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 (Kinoite). 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 Kinoite!
edit: i am DYING at the number of "you're using it wrong" comments here. never change people.
Because distros from the Debian family are more popular, any random help article aimed at beginners is likely to assume one of those distros. (If you know how to map from
apttorpm, you're probably not a beginner.) Plus, I don't trust Red Hat, who have a strong influence on Fedora.(Note that I don't generally recommend my own distro—Gentoo—to newcomers either, unless they have specific needs best served by it.)
Not implying anything, but why don't you trust Red Hat? Because they're a big company, or because of some other reason?
Not the original commenter but Red Hat took steps a few months ago to make it harder to make complete bug-for-bug clones of their Enterprise product ( RHEL ). Basically, they stopped providing the exact build instructions and exact patch sets ( SRPMS ) to their competitors. You now have to jump through more hoops to do it ( like Rocky does ) or you have to fork your own Enterprise distribution from CentOS Stream ( like Alma now does ).
You still get everything you always did as a Red Hat subscriber ( even if you do not pay them — they have a free tier ). All the actual software is still Open Source for everybody ( subscriber or not ) and available free in CentOS Stream and Fedora. Red Hat is still one of the biggest contributors across the Linux ecosystem and, ironically, one of the biggest proponents and providers of GPL software in particular.
However, if you are a Red Hat subscriber and you share the RHEL SRPMS, Red Hat may not renew your subscription. That is their big evil move.
Many people did not like this change and the most extreme detractors have accused Red Hat of betraying Open Source or of even trying to take Linux proprietary. In my view, this is totally wrong. Read my second paragraph.
What many people do not seem to understand is that Red Hat founded the Fedora Project and, much later, the CentOS Stream Project explicitly to be open, community distributions so that they ( Red Hat ) could pursue their commercial interests with RHEL without friction from the community. I say people do not understand because some people now say they do not trust Fedora to stay Open when the entire reason it exists is to be that ( as an explicit strategy of Red Hat ).
One of the things that is annoying ( to me ) about Fedora is that it insists on being completely anti-commercial ( avoiding patented codecs for example ). The idea that Fedora is for businesses or will be “taken over” by IBM is silly. Red Hat employees have always been the biggest contributors to Fedora. It has always been Free ( as in freedom ).
The most extreme damage Red Hat may eventually do to Fedora is to stop paying so many people to work on it and the important packages it relies on. That has not happened and probably will not anytime soon ( in my view ).
Thank you for the history lesson! I can see why their decision might chafe some people or cause them to be a bit more wary (given that many of us live in an end-stage-capitalism hellscape), but as is often the case, real life details are usually mundane.
I've personally been impressed by their Atomic distros, and they've come a long way since I first tried vanilla Fedora with Gnome many years ago.
Red Hat's interests often don't seem to be aligned with those of the average user. The result is that they push for the adoption of software and conventions that make things better for businesses running RHEL, but worse for almost everyone else. This goes back a long way, and makes me question the long-term suitability of any distro Red Hat is involved in for any user who is not paying them for support. It's the pattern that bothers me, not any single event (and yes, part of that pattern does arise from the fact that they're a for-profit corporation).
It's the sort of thing that many people won't really care about, and if the alternative was Microsoft or even Canonical (which is prone to weird fits of NIH and bad monatization ideas), then fine, I would go with Red Hat. Still, I would recommend a community distro above anything that a corporation has its fingers in.
TBH, Red Hat focusing their attention on business isn't that problematic for me. RHEL is specifically for businesses, and Red Hat needs to make money to keep operating. Kind of a necessary evil, if you could consider that evil. However, I completely understand why the capitalist realm makes average people squirm.
But that said, I usually prefer community projects myself (Fedora spins included), since they tend to have modified setups that are more in line with what regular users would want or need.