Linux

• requires a fair bit of post-installation configuration (suboptimal OOTB experience for newbies)
• Uses btrfs by default but comes with no snapshots or GUI manager pre-configured for system restore
• Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint
• More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint

People generally recommend Debian-based distributions because they tend to be more popular, have more applications designed first and foremost to work on them, and tend to have the most community support because they are more popular.

A crash 1-2 times a week sounds very strange no matter what Linux distro you're using. I would suggest testing your RAM right away, it could be a hardware problem.

Why does nobody here ever recommend Fedora to noobs?

It does happen. It's simply not the popular choice for the following reasons:

• Fedora and its predecessors were until relatively recently simply more cumbersome in use compared to Debian and Ubuntu;
  • There was a time (like at least over 10 years ago) in which package managers didn't necessarily know how to resolve dependencies. However, Debian's package manager at the time did it earlier than the package manager found on Fedora's predecessor. Hence, this was a clear reason to prefer Debian or Ubuntu over Fedora('s predecessor).
  • Freezing packages and offering stable releases with two years of support (like Debian does), has been and continues to be a very pleasant way to run your Linux OS. That's why, even in the past, Fedora's slower cousin (i.e. CentOS) was very popular (though being RHEL clone didn't hurt either). Fedora, on the other hand, offers a semi-rolling release cycle of 6 months with only 13 months of support since release. With semi-rolling release, I refer to the fact that some packages are frozen and some are not frozen. Hence, you should expect daily updates. Access to the latest and greatest software is great. However, every update is a possible cause/reason for something to bork/break on your system. It's therefore unsurprising that some prefer the predictability found on other distros. Though, for the sake of completeness, one has to mention that Fedora Atomic does a great job at tackling this problem; especially the uBlue projects.
  • A couple of years back, Fedora switched in quick succession to systemd, Wayland and GTK4. Thankfully, I didn't experience this for myself. But, from what I could gather, it was a mess. Users, perhaps rightfully so, questioned Fedora's decision-making. While Fedora wasn't particular loved, this didn't help to retain new users, nor did it help to cultivate a trusted environment.
• Due to the previous reason, Fedora has not particularly been a very popular distro. Hence, troubleshooting your issues through Google is less straightforward compared to Linux Mint or Ubuntu. Additionally, as Fedora's user base has primarily been more experienced users compared to the ones found on Linux Mint or Ubuntu, it's unsurprising to find less discussion on elementary stuff. Simply by virtue of Fedora's user base already being past that.
• Fedora, like Debian and openSUSE, offers a relatively bare bones experiences. It does make a lot of sane decisions for you. However, it doesn't focus on being particularly GUI-friendly or newbie-friendly. By contrast, distros like Bazzite, Linux Mint, ~~Manjaro,~~ MX Linux, Nobara, Pop!_OS and Zorin OS (amongst others), do put thought and effort into streamlining the experience as much as they can; especially for newer users.
• While Fedora is ~~primarily~~ community-driven, Red Hat's influence is undeniable. As such, people that hate corporate interest and/or Red Hat and/or IBM will favor the use of Arch and Debian.

Having said all of that, I've been using Fedora Atomic for over two years now. Heck, Silverblue was my first distro. And it has been excellent so far. Furthermore, with Bazzite (based on Fedora Atomic) and Nobara (based on Fedora) often mentioned in conversations regarding beginner friendly distros, even if Fedora itself isn't explicitly mentioned, the ecosystem is clearly healthy and will continue to flourish.

Because on Fedora sometimes you are required to use terminal for some stuff like installing nvidia drivers and you dont really want to send a total beginner to Fedora

Long-time Fedora user here. I do not think Fedora is noob friendly at all.

• Their installer is awful
• Their spins are really well hidden for people who don't know they exist
• The Nvidia drivers can't be installed via the GUI
• There's no "third party drivers" tool at all
• The regular Flathub repo is not the default and their own repo is absolutely useless
• AMD/Intel GPUs lack hardware acceleration for H264 and H265 out of the box, adding them requires the console
• Their packages are consistently named differently than their Ubuntu/Debian counterpart

I really like Fedora for their newish packages without breaking constantly. I still would not recommend it for beginners.

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.

I wouldn't be confident in recommending Fedora to noobs, because its a distribution that is on the bleeding edge side. But it depends on what type of noob we are talking about. There are noobs in Linux, who are technically well versed in Windows and have no problem in adapting to a new system. If someone wants to have the newest software, then Fedora might be it.

