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I find that suggestion odd as well. I can't think of a single reason why Ubuntu should be favoured over Fedora as a quote "easy way to try and step into GNU/Lin

I find that suggestion odd as well. I can't think of a single reason why Ubuntu should be favoured over Fedora as a quote "easy way to try and step into GNU/Linux" either. All three of their distro suggestions ship GNOME by default. Fedora is such a clear choice for those who want to use GNOME without all of the non-standard crap Canonical insists on tacking onto the DE and the overall environment.

jabbany 4y ago
As a Fedora user I can see one almost-reason. IIRC Fedora by default only ships with the FOSS repos enabled. Most average users probably want to enable the rpmfusion repos to get things like media codecs, drivers, and various other nonfree stuff. It's not hard to do this, but it makes it more of a "turn key twice" solution compared to Ubuntu.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Fedora ships proprietary firmware in their "FOSS" repos, so your first statement isn't entirely accurate. Debian will now install firmware by default too. I think the only distros that now don't are Guix and other FSF affiliated distros.
spijdar 4y ago
> Fedora is such a clear choice for those who want to use GNOME without all of the non-standard crap Canonical insists on tacking onto the DE and the overall environment. I think you've gotten unintentionally close to answering GP's question, and your own. By virtue of Fedora being the literal upstream of RHEL and getting lots of attention from the RedHat guys, it is (IMO, YMMV) both a big testing ground for new RedHat software, and also pushes new software versions and features probably more aggressively than any distro except rolling release ones. Keep in mind, software like SystemD, NetworkManager, D-Bus, the PAM implementation most distros use (Wikipedia claims some use the BSD openPAM implementation, can't find those though), PolKit, and others seem to have pretty big financial or engineering support from RedHat. Fedora ends up effectively being "the lowest common denominator" in the sense that most other distros end up being "like Fedora but with <x> replaced with <y>". The sometimes bleeding edge feature set and use of new functionality (like Wayland, systemd-resolved, pipewire off the top of my head) can make it a bit less "beginner friendly", potentially, than a more conservative distro. It also makes it very appealing if you want to understand the "technical side of Linux", since anything you learn on Fedora will probably transfer more easily to other distros than vice versa, even if Fedora is more convoluted and full of cruft. That's my takeaway, at least. Compared to Arch, a given release of Fedora will have about as up-to-date versions of major software, with the benefit of release engineering. Rolling release is a drug not everyone is strong enough to take... edit thoughts: I want to be clear, the projects that RedHat either started or is heavily involved with usually have a lot of community involvement too. I don't want to minimize the importance of other contributors, just pointing out RedHat does a decent amount of work in several low level components of "GNU/Linux"

jabbany 4y ago

As a Fedora user I can see one almost-reason. IIRC Fedora by default only ships with the FOSS repos enabled. Most average users probably want to enable the rpmfusion repos to get things like media codecs, drivers, and various other nonfree stuff. It's not hard to do this, but it makes it more of a "turn key twice" solution compared to Ubuntu.

pabs3 4y ago
Fedora ships proprietary firmware in their "FOSS" repos, so your first statement isn't entirely accurate. Debian will now install firmware by default too. I think the only distros that now don't are Guix and other FSF affiliated distros.

spijdar 4y ago

> Fedora is such a clear choice for those who want to use GNOME without all of the non-standard crap Canonical insists on tacking onto the DE and the overall environment. I think you've gotten unintentionally close to answering GP's question, and your own. By virtue of Fedora being the literal upstream of RHEL and getting lots of attention from the RedHat guys, it is (IMO, YMMV) both a big testing ground for new RedHat software, and also pushes new software versions and features probably more aggressively than any distro except rolling release ones. Keep in mind, software like SystemD, NetworkManager, D-Bus, the PAM implementation most distros use (Wikipedia claims some use the BSD openPAM implementation, can't find those though), PolKit, and others seem to have pretty big financial or engineering support from RedHat. Fedora ends up effectively being "the lowest common denominator" in the sense that most other distros end up being "like Fedora but with <x> replaced with <y>". The sometimes bleeding edge feature set and use of new functionality (like Wayland, systemd-resolved, pipewire off the top of my head) can make it a bit less "beginner friendly", potentially, than a more conservative distro. It also makes it very appealing if you want to understand the "technical side of Linux", since anything you learn on Fedora will probably transfer more easily to other distros than vice versa, even if Fedora is more convoluted and full of cruft. That's my takeaway, at least. Compared to Arch, a given release of Fedora will have about as up-to-date versions of major software, with the benefit of release engineering. Rolling release is a drug not everyone is strong enough to take... edit thoughts: I want to be clear, the projects that RedHat either started or is heavily involved with usually have a lot of community involvement too. I don't want to minimize the importance of other contributors, just pointing out RedHat does a decent amount of work in several low level components of "GNU/Linux"