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.
You must log in or register to comment.
if you like fedora, have you tried endeavour?
I have not but it was actually on my list of distros to try if Fedora didn’t work out. I should give it a look.
I prefer Fedora. I think Fedora lost the war on easy Linux branding to Ubuntu 15 years ago.
Yep, though the dpkg ecosystem also had more inertia than the rpm ecosystem did. Before Flatpak existed, pretty much everything that was packaged for Linux had a .deb file for it, but the same wasn’t true for rpm. So people who didn’t want to package shit themselves flocked to the Debian-based ecosystem. But these days we have Flatpaks and everything moved to the browser, so it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.
Agreed. If flatpak can continue to gain more control around GUI and hardware, I would finally be able to hop on the wagon completely.
Atomic Fedora, like Fedora Kinoite is probably the most noob friendly. Impossible to break.
I’ve recently converted two people from Windows to Linux with Fedora Kinoite. One of them has been using it for maybe two months now without a single issue and the other just started using it with positive first impressions. I find it very modern, simple, and familiar. The atomic system just works too. I enjoy it much more than Mint
Agreed on all counts! I really can’t express enough how impressed I am.
My først linux experience is actually Fedora 39. I was just hooked on how it looks, (Gnome) but I don’t know anything under the hood. But I wio recommend it to noons like me, because I know there is a lot of help in the internet, and we all have to start somewhere. And BTW I’m not someone who understands all the technics and coding orstuff.
maybe if fedoras wold actually work id recommend it
i tried it 3 times, one time it didnt install, and the other two when i installed the nvidia driver it 1, borked, and 2. had graphical glitches
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.
I’ve been having a tough time with it. Maybe I’m unlucky with my hardware and setup. Spend hours this week recovering from a black screen after upgrading to F40. Issue with Plymouth + Nvidia + Luks at boot. Also getting Nvidia to work on F39, my first install. Secondary computer (laptop) macbook 2017, keyboard doesn’t work with Fedora compared to Linux Mint.
I’d recommend Linux Mint for beginners after my experiences. imho
Things should get a lot better with NVIDIA soon in distros like Fedora that want to stick with only open software.
Nvidia can be a bitch. And it’s unfortunate that Fedora isn’t particularly well known for handling that graciously.
I’d recommend Linux Mint for beginners after my experiences.
Absolutely fair. FWIW, if you ever feel like giving Fedora another chance, consider doing it through its derivative (i.e. Bazzite).
Thanks for the recommendation, I just installed Bazzite. Had been trialling LMDE but found it frustratingly lacking. No Driver Manager on that edition made NVIDIA drivers a nightmare. Meanwhile that’s handled in Bazzite and it has a shortcut to install Moonlight? Awesome.
You’re welcome 😊!
I agree that Bazzite is very very good. So much so, that it’s the first distro I recommend in person.
Enjoy 😉!
One of these days, I’ll have to give Universal Blue a look for general computing. Bazzite is excellent, but I don’t imagine my MiL is going to care about having Steam and gamescope installed out of the box, should I ever have to do a fresh install for her.
I understand. And to be frank, I agree with you that perhaps it’s too much focused on a particular set of things (i.e. gaming).
There’s also Aurora and Bluefin (see uBlue’s website) for those that seek a very similar experience but without the focused-on-gaming part. The reason I prefer Bazzite over those two is related to Waydroid (i.e. software to run Android (apps) on Linux). However, your mileage may vary.
Finally, uBlue used to dedicate resources and documentation on their base images; i.e. relatively not-opinionated images for Silverblue, Kinoite and Fedora Atomic with basically any desktop environment you could imagine plus hardware enablement. These are perhaps still worth considering. However, personally, I’ve been having a better time on Aurora/Bazzite/Bluefin.
I always forget about Aurora and Bluefin. Thanks for the reminder!
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
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.
Fedora has one of the more confusing installers, it requires you to know some technical things such as repos and Flathub to set it up, and package names are different to the standard. It’s just not targeted to beginners so why recommend it to beginners? There are better options out there to show them the full power of Linux user friendliness.
As a packager I’ll just say Debian is the one with the weird package names. Fedora just matches upstream names generally, similar to Arch.
For me program names in the repos were the same on Arch and Debian but Fedora packages had architecture suffixes and sometimes weird names.
I think you are mistaken. An example:
https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/glib2/
https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/glib2/glib2/Debian:
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/libglib2.0-0
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/libglib2.0-cilThis is the common case, but Debian gets really out there some times.
