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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There was a time when I thought about switching to Fedora when I ditch Windows in 2025, but the frequent release schedule of Fedora has made me worried if those updates risk breaking my setup.
Just finished moving all 3 of my computers to Fedora and WOW it is so good compared to ubuntu. I was missing out. Everything is working on both AMD and Nvidia, even wayland.
I am installing fedora kinoite to most of the people I install gnulinux to. All noobs.
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.
- 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
More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint
how so?
More frequent kernel updates.
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 (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.
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.
Because SE Linux drove me bonkers once and I am petty.
No Nvidia driver support. Dealbreaker for most folks folks wanting to run games.
I am not sure what do you mean. I use fedora with Nvidia (it’s a different repo to activate) and my main rig is for gaming… No problem what so ever. Using Fedora since 37, what a smooth ride.
My understanding was that they weren’t included in the ISO and had to be installed manually after the fact.
Have you tried Fedora recently or are you stuck in its early Wayland days?
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.
KDE/QT is not OSS
I am also genuinely interested in further explanation of this view.
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2021-January/040798.html
Things might have changed, but I personally avoid it. GTK is just as good. If you’re a linux newb this might not be good advice, but I’d recommend XFCE if you hate GNOME.
Would you mind elaborating?
Long-time Fedora user here. I do not think Fedora is noob friendly at all.
- Their installer is awful
- Their spins are really well hidden for people who don’t know they exist
- The Nvidia drivers can’t be installed via the GUI
- There’s no “third party drivers” tool at all
- The regular Flathub repo is not the default and their own repo is absolutely useless
- AMD/Intel GPUs lack hardware acceleration for H264 and H265 out of the box, adding them requires the console
- Their packages are consistently named differently than their Ubuntu/Debian counterpart
I really like Fedora for their newish packages without breaking constantly. I still would not recommend it for beginners.
Their packages are consistently named differently than their Ubuntu/Debian counterpart
I agree with all your points, but this one has way more to do with Debian being a bunch of weirdos about how packages are packaged. Its really more of a Debian demerit than anything since sometimes their packaging practices can be somewhat hostile to projects not directly associated with Debian, especially since the Debian community can have a certain “Our way is the only right way” attitude. That said, the Debian packaging standards can make it easier as a developer to experiment with creating a software package to interact with an existing package. Like there’s a reason to do it that I can support and I wish Debian packagers would more often say “we package things like this so people can experiment” instead of “Everyone else does packaging wrong and our way is the only way”
Half of your complains are fixed in newer releases. For instance it asks you if you want to enable third party repos. If you hit yes it enables the repo for chrome, Nvidia and others plus it setups stock flathub.
That only applies to the GNOME variant, the KDE spin is missing the third party repo toggle.
At least the Flathub repo is fixed on the GNOME variant now. The Nvidia repo is added but the driver is not installed, meaning you still need to use the CLI to install the drivers.
Completely agree. I mean, I’m what you’d call a power user, and I still opt for using a flatpak for my browser (Floorp) because codecs are a pain.
What do you mean the installer is awful? I have found it quite straightforward. Select the disc, your keyboard setup, timezone and then it install itself…
It caters to a middle ground that barely exists, meaning it doesn’t have enough options for a power user and too many for a newcomer.
For example, a newcomer doesn’t know what a root account is and doesn’t have to care, yet they have to choose if they want to enable or disable the account. They can also remove their administrator privileges without knowing what it means for them. I get asked what a root account is every time somebody around me tries to install Fedora.
I recommend spinning up a Ubuntu 24.04 VM and taking a look at their installer.
They have a clear structure on how to install Ubuntu step by step while Fedora presents you everything at once. They properly hide the advanced stuff and only show it when asked for it. They have clear toggles for third party software right at the installer and explain what they do. Fedora doesn’t even give you the option to install H264 codecs or Nvidia drivers.
It also looks a lot cleaner and doesn’t overload people with too much info on a single screen. And yet it can still do stuff like automated installing and has active directory integration out of the box, where the Fedora installer miserably fails for a “Workstation” distro.
The Fedora installer works, but it doesn’t do much more than that and the others do it better in many areas.
If you’re installing an OS you should absolutely understand what the root account is. That’s like buying a car without understanding the concept of keys.
No, it’s like buying a car without understanding how the engine works, which a lot of people do.
That’s absurd. You don’t need to understand the inner workings of the kernel to know what a root account is. If you’re regularly encouraging people to install a new OS when you aren’t even confident in their ability to understand what a root account is, you’re not doing them any favors.
Don’t even get me started on disk partitioning. I feel like they somehow have the most obtuse partitioning setup out of every distro I’ve ever installed. It feels like if you don’t just hand over your whole disk (which, if you do that, I feel like it doesn’t make it clear how it’s going to partition it), the installer gets very spiteful and just goes “fine then, figure it out”. I’ve never had so much trouble manually partitioning a disk before, I would literally rather just use fdisk lol.
• The majority of useful packages are hidden in RPM Fusion
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
