defaults anyway and also not make experiments with Atomic editions either.
Because on Fedora sometimes you are required to use terminal for some stuff like installing nvidia drivers and you dont really want to send a total beginner to Fedora
idk I have only needed the terminal once, with Ubuntu/Gnome it was a daily occurrence.
What were you using the terminal for that now you don’t need it? I personally prefer KDE to GNOME as well, and I think lots of it can be related to that and not the distro itself.
Nvidia can be installed through the App Store (or whatever it’s called) now. You just have to enable the non-OSS repo in the settings.
Because Ubuntu LTS works very reliably and because there’s a huge body of information and large swathes of people who can help on the Internet, and because every project and vendor tests and releases their stuff for Ubuntu/Debian and has documentation for it.
Despite the hate you see around these shores, Ubuntu LTS is among the best if not the best beginner distro. Importantly it scales to any other proficiency level. The skill and knowledge acquired while learning Ubuntu transfers to Debian as well as working professionally with either of them.
Also, with the fuckery RedHat pulls lately, it’s a disservice to new users to get them to learn the RedHat ecosystem, unless they plan or need to use it professionally. If I had to bet, I’d bet that the RH ecosystem would be all but deserted by volunteers in the years to come. I bet that as we speak a whole lotta folks donating their time are coming to the conclusion that Debian was right and abandoning ship.
Also, with the fuckery RedHat pulls lately, it’s a disservice to new users to get them to learn the RedHat ecosystem, unless they plan or need to use it professionally.
We and several other companies that I know are migrating away from EL entirely directly because of those Redhat decisions. We can’t trust them not to be stupid again.
Because Ubuntu LTS works very reliably
Ubuntu pulled a blinder many years ago with their LTS model. You get a new one every two years with five years support for each one and a guarantee of moving from one to the next. That gives you quite a lot of time to deal with issues, without requiring you to live in the stoneage.
For example: Apache Guacamole is a webby remote access gateway thingie. It currently requires tomcat9 because TC9->10 is a major breaking change. Ubuntu 22.04 has TC9 and Ubuntu 24.04 has a later version (probably 10). However Ubuntu 22.04 is supported until 2027. So we stick at Ubuntu 22.04 and get security updates etc.
Guacamole is currently at 1.5.5, and the next version will be 1.6.0. The new version will have lots of functionality additions. The devs will then worry about Tomcat editions and the like. Meanwhile Ubuntu will still be supported.
In my opinion the two year release/five year supported model is an absolute belter.
Newer, less stable packages. I’ve been on Fedora as a daily driver since 2009 and have had yum updates break things. I do RHEL full-time so I’ve got the know-how to unravel it, but it’s not for the noob / non-technical, at least not at first.
I’ve been on Fedora as a daily driver since 2009 and have had yum updates break things.
Ah yes, when yum was the package manager, you had some breakage. As context for the readers here: dnf replaced yum in 2015, almost a decade ago: https://lwn.net/Articles/640420/
I do RHEL full-time so I’ve got the know-how to unravel it, but it’s not for the noob / non-technical, at least not at first.
Also, “noob / non-technical” users just use Gnome Software and not command line package managers.
M’lady…
U dropped ur fedora, king
You joke, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s at the back of some people’s minds.
There’s also the whole association with Red Hat, and since Red Hat got bought, went corporate and murdered CentOS, Fedora is tainted somehow.
These things aren’t necessarily good reasons to not recommend Fedora, (for those see other comments) but they’re reasons nonetheless.
murdered CentOS
Ehh that is rather unforgivable and I did not even know!
Deff no fedora for me now!
They didn’t murder centos, they changed its development so that its upstream of RHEL, one point release ahead. For 95% of deployments it makes no difference, for the last few percent RHEL proper is available for free for non-commercial purposes and if it’s commercial then buy a license or use another clone.
Most people have bought into FUD, and spout off the same BS points, and were never centos users to begin with.
