For brand new hardware, Fedora gets the niggle-free experience faster than Ubuntu. 5K screens are treated as two separate devices "under the hood", many Ubuntu software didnt honor the abstraction, hence the monitor layout, notifications, taskbar etc were treating each half as a full monitor.
How well does Fedora handle proprietary software nowadays? For example the Nvidia driver, Steam, Rider or video codecs. I negatively remember their patent paranoia regarding elliptic curve cryptography.
My favourite feature of Manjaro (and presumably Arch) is how easily I can install almost any software from a single package manager (which supports the official repos, flatpak and AUR). While on Mint I had to mess with custom package sources, or install individual vendor provided packages which lacked auto-update.
There's still a bit of manual work involved to install the codecs (and proprietary drivers if you need em), which is why I would never recommend vanilla Fedora to a newbie - but Fedora derivatives exist to address that issue.
Ultramarine[1] is one such easy-to-use derivative, and for gamers there's Nobara[2] and Bazzite[3] (an immutable distro).
Hasn't been my experience, running KDE Wayland on host with amdgpu. Just had to pass `--extra-flags "env GDK_BACKEND=wayland"` when exporting the app. Zero issues, far from being unusable.
In fact you can even run an entire DE from Distrobox if you wanted to, although I can imagine that being a bit awkward. But a single GUI app? Shouldn't be an issue unless you've got a tricky/niche setup.
Ubuntu has fallen out of favour with quite a lot of Linux recommender sites and reviewers and its mainly about flatpak and Gnome, but also gaming support by default. Other Linux distributions do things better now for the influx of gamers to Linux and with SteamOS being on Arch a lot of Arch deriatives are becoming increasingly popular. I don't think its Fedora picking up users, its Cachyos and Bazzite.
Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration (gaming mode, etc.). Bazzite works really well on my PC handheld and I don't think a generic distro with Steam added after the fact would be the same. Id you want a distro without Steam bundled there are lots of those.
It's a quid pro quo from Valve. They are investing profusely in Linux ecosystems, and the distro-devs are following that.
Meanwhile Epic Games still lacks a first-party app on linux, and users need to pass from Lutris, Heroic etc...
What are the specific issues with gaming that you're claiming Ubuntu has?
I've been using Ubuntu for a few months, and I have complaints - lots of them. But gaming isn't one. I just installed the apps I needed and they worked.
Recommended by João Carrasqueira, a "Lead Windows Editor" at XDA[1], who "has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem".
Clearly an expert on Linux distros, as you can see.
I still don't understand how people can run Debian/Ubuntu. Every single time I have tried my environment in the span of a few months turns into a wet ball of mud with various levels of breakages. It's honestly astounding how bad it is. Once in a while I install a newly released version and naively think "Surely this problem is now fixed". But no, it's terrible.
I have used in my life many different Linux distributions: Slackware, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian (professionally or privately). My private choice is the only one not driven by marketing: Debian.
You have three main Debian releases:
SID (if you need to be as close as possible to upstream versions)
Testing (the same as above but a few days after SID)
Stable (you sacrifice the latest software versions for insane stability)
Which one did you use ?
And please don't mix Debian and Ubuntu.
Canonical is commercial company driven by profit (and CEO's bonus).
Debian is driven by community and (mostly) engineers.
Back in the 1990's I was fond of it for the community spirit, the attention to detail, the way things "just worked" even it had a particular take on some things. Over time it felt like it became burderned with design-by-committee decisions, maintainers leaving and abandoning packages faster than they could replace them, and just a bit too political.
For brand new hardware, Fedora gets the niggle-free experience faster than Ubuntu. 5K screens are treated as two separate devices "under the hood", many Ubuntu software didnt honor the abstraction, hence the monitor layout, notifications, taskbar etc were treating each half as a full monitor.
Backed by IBM/ Red Hat a US based company.
I trust the German government to have more respect for privacy rights at this point.
So I use Open Suse Tumbleweed. It’s been pretty stable , although with nvidia you have to do a bit more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318830
Suse is up for sale.
I don’t imagine the German government will allow it to be sold to a non EU entity.
But there’s always NixOS.
How well does Fedora handle proprietary software nowadays? For example the Nvidia driver, Steam, Rider or video codecs. I negatively remember their patent paranoia regarding elliptic curve cryptography.
My favourite feature of Manjaro (and presumably Arch) is how easily I can install almost any software from a single package manager (which supports the official repos, flatpak and AUR). While on Mint I had to mess with custom package sources, or install individual vendor provided packages which lacked auto-update.
There's still a bit of manual work involved to install the codecs (and proprietary drivers if you need em), which is why I would never recommend vanilla Fedora to a newbie - but Fedora derivatives exist to address that issue.
