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.
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I do, Fedora is simply the best and meets the most use cases. It combines good privacy and security out of the box with a clean UI (at least with Workstation and KDE spin) while having a package manager that’s easy to learn and easy access to Flathub and up-to-date apps (can’t stress this enough, even windows and Mac keep apps up to date and don’t hold them back for the sake of LTS (sorry Workstation Debian fans). It also brings in newer and better technologies without breaking almost anything (at least for me).
This is just my opinion though, I know people like to reccomend Mint but I personally do not like it, and despise it’s desktop options (I am one of the people that do not and never have liked Cinnamon).
I decided the nuclear option using mint with kde plasma 5
Well I did switch to opensuse tumbleweed, liked kde plasma a lot so while setting up weekly backups, I ended up… uh… “overwriting” it and my last external backup was a month old mint backup, so to not set things up again I just install kde on mint and said F 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.
Surprisingly unhelpful, thanks! :)
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 :)
I don’t understand. That’s essentially where I learned Fedora from. Where did you learn to use Windows?
I see no reason to downvote you at all.
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: https://www.adelielinux.org/about/
What about a lightweight variant like Lubuntu or Xubuntu? 4Gb should be usable for a lot of things.
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!
I wouldn’t recommend fedora plain, but the ublue atomic spins are great. Really solid lots of choices (use case, DE, hardware…) personally I use bazzite on the desktop and aurora on the laptop.
Yes, this is my go to nowadays for all my family and friends. Atomic makes it harder for them to break it and everything just works out of the box.
The installer is garbage in my opinion. But aside from that, the distro is probably fine.
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Long story short, Fedora is RedHat, RedHat is mostly aimed at companies, so most random users haven’t encountered it. I used Fedora for a few months, a Friend of mine was very passionate about it, I personally didn’t find anything special about it and disliked rpm at the time, so I ended up switching back to Mint (I think it’s what I was using at the time).
So, long story short, people are not recommending it because they’re not using it, but I know a few people who use it and swear by it, so it looks like you’re on the road to join their club, and don’t let anyone tell you you should be using any other distro, as long as you find something that works for you, that’s what matters.
That being said have you tried Kubuntu? I feel lots of what you had issues with could be the old GNOME vs KDE argument.
“Fedora is Red Hat, Red Hat is mostly aimed at companies”.
I said this in another comment but Red Hat Linux used to target both the community and commercial interests. Fedora was founded to be an explicitly community distribution that was NOT aimed at companies. Red Hat then created Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ) which absolutely targets companies ( for money ). The whole point of founding the Fedora project was for it not to target companies.
Fedora release often, has short support cycles, and is hostile to commercial software. It would be a terrible choice for a business in my view. It is a leading community distribution though.
The top foundational distros that all the others are based on are Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Arch ( and maybe SUSE — I am not European ).
In my view, Ubuntu’s best days are behind it. Fedora has never looked so good.
I use one of the other distros above but I used Fedora long ago and it treated me well. I think it is a solid choice. My impression has been that it is gaining in popularity again.
Here’s the deal, most people from yesterdays started on Ubuntu or something similar. So, they suggest what worked for them. I just moved my wife away from Windows and straight into Fedora, I haven’t had to help her on anything other than once she could not find the printer (it’s on another VLAN and she was not connected to it 🙄). She is loving it and just last night told me, and I quote, “I should have changed sooner”.
Fedora just works, but another factor may be that Debian and Ubuntu based distros are LTS what le Fedora is more semi-rolling, this helps with stability, thus it makes sense to suggest something with less probability of breaking suddenly than something they may need to roll back.
As for atomic distros, YMMV. I find them sluggish during install, boot and when starting an app for the first time, and in my case, broken after a few updates (would not work on Wayland forcing me to log in over X11).
Curious how your atomic distro broke, since you can
rollbackandrebasepretty easily after a problematic update. I’m running Bazzite on a 10yo laptop, and it’s been great; I even rebased to a completely different DE, then did a rollback when I decided it didn’t work for me.Yeah, I’ve no idea what happened either, as I’m not that smart, lol. I just tend to move away from stuff that breaks easily. I searched a bit around to see if I found anyone else with this issue, but found nothing even remotely similar.