They didn’t murder centos
They murdered it, hollowed it out, then re-used the name for something completely new. Granted, what’s new is far from a bad thing, and despite having half the support cycle, the cycle itself is way more consistent and constant because there is no lag time between minor updates (because there are none). Releases are still apparently checked by RH QA, and bug fixes now come a little faster, too.
Most people have bought into FUD, and spout off the same BS points, and were never centos users to begin with.
I’ll do you one better: the centos users got exactly what they paid for, and were able to step in at any time to keep centos from turning into centos stream by making their own supported distro. Nobody did until centos original was gone, and were somehow surprised that a distro with a fixed 10 year support cycle takes a nontrivial amount of resources to run. I guess Oracle kind of tried to make their own version of centos with OL before the advent of CentOS Stream, though it was far from being “by the community, for the community”.
You say that like it was a small thing, but small things don’t create such bad feeling, cause most of the Centos volunteer team to resign, create off two entirely new distributions (Rocky and Alma). The subsequent paywalling of RHEL sourcecode and its accompanying spiteful communications make it clear where Redhat’s focus is - or, rather, isn’t. People judge companies by what they say and do, and I and many others are deeply concerned for the future of RHEL after the IBM takeover and are moving away from it.
I think there is a lot of nostalgia about the great work that Redhat did (and still does, at a smaller scale) and are overlooking what it’s become but RHEL as a business product is not the force it once was. I think it’s entirely possible that Redhat/IBM will simply pull the plug on RHEL and the entire EL universe will need some serious remapping if its to survive.
(Was a Centos user, still maintain 180 EL servers, am quite aware of the FUD, much of which originated and still does in the other direction from Redhat and its employees. The Centos 8 announcement came just after I’d manually migrated 60 vms to it, which then needed migrating again to another distro - so this did cause us some significant work and cost.)
cause most of the Centos volunteer team to resign
The centos volunteers never resigned because of RH. The reason RH got centos was because centos almost didn’t get a few major releases out. It wasn’t until other companies started providing support for their own RHEL derivatives that they chose to restrict sources.
Your second monitor was not broken by Ubuntu. Your second monitor was no longer receiving a signal. The distinction is that the second monitor was functional but not compatible.
Yeah I’m seriously sensing there’s a massive bit of info we haven’t been given. I can’t even conjure up a way that a distro would “break” a monitor lol.
It works with Fedora, Windows and Macintosh. It worked with Ubuntu until a month ago. It doesn’t work with a fresh install of Ubuntu with default settings.
There, now you have all the same information I have.
It worked perfectly with Ubuntu until recently. It worked perfectly with Windows and Macintosh. It worked perfectly with Fedora.
It didn’t work with a fresh install of Ubuntu and several other distros in the same family.
Now I know what you’re about to say- you’re about to say it could have worked if I had only X Y or Z. But that’s not my point.
My point is that newbies don’t want to troubleshoot everything.
The problem with Fedora and especially the atomic versions is that when you Google “how to do X on Linux” you pretty much always get information for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives. The atomic versions have it mildly harder because now you also have to learn how immutable distros work, and you can’t just make install something from GitHub (not that it’s recommended to do so, but if you just want your WiFi to work and that’s all you could find, it’s your best option).
It’s not as bad as it used to be thanks to Flatpak and stuff, but if you’re really a complete noob the best experience will be the one you can Google and get a working answer as easily as possible.
Once you’re familiar and ready to upgrade then it makes sense to go to other distros like Fedora, Nobara, Bazzite, Kionite and whatnot.
I don’t like Ubuntu, I feel like Mint is to Ubuntu what Manjaro is to Arch, Pop_OS is okay when it doesn’t uninstall your DE when installing Steam. But I still recommend those 3 to noobs because everyone knows how to get things working on those, and the guides are mostly interchangeable as well. Purely because it’s easy to search for help with those. I just tell them when you’re tired of the bugs and comfortable enough with Linux then go start distrohopping a bit to find your more permanent home.
if you’re really a complete noob the best experience will be the one you can Google and get a working answer as easily as possible.
