Selection process, I guess. I’ve gone through tens of desktop distros/DE combinations in about a year in an attempt to find a Windows desktop alternative. I initially ignored Fedora because I ran Ubuntu and Debian servers so I was more familiar with that side of things and I didn’t feel like learning much new stuff.
But I kept hearing good things about Fedora and yup, it’s by far the best. I like KDE Plasma and KDE applications and Fedora 41 offered most recent version plus latest NVIDIA drivers installation was a breeze, compared to most other distros that often make it hard, latest drivers are simply available from a repository, no voodoo required. Same goes for Steam.
Though, it seems I suffer from the NVIDIA curse and Plasma, Wayland and NVIDIA don’t mix too well even on latest Fedora
I’ll keep running Fedora 41 on a spare PC in hopes that Plasma 6.3 will improve things in February and perhaps Wayland and NVIDIA will get a patch by then.
Both Fedora and KDE forums seem to be mostly free from the usual bickering present on Linux forums that can be quite discouraging for a Windows user wanting to switch to Linux.
I came to Fedora Rawhide from Arch with Cachyos repos added. I’ve also tried Opensuse Tumbleweed (and Ubuntu). I have nothing bad to say about my prior systems, but I prefer Rawhide. I run CPU intensive tasks, but I am not a gamer and I no longer need to use CUDA – so the non-proprietary stock/default Nvidia drivers are fine for me. I like Rawhide’s latest kernels and software (often the most recent available anywhere) and I think v3 optimization is fine for my use case. Overall, I have been really impressed with the quality control over Rawhide’s rolling distribution. I’ve had no issues (although happy to report a bug if I ever experience one!). I sense the staff/resources behind Fedora are very good and are better integrated than other operating systems (e.g., Arch). Btrfs with btrfs-assistant is nice and the lynis audit score of 69 seems decent. Overall, Rawhide just seems like a really well put together and maintained system with a good community and information resources available with a simple Google search. Rawhide has actually caused me to switch from being a KDE guy to using Fedora’s default Gnome Workstation version. I have come to appreciate its simplicity and I feel it has fewer issues than the KDE spin. I put together a blog page with some notes for myself as I installed it (all post the stock installation process) in case anyone else finds it helpful: https://archsetup.blogspot.com/2024/10/quick-fedora-install.html
Not competent enough to daily arch but want the lastest software. While debian and ubuntu base was nice and easy going, got bored with it. I been diehard distrohopping for a year or so, with all the popular choices; mint, lmde ubuntu, debian, mx, arch, manjaro. Always that little something that was bothering enough to not keep it installed.
The polish and sane defaults that go into fedora as a product are all around evident. If you told me this came with my laptop I wouldn’t doubt it.
Well Recently two big things. Number 1 Bazzite, It’s just about the perfect Gamer OS. I got a mini PC and the only fuss it gave me was with Secure Boot (not really Bazzite’s fault there). Now I basically have my own Steam Machine.
Number 2 is my Framework 13 laptop I got about a year and a half ago. I started out trying all kinds of distros, other than Ubuntu and Fedora. I just felt like being a rebel and not just doing what Framework tells me to do. I will give some props to Endeavor OS though other than the occasional update braking things, it was quite nice. But after about a year of service, I kinda got tired of the paranoia I would experience every time I typed pacman -Syu. So I though, hay why don’t I just take Framework’s advice and try Fedora. And I gotta say I kinda wish I did from the start. Everything just works. It has by far the best KDE experience I’ve had on the hardware. It has the best Bluetooth support, even the fingerprint reader work out of the box.
So yeah I’ve been turning into a bit of a Fedora fanboy as of late!
