Fedora’s philosophy is free software only. So vanilla Fedora ships with FOSS only. Imo, they’re really good at this, but I personally couldn’t live with that. The community maintained fusion repository is essential because of Nvidia drivers and full ffmpeg. Steam is in a separate non-free repo as well.
Other than than tidbit, Fedora is easy to install, well maintained, has a large community and wide third party support (as in software devs often build “native fedora” binaries available on their repo).
I prefer it to any other Fedora based distro, but for the reason above, it may not be best suited for the average lemming.
Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community. For noobies, a good, familiarish desktop environment and comprehensive hardware support are really the most important things for them not to immediately bounce off.
Arch can be great and you can install whatever desktop environment you like, but there are just too many concepts for the average new user. Making a USB install stick is “difficult” enough to make a lot of people give up.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops. It’s easy enough to install whatever drivers you need, but again that can be just one thing too many for a new user.
That’s pretty much it. The most obvious difference between Debian and Fedora is that Debian uses apt with deb files for package management, while Fedora uses dnf and rpm files.
The typical advice is:
As usual OpenSuSE gets totally forgotten. Tumbleweed is 5the most stable rolling release I’ve ever seen.
Oh yeah! I’ve always heard good things about OpenSuSE, just never tried it. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl on my other old laptop.
really? I haven’t touched regular fedora, how is the “vanilla” version different to derivities and other “vanilla” distros like debian or arch?
Fedora’s philosophy is free software only. So vanilla Fedora ships with FOSS only. Imo, they’re really good at this, but I personally couldn’t live with that. The community maintained fusion repository is essential because of Nvidia drivers and full ffmpeg. Steam is in a separate non-free repo as well.
Other than than tidbit, Fedora is easy to install, well maintained, has a large community and wide third party support (as in software devs often build “native fedora” binaries available on their repo).
I prefer it to any other Fedora based distro, but for the reason above, it may not be best suited for the average lemming.
Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community. For noobies, a good, familiarish desktop environment and comprehensive hardware support are really the most important things for them not to immediately bounce off.
I have never installed Arch, but I guess it doesn’t; but debian does come with various DEs , including KDE and Gnome.
Arch can be great and you can install whatever desktop environment you like, but there are just too many concepts for the average new user. Making a USB install stick is “difficult” enough to make a lot of people give up.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops. It’s easy enough to install whatever drivers you need, but again that can be just one thing too many for a new user.
ah ok, so fedora is generic and more up to date for new hardware, but debian lacks … cutting edge support, otherwise, it’s just as good for newbies.
And arch is still wiki based to install, even if you use archinstall.
That’s pretty much it. The most obvious difference between Debian and Fedora is that Debian uses apt with deb files for package management, while Fedora uses dnf and rpm files.