Those Ubuntu “as easily as possible” answers on the web often revolve around adding random PPAs which cause breakage over time, especially the more PPAs are mixed and mashed. If anything, those easy answers from random Ubuntu forums and websites, last updated 2014, cause more harm than good.
I wouldn’t be confident in recommending Fedora to noobs, because its a distribution that is on the bleeding edge side. But it depends on what type of noob we are talking about. There are noobs in Linux, who are technically well versed in Windows and have no problem in adapting to a new system. If someone wants to have the newest software, then Fedora might be it.
Also not many people have experience with Fedora, therefore less likely to be recommended. Most people use or used Ubuntu, maybe even started with Ubuntu. You or me may not like it, but its proven that Ubuntu is generally a good choice for newcomers to get into Linux. And that also plays into how many people know and are able to help. In contrast, Fedora is too much of a niche.
Fedora is not bleeding edge like Arch. It’s “leading edge”; the packages are a lot more tested before being deployed.
People being more experienced with Ubuntu/Debian is a good point
How are the packages more tested than on Arch? Both systems have multiple testing stages in place, doesn’t it? In Archlinux there are 2 more stages before it lands on the actual end user. Sometimes one has to wait long time, in example for me RetroArch was updated after 6 weeks after official release. That’s not bleeding edge at all. Only the system core files get updated extremely quick. But that’s only about updating new packages.
The “leading edge” term of Fedora is about a total different aspect. It’s leading, because Fedora adopts certain technologies first, before even Archlinux adopts it. In example Pipewire. Archlinux waits a bit before the technology is adopted widespread, while Fedora is leading and adopting it early. And that has nothing to do about how often the packages itself get updated. People often mixup these two things (and so I did probably).
From this article, an interview with Fedora’s project leader:
On the other hand, the long-term distributions work by basically not making changes. Fedora doesn’t follow that, your packages will get updated. We try to make it so that major breaking changes happen on releases rather than just as updates. But sometimes, if there is a security problem, we will put out a newer version of something. So for that kind of stable, it is much less so."
That’s why Fedora users are stuck with e.g. the older GNOME version until the next release.
The difference between Fedora and Debian regarding stability is that there’s a new Fedora release every 6 months, while on Debian you have to wait like 2 (?) years for major updates.
That’s how I always interpreted the term “leading edge”.
By that description, Ubuntu does the same, matching the release cycle of non LTS Ubunu versions; every 6 months with breaking changes (just like Fedora). The difference to Fedora is, that Ubuntu users do not need to upgrade to the next major version, while Fedora have to, because there is only one version.
And not only did everything “just work” flawlessly, but it’s so much faster and more polished than I ever knew Linux to be!
Congrats, you are very lucky. But try to survive couple of version upgrades before recommending it to noobs.
Years ago major upgrades and to lesser degree even minor upgrades made me to give up trying to keep installation running. I don’t even remember if it was Red Hat or Debian.
Eventually I realized, that I like running newest version of Desktop and I ran into cases of getting frustrated with lack of newer versions, which had fixes for issues I ran into. Then I realized that best wiki was not a snapshot distribution.
In the end I tried rolling distribution and remain happy for years.
Debian or derived distribution is easiest to get google help for and it is the simplest choice for me, when running on the cloud.
Although, Alpine is pushing through containers quite forcefully.
I’ve been running Fedora OStree variants for over two years. I version upgraded and rebased between entirely different spins, rawhide and over to ublue variants then back to fedora mainline. All off the original install, keeping my userspace intact. Never once has it self destructed.
Friends don’t let friends use IBM software.
Fedora is upstream of Red Hat now. It’s developed by the community, then IBM/Red Hat steal it lol.
then IBM/Red Hat steal it lol.
Not really. RH provides all the hosting for the Fedora project, pays multiple people to work on it full time, and on top of that, the RPM specs (which are used to actually build packages) are all MIT licensed. It’d be like complaining bluehat steals the Linux kernel by cloning it from a git repo and making/distributing their own version of it, which is exactly what they do.