And I’ll just say
dnfis a much easier to use tool:dnf install /usr/bin/aprogram
dnf install 'pkgconfig(glib-2.0)'Never noticed. I don’t use much developer stuff. I was talking about regular apps like htop. Fedora names are uncommon for them.
No its not, the package is literally “htop”.
Hmm in my case many packages were in package.x86_64 format or something similar.
Every package has an architecture but you never have to care about it.
M’lady…
You joke, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s at the back of some people’s minds.
There’s also the whole association with Red Hat, and since Red Hat got bought, went corporate and murdered CentOS, Fedora is tainted somehow.
These things aren’t necessarily good reasons to not recommend Fedora, (for those see other comments) but they’re reasons nonetheless.
murdered CentOS
Ehh that is rather unforgivable and I did not even know!
Deff no fedora for me now!
They didn’t murder centos, they changed its development so that its upstream of RHEL, one point release ahead. For 95% of deployments it makes no difference, for the last few percent RHEL proper is available for free for non-commercial purposes and if it’s commercial then buy a license or use another clone.
Most people have bought into FUD, and spout off the same BS points, and were never centos users to begin with.
You say that like it was a small thing, but small things don’t create such bad feeling, cause most of the Centos volunteer team to resign, create off two entirely new distributions (Rocky and Alma). The subsequent paywalling of RHEL sourcecode and its accompanying spiteful communications make it clear where Redhat’s focus is - or, rather, isn’t. People judge companies by what they say and do, and I and many others are deeply concerned for the future of RHEL after the IBM takeover and are moving away from it.
I think there is a lot of nostalgia about the great work that Redhat did (and still does, at a smaller scale) and are overlooking what it’s become but RHEL as a business product is not the force it once was. I think it’s entirely possible that Redhat/IBM will simply pull the plug on RHEL and the entire EL universe will need some serious remapping if its to survive.
(Was a Centos user, still maintain 180 EL servers, am quite aware of the FUD, much of which originated and still does in the other direction from Redhat and its employees. The Centos 8 announcement came just after I’d manually migrated 60 vms to it, which then needed migrating again to another distro - so this did cause us some significant work and cost.)
cause most of the Centos volunteer team to resign
The centos volunteers never resigned because of RH. The reason RH got centos was because centos almost didn’t get a few major releases out. It wasn’t until other companies started providing support for their own RHEL derivatives that they chose to restrict sources.
RH had taken over the Centos project and Board by that time. You’re right that Centos was already circling the drain in terms of resources (I remember waiting many weeks for point releases), but the way they did this was brutal and poorly communicated.
And remember those downstream ‘rebuilds’ only appeared to fill the vacuum caused by Centos disappearing. That they’re both doing very well does make you question whether Centos could have been sustained in its traditional form. (As opposed to Stream, which is only of benefit to Redhat and those in its testing cycle)
a lot of reasonable for the money shot tho
were never centos users to begin with.
They didn’t murder centos
They murdered it, hollowed it out, then re-used the name for something completely new. Granted, what’s new is far from a bad thing, and despite having half the support cycle, the cycle itself is way more consistent and constant because there is no lag time between minor updates (because there are none). Releases are still apparently checked by RH QA, and bug fixes now come a little faster, too.
Most people have bought into FUD, and spout off the same BS points, and were never centos users to begin with.
I’ll do you one better: the centos users got exactly what they paid for, and were able to step in at any time to keep centos from turning into centos stream by making their own supported distro. Nobody did until centos original was gone, and were somehow surprised that a distro with a fixed 10 year support cycle takes a nontrivial amount of resources to run. I guess Oracle kind of tried to make their own version of centos with OL before the advent of CentOS Stream, though it was far from being “by the community, for the community”.
I’ve actually had someone thumb their nose at linux because of that name. “You mean the hat OS? The one those weird guys use? No thanks.” I’m paraphrasing but ya, that association is there for some people.
U dropped ur fedora, king
Newer, less stable packages. I’ve been on Fedora as a daily driver since 2009 and have had yum updates break things. I do RHEL full-time so I’ve got the know-how to unravel it, but it’s not for the noob / non-technical, at least not at first.
I’ve been on Fedora as a daily driver since 2009 and have had yum updates break things.
Ah yes, when yum was the package manager, you had some breakage. As context for the readers here: dnf replaced yum in 2015, almost a decade ago: https://lwn.net/Articles/640420/
I do RHEL full-time so I’ve got the know-how to unravel it, but it’s not for the noob / non-technical, at least not at first.
Also, “noob / non-technical” users just use Gnome Software and not command line package managers.
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?
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.