Ultramarine[1] is one such easy-to-use derivative, and for gamers there's Nobara[2] and Bazzite[3] (an immutable distro).
[1] https://ultramarine-linux.org/
[2] https://nobaraproject.org/
[3] https://bazzite.gg/
Just use Flathub on Fedora for anything proprietary including codecs. Leave dnf/rpm for system software / updates.
Nvidia is pretty simple, you can either enable the driver via the UI or just follow the rpmfusion guide.
there's a third party repo called rpmfusion for that
If you use a Linux desktop professionally, it's only a matter of time until you hit that one GUI app that you need, that is only supported on Ubuntu.
I prefer Tumbleweed, but the sane choice remains Ubuntu.
> that is only supported on Ubuntu.
So much for that Linux ecosystem compatibility, Linux apps not even compatible with other linuxes!
It's a packaging problem.
A vendor used to the Windows ecosystem might find it natural to support only one Linux distribution.
Distrobox exists for that very reason. No need to ruin your main OS just to run one app.
Distrobox is great for cli apps and stuff not touching mesa/drivers.
It's very awkward or unusable otherwise.
Hasn't been my experience, running KDE Wayland on host with amdgpu. Just had to pass `--extra-flags "env GDK_BACKEND=wayland"` when exporting the app. Zero issues, far from being unusable.
In fact you can even run an entire DE from Distrobox if you wanted to, although I can imagine that being a bit awkward. But a single GUI app? Shouldn't be an issue unless you've got a tricky/niche setup.
This is again the argument of the power user arguing that everyone should just become the expert in the power users domain.
As long as the Kernel ist compatible, sure, technically.
This is not what I would consider "supported". This is not something a company wants to deal with on every single Linux client.
Ubuntu has fallen out of favour with quite a lot of Linux recommender sites and reviewers and its mainly about flatpak and Gnome, but also gaming support by default. Other Linux distributions do things better now for the influx of gamers to Linux and with SteamOS being on Arch a lot of Arch deriatives are becoming increasingly popular. I don't think its Fedora picking up users, its Cachyos and Bazzite.
Linux distributions shouldn't ship with Steam installed and imho bundling it makes a bad precedent.
Steam should be easy to install (whether from a store like Flathub) instead.
Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration (gaming mode, etc.). Bazzite works really well on my PC handheld and I don't think a generic distro with Steam added after the fact would be the same. Id you want a distro without Steam bundled there are lots of those.
It's a quid pro quo from Valve. They are investing profusely in Linux ecosystems, and the distro-devs are following that. Meanwhile Epic Games still lacks a first-party app on linux, and users need to pass from Lutris, Heroic etc...
What are the specific issues with gaming that you're claiming Ubuntu has?
I've been using Ubuntu for a few months, and I have complaints - lots of them. But gaming isn't one. I just installed the apps I needed and they worked.
Isn’t Bazzite based on Fedora?
Fedora may be becoming the default for desktops, not for servers (Debian possibly the default for servers).
Actually on servers RHEL is still the default (43% server OS market share), followed by Ubuntu at 34%, Debian at 16% and SuSE at 11%.
https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-server-market-shar...
Enterprises love RHEL because of the paid support, even if they never use it, it's "there".
Why do you think Debian for servers only ? Did you use Debian SID or Testing as a desktop ?
Fedora is upstream for RHEL, which is absolutely dominant in the server space some sectors that require enterprise support.
Recommended by whom?
Recommended by João Carrasqueira, a "Lead Windows Editor" at XDA[1], who "has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem".
Clearly an expert on Linux distros, as you can see.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/author/joao-xda/
XDA is a normie consumer site, beware conflating consumer with professional recommendations.
I still don't understand how people can run Debian/Ubuntu. Every single time I have tried my environment in the span of a few months turns into a wet ball of mud with various levels of breakages. It's honestly astounding how bad it is. Once in a while I install a newly released version and naively think "Surely this problem is now fixed". But no, it's terrible.
I have used in my life many different Linux distributions: Slackware, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian (professionally or privately). My private choice is the only one not driven by marketing: Debian.
You have three main Debian releases:
Which one did you use ?And please don't mix Debian and Ubuntu.
Canonical is commercial company driven by profit (and CEO's bonus).
Debian is driven by community and (mostly) engineers.
I used Stable and SID. The reason I mixed Debian and Ubuntu is because I perceive the root of shittiness to be apt.
Back in the 1990's I was fond of it for the community spirit, the attention to detail, the way things "just worked" even it had a particular take on some things. Over time it felt like it became burderned with design-by-committee decisions, maintainers leaving and abandoning packages faster than they could replace them, and just a bit too political.
I've lived on Debian since day dot, never really had an issue. Biggest gripe with Debian is that it's /too/ stable!
Are they both still a nightmare to setup and/or use?