Also not many people have experience with Fedora, therefore less likely to be recommended. Most people use or used Ubuntu, maybe even started with Ubuntu. You or me may not like it, but its proven that Ubuntu is generally a good choice for newcomers to get into Linux. And that also plays into how many people know and are able to help. In contrast, Fedora is too much of a niche.

I wouldn't recommend fedora plain, but the ublue atomic spins are great. Really solid lots of choices (use case, DE, hardware...) personally I use bazzite on the desktop and aurora on the laptop.

The problem with Fedora and especially the atomic versions is that when you Google "how to do X on Linux" you pretty much always get information for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives. The atomic versions have it mildly harder because now you also have to learn how immutable distros work, and you can't just make install something from GitHub (not that it's recommended to do so, but if you just want your WiFi to work and that's all you could find, it's your best option).

It's not as bad as it used to be thanks to Flatpak and stuff, but if you're really a complete noob the best experience will be the one you can Google and get a working answer as easily as possible.

Once you're familiar and ready to upgrade then it makes sense to go to other distros like Fedora, Nobara, Bazzite, Kionite and whatnot.

I don't like Ubuntu, I feel like Mint is to Ubuntu what Manjaro is to Arch, Pop_OS is okay when it doesn't uninstall your DE when installing Steam. But I still recommend those 3 to noobs because everyone knows how to get things working on those, and the guides are mostly interchangeable as well. Purely because it's easy to search for help with those. I just tell them when you're tired of the bugs and comfortable enough with Linux then go start distrohopping a bit to find your more permanent home.

When the time came to pick which boring old man distro to use, the people who picked and would recommend fedora all got jobs supporting rhel. They don’t have time or energy to devote to computer touching when they get home from their serious business jobs making sure the computer keeps increasing shareholder value.

Fedora is very good.

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

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

I would not encourage anyone to join the EL universe as I don't consider it as stable as others.

TLDR; Redhat's being absorbed into IBM and they don't care about RHEL. RHEL (in my view) is dying a slow death. Without RHEL, there is no Fedora or Centos Stream. There'd also be no Rocky or Alma, as things currently stand.

(Although if that happened, I'd not be surprised if the users of Fedora merged with Rocky and Alma in some form of new and fully independent distro - we've already seen how well such disasters can be worked around)

Longer reasoning: Redhat, in my view, have made some unpredictable and frankly terrible decisions over the past few years with RHEL which have caused a great deal of concern in the business sector about its stability as a product. (Prematurely ending Centos 8 six years early, paywalling the source code, and more recent anti-rebuilder steps. They also treated the community team working for Centos appallingly throughout these leading to many resignations.) Further more, these were communicated without warning or consultation and have sometimes come across as petty and spiteful, rather than as professional business decisions.

IBM bought Redhat shortly before this happened, mostly for its cloud services. It seems from the outside that RHEL is being squeezed. There have been two major rounds of layoffs. In all, this paints a picture of a company that is in decline and we've seen a reduction in contributions to the excellent work done by Redhat in the foss world. IBM have a long history of buying and absorbing companies - I don't see why Redhat would be any different and RHEL doesn't make enough money.

Our company is moving away from EL and I know of several others who are doing so. We're all choosing Debian.

And not only did everything “just work” flawlessly, but it’s so much faster and more polished than I ever knew Linux to be!

Congrats, you are very lucky. But try to survive couple of version upgrades before recommending it to noobs.

I think Fedora is solid choice. I will tell you why I do not recommend it to new users myself.

1 - Fedora is very focused on being non-commercial ( see my other comments on its history ). This leads them to avoid useful software like codecs that I think new users will expect out of the box

2a- the support cycle is fairly short and whole release upgrades are required

2b - Fedora is typically an early adopter of new tech. It is not “bleeding edge” but it may be moreso than new users need.

3 - it is does not really target new users like say Mint does though it does target GUI use

4 - I do not use it myself anymore and I do not like to recommend what I do not use. What I do use has a reputation for not being new user appropriate ( not sure I agree ).

Nothing wrong with Fedora though in my view. I would never discourage anybody from trying it.

Usually people recommend what they use and like. A majority of people is on ubuntu/mint. Hence, they recommend that. I don't like apt and I'd never send someone in the debian world unless they want a server. But nowadays the package manager doesn't matter too much anyway. You should use flatpaks first, and then distrobox, nix, or native (rpm). You won't feel a real difference between major distros because you don't interact with the underlying system too much.

