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.
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.
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Someone explained it to me this way:
If knife is a newest feature, then
- cutting edge has newest features
- bleeding edge bleeds from knife cuts, because it doesn’t have the newest features.
Any snapshot distribution by definition is on bleeding edge.
Any rolling release is by definition on the cutting edge.
Is it because Fedora is usually considered bleeding edge?
That was literally more than 10 years ago.
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.
Like any other distribution with KDE software.
Kubuntu deviates from upstream, which is problematic but shows that it can be done differently.
Someone has to be the first.
Arch unstable, Fedora Rawhide, Debian Testing…
The first Plasma 6.1 update has been released yesterday.
I think I have it since a few days on Kinoite?
Plasma is not the default desktop of Fedora.
Not yet, but a close second.
noobs who should stick to defaults anyway and also not make experiments with Atomic editions either.
Noobs should absolutely use atomic editions. Totally. Every bad behavior should just break so they dont mess up.
The system is resettable which is so valuable. It has transparent changes. It has integrated backups.
But taking Fedoras defaults is difficult, as Fedora Flatpaks and Toolbox are not really great.
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Yes, that article is wrong
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Here’s another comment with more detail
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.
Because SE Linux drove me bonkers once and I am petty.
I typically run fedora kde, both server and desktop. I’ve a laptop using hyprland which is great once you remember all the shortcuts you’ve setup, but fedora kde is worth its weight.
I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.
My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.
There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.
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
Back when I moved over to linux I wanted to get away from the mainstream. Fedora/Red Hat were too mainstream for me at the time but I have never had any real objections to it. I eventually ended up settling on Debian and ever since then i’ve stuck with descendants of that distro because having the same toolchains of software as Debian makes transitioning distros slightly easier.
I have never touched Linux/GNU and I installed Linux after the Microsoft recall and when with standard workstation (GNOME) as a dual boot. After the first two weeks reinstalled fedora over top of windows and haven’t looked back.
That was 2 months ago and and having no issues even gaming on my machine works great.
I’m a big fan personally. I an experimenting more with OpenSUSE’s distro including microOS but that not because of Fedora but more so I want to recommend options that are easy to scale into FOSS professionally for people too and unfortunately RedHat no longer offers that path for Fedora users.
Fedora is good for people with some knowledge. Think RHEL admins or web developers.
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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.
You need to use the command line more often and occasionally something breaks
I tried it when the first one I tried didn’t work out.
Ctrl+C hard locked it instantly every time I pushed it. I could right-click and choose “Copy”, but pushing Ctrl-C just froze whatever image was on screen. No response at all after that. Plus it was giving me a headache trying to get Nvidia drivers installed.
So then I moved to Pop since the correct driver was baked in, and it’s been mostly smooth since.
@flork I would say the main reason is that the best of Fedora is under the hood, and goes completely unnoticed by the general public. Beginners don’t care how and when Wayland, PipeWire, zram or SELinux were implemented.
Other reasons:
- The system requires manual intervention after the initial installation (e.g. RPMFusion)
- Some choices, such as firewalld and Anaconda, are not so good for beginners
- Bad marketingI’m salty on Red Hat and won’t touch anything near it.
I recommend Zorin because it’s Debian based and I’ve been running Debian Stable for over 20 years. If there’s an issue I can probably help.
I’m switching to COSMIC on Debian Stable when that becomes an option. Until then, It’s Fedora with Qtile Wayland (and Hyprland as backup).
Edit: though I have a Debian VM where I’ll try to get Qtile Wayland set up via pipx and document the process so might go to Debian before then.
That’s funny, you’re the second person today to mention Cosmic to me. I hadn’t seen it yet – now I’m interested as well.
I tried the prealpha and it’s missing a few things I want (they’re WIP). I’d suggest checking out some Youtube videos of it, and not to expect too much, as it’s still not there imo.
Good point! I forgot Zorin is actually based on Ubuntu. Thanks for the reminder.
Have you tried Fedora recently or are you stuck in its early Wayland days?
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.
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.
