is that it wasn’t my first distro and that I didn’t switch 4 years ago.
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If it was your first maybe you wouldn’t have appreciated how good it is. This is the perfect time!
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KDE or GNOME or something else?
When you’re new to Linux, you’re usually pushed by the crowds towards either Mint or Ubuntu. They’re good desktops but not great, even though Mint seems to be more stable than Fedora.
If you want to run a home server then it’s either Ubuntu again, or Debian, or something Debian based such as Raspberry Pi OS.
Then there is the loud Arch crowd on the opposite side of the spectrum confusing the hell out of noobs with all that noise.
Fedora somehow doesn’t come up a lot when you start your Linux journey. It takes some digging around. I ignored it for nearly a year while testing bazillion of other distros.
I still use Debian on my servers and will likely continue, but yeah, Fedora is probably the best desktop Linux distro, especially considering its KDE integration. I feel like KDE Plasma integration on all other distros is half baked.
Hi everyone,
I wanted to share my recent positive experience with Fedora, after having switched away for a while.
I had actually left Fedora in November '23. I had run into negative experiences with crashes and freezes using Fedora 37, 38, and 39 with the KDE desktop environment on 4 different laptops and also in VMs.
After that, I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed, Slowroll, and Linux Mint, but I encountered identical problems across those distributions as well.
When Fedora 41 was released, I decided to give it another shot and chose MATE as my DE (which I had never tried before). For this test, I used only one old laptop, about 16 years old, but with a decent SSD installed.
Fedora 41 MATE first, and now Fedora 42 MATE, have been very fluid and smooth. It supports Proton VPN Plus without any issues, which is important for me.
My daily activities are running without any major problems. Everything seems to be working great, from my printer to my Bluetooth headphones.
Just wanted to share this positive feedback!
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it wasn’t always like that. redhat was #1 distro when I started back in the late 90s
I feel you 
I also ignored Fedora too long because I believed some old myths about this distro.
In my experience the main advantage of “Ubuntu” are the “derivatives” that provide a “ready to use” desktop for whoever wants to use XFCE or Mate or LXQT or KDE. Fedora has got the “spins” but they are “vanilla” DE on top of Fedora, they don’t have their own sort of “identity”. Mint is again a sort of “derivative” of Ubuntu, it basicaly re-does the “old school GTK” with almost unified look and feel.
I did not like or understand Gnome for some time and I used mostly XFCE and then Xubuntu.
At some point it crashed whenever I tried to print. I thought to try the default “Ubuntu” and it couldn’t even load the desktop. I tried Mint but the Wireless did not work (it worked only with auto-dhcp).
At that point I was forced to look for an alternative. The options were Debian or Opensuse. Debian is nice, mostly as idea but it always look “amateur”, plus it is outdated, very. Opensuse has more or less the same drawbacks of Fedora but worse.
So it was Fedora or the agony of “exotic” distributions.
Once I got used to Gnome (the “dash on the bottom” change helped a lot) Fedora was the best option because it is updated, it looks “professional” and it never failed with my hardware so far.
I also manage to convert a couple of friends to Fedora from Windows.
As a kid in my 20’s I had time on my hands to be interested in optimising and compiling kernels, customising text editors, fixing little issues, hopping distro’s or tools etc etc.
Now I’m knee deep busy with raising my kids and keeping a career on track where I need to keep pace with technical advancements. So I need my OS to be stable and not distracting. Fedora is the closest thing in a messy Linux world to providing me just that.
Over the decades I started with Red Hat and Slackware, to Debian then moving into Arch based distros.
Today, the only distro that some times catches my eye is SUSE (slowroll), but each time I try it and question “is it worth the switch?” I answer no. Not because it’s bad, in fact it is really good, but it just isn’t enough benefits/difference to justify the switch. Perhaps if the Americans keep Trump in power and it starts to impact Fedora (American based) I’ll switch.