Could be that my hardware is the issue? I was running it on a Gazelle 16 (System76) with an RTX3050Ti. But Fedora Workstation has always worked flawlessly on it.
Weird. I would be interested to know what actually happened, but I am not smart enough to troubleshoot hardware to that degree! At least you found something that works.
Never have I ever successfully updated a fedora system. It was always a reinstall.
Really? I have successfully updated for years. Did you use offline upgrades?
I can’t honestly recall or put my finger on it what I did wrong.
Choose fedora because it used my laptop subwoofer and wasn’t a rolling release. I remember each time (x2) reading about how to update the distro and each time my system was completely borked. I went to debian, read upon alsa, made my subwoofer work with a homegrown script and never looked back.
To this day I am wondering if people recommending redhat are trolls or paid.
KDE/QT is not OSS
Err
Yes it is? It is in fact FOSS
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.
I don’t really undeestand from this mail how is it not open source, but I am not well versed in licenses and technicalities either.
Would you mind elaborating?
Its not a good noob distro. Its a test bed development distro. There are going to be things in Fedora that are broken on account of those things being in development. I believe there’s a rolling release now which improves the lack of long term releases, but for a long time trying to auto upgrade between point releases was a fast track to the very worst time of your life.
Then there’s the question of whether or not its association with Redhat and IBM makes it a safe choice long term given that they’ve gone full hostile. I just don’t see the benefit to going with Fedora as a noob instead of something designed for noobs like LMDE
I do. Nobara specifically since it has the non-free repos and codecs by default, and a bunch of tweaks for gaming and editing already set up or easily added in the Welcome app.
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.
Fair enough. I didn’t know that. Hopefully they don’t abuse their position, but at least it’s not a full ownership situation I guess.
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.
Generally Fedora’s purpose is to make sure nothing gets into redhat (RHEL) Linux. So if there are breaking changes to things, you’ll be getting them.
Historically if people had wanted to learn I’d push them towards Ubuntu because its Debian based, meaning familiar enough to most of what runs the modern internet that I could eventually (I’m not a Linux admin) fix.
These days if you just want to use it I’d pick Linux mint, just since they seem to be orienting towards that way. Arch or SUSE based something if you want to learn more about how the packages you install work together. But the choice in distro honestly feels more like an installer and package manager choice than anything. a distro is just a choice of which thousand things to hide in a trenchcoat.
I just ideologically don’t like IBM and would rather hand in my bug reports to the volunteer ecosystem.
Installer is a big part.
2nd biggest part is how system is configured.
Debian is not afraid to create its own version of default configuration. Take some mail software as example.
Arch on the other hand is most likely just going to ship original application configuration.
Debian might be nice and easy, until configuration change is necessary. Suddenly, original application documentation doesn’t apply. Debian documentation may be obsolete or absent. And that is the beginning of reading all of the configuration files. Normally, it is not a problem until something like email system configuration is necessary.
That’s when Arch philosophy of making fewest changes to software comes to shine. Original documentation usually works and applies well.
So if there are breaking changes to things, you’ll be getting them.
No, Fedora has a policy against compatibility breaking updates mid-cycle. That’s why Gnome is never updated to a new major release on a Fedora release. You’ll have to wait for the next Fedora release to come out for such upgrades.
I didn’t mean to imply they’d roll in buggy packages, by virtue of release; just that Fedora’s function is typically regression testing for the money making product.
The testing is for the much more marketable enterprise window.
just that Fedora’s function is typically regression testing for the money making product.
Fedora is not an LTS distribution but Fedora itself has as robust, if not more robust, QA leading up to a release as any other distribution.
Unfortunately boring distributions don’t get recommended because users of boring distributions don’t bother commenting on distribution discussions.
And it’s really unfortunate that obscure distributions have more vocal fans, because boring distributions are much better for beginners.
Ironically this is how I feel about Arch, for me it’s worked flawlessly for years.
I don’t bother getting in ‘discussions’ about using it, because if other people have problems I’m not going to convince them that I don’t.
It’s mostly the installation and initial setup that’s a pain on arch, so definitely not a beginner distro, but very good nonetheless
Yeah totally, I think to use Arch successfully you need an opinion about what your system needs, and that takes experience with using Linux.
Installation is pretty trivial these days with the install script