Fedora is perfect for beginners. And especially atomic versions as you said are great for beginners. Atomic versions are not good for tinkerers, so if you send someone who wants to customize his experience heavily, he's going to have a hard time on atomic versions as a beginner. A casual pc user who will edit docs and browse internet prpfits immensely from fedora and atomic version. Fedora has awesome defaults and a new user does not need to care about recent advances in linux because fedora implements them already. Especially ublue improves upon fedora's ecosystem.

I prefer Fedora. I think Fedora lost the war on easy Linux branding to Ubuntu 15 years ago.

M’lady…

I had a similar experience on my laptop. I tried Ubuntu which broke after trying to throw on Nvidia drivers (using the official docs). I tried Mint and Debian, both of which couldn't detect my laptop's wifi card (after hours of trying to fix - apparently a common issue but the fixes did not work for me!). I landed on Fedora, worked great. I'm now on EndeavourOS, but Fedora was the stepping stone I needed.

My desktop I built recently is Bazzite, which is Fedora based and I love it.

if you like fedora, have you tried endeavour?

I put my tech illiterates on Fedora with GNOME without issue. If you're the one doing the installation and can install the RPMFusion stuff like drivers and codecs then yeah it's pretty smooth sailing.

Fedora sounds like a redditor distro. That's why I never recommend it

I find it pretty problematic how Ubuntu is messed up and still used as default distro.

Fedora has issues with always being a bit early. I prefer it a lot over buggy Kubuntu, as I use KDE, but for example now 6.1 is too early and still has bugs, while Plasma 6 was really well tested (with Rawhide, Kinoite beta and Kinoite nightly being available)

Fedora has tons of variants and packages, and COPR is full of stuff. The forums are nice, Discourse is a great tool.

It uses Flatpak, but adds its legally restricted repo by default.

The traditional variants... I think apt is better. I did one dnf system upgrade to F40 and it was pretty messy.

The rpm-ostree atomic desktops are really good, but not complete. For example GRUB is simply not updated at all. This is hopefully fixed with F41.

Or the NVIDIA stuff, or nonfree codecs, which are all issues even more on atomic.

So the product is not really ready to use, while rpmfusion sync issues happen multiple times a year. This is no issue on the atomic variants, but there you need to layer many packages, which causes very slow updates.

I am also not a fan of their "GUI only" way, so you will for example never have useful common CLI tools on the atomic variants, for no reason.

It is pretty completely vanilla, which is very nice.

Does Bazzite count? I recommend Bazzite

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.

Because Ubuntu LTS works very reliably and because there's a huge body of information and large swathes of people who can help on the Internet, and because every project and vendor tests and releases their stuff for Ubuntu/Debian and has documentation for it.

Despite the hate you see around these shores, Ubuntu LTS is among the best if not the best beginner distro. Importantly it scales to any other proficiency level. The skill and knowledge acquired while learning Ubuntu transfers to Debian as well as working professionally with either of them.

Also, with the fuckery RedHat pulls lately, it's a disservice to new users to get them to learn the RedHat ecosystem, unless they plan or need to use it professionally. If I had to bet, I'd bet that the RH ecosystem would be all but deserted by volunteers in the years to come. I bet that as we speak a whole lotta folks donating their time are coming to the conclusion that Debian was right and are abandoning ship.

Fedora has no selling point at all besides being similar to RHEL.

I’m probably going to get downvoted for this but I’m a Linux noob overall…. Windows has historically been what I’ve used. Or Ubuntu. I did distrohop to antixLinux and other really super small distros, but they didn’t fix my problems and I ended up back on relatively bloaty Ubuntu for further testing and sadly it solved bout a third of my problems (the hardware is ancient enterprise shit with a whopping 4gb ram and 16 usb ports)

I’ve been looking for a Debian based system to replace Ubuntu because I’m a noob and Debian-based is super different from the fedora.

I’m sure fedora is great! Tons of people love it! But for a noob is can be really daunting. Especially when most Linux instructions come in three flavors “Ubuntu/debian” and 2 other things. Who knows which two. You, the advanced Linux user, probably know which two but your noob doesn’t. And doesn’t understand the difference.

I’m not a total noob but I prefer Debian because I know a person who gets Debian and can help me. If I knew a fedora user that was actually willing to help me, I’d use that, but I’ve never met one so I’ll stick with what I know.

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).

I am installing fedora kinoite to most of the people I install gnulinux to. All noobs.

I tried it, but Firefox didn't play some videos. As it turns out, it was an issue with non open source codecs. I'm not helping anyone navigate those issues, I'd rather point them out to a ready to go kind of distribution.