Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.
On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!
Thoughts?
I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.
Is Snap really that bad?
Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !
What are those better choices then (for those who currently use the non-LTS Ubuntu releases and don't want to move to rolling releases or LTS-only releases)?
You pretty much described Fedora. Non-LTS stable 6-month release cycle with 1 year of support for each release.
Never touching Fedora again. It’s a corporate distribution. As much as people might say otherwise redhat has a lot of pull over it. Look at the lawyers getting involved over pulling out the codecs.
Your loss, it's a great distribution and if you spent even a couple of minutes in our forums you'd see that the RedHat pull is due to them actually collaborating and being and active part in the community.