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In some ways Ubuntu has kinda lost it's course with the whole Unity unification. Fedora 25 spins are now much nicer use if you don't mind upgrading every year and if you want LTS type of system Ubuntu still rocks, although I find it much less stable than it used to be.

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My father used to be a big Ubuntu fan, before Unity came along, which he instantly hated (describing it with words like 'childish' and 'tinker-toy'). I tried him on various alternatives, such as Mint or KDE, all of which were pretty unsatisfactory for various reasons.

But then, just recently, I gave Ubuntu another try, and discovered that MATE is an out-of-the-box installation option --- and it's lost all the Unity nonsense and now provides a clean, stripped down, unfussy desktop environment where everything works and nothing gets in your way. Both he and I like it a great deal, and because it's an official Ubuntu release it's way more stable than Mint is.

> and discovered that MATE is an out-of-the-box installation option

Yeah, Ubuntu MATE is nice, when using net-installer i.e MinimalCD one could get just the Ubuntu + MATE + system-utilities without all the bloat and then just add the preferred programs no fuss, no buzz.

I have to agree, Fedora 25 is very nice now.

I also like, where they are going in long term - see Owen Taylor's "Reworking the desktop distribution" talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNLPkMDf9LI

I liked the Fedora Interface, but it lacks several packages that I use (Kodi comes to mind, but there were others) SE Linux is always reporting security issues and makes enabling any networking feature a royal pain. Worse, when something doesn't work there is a fraction of the support articles and posts on the Internet. They also changed the package manager from Yum, so a lot of new things to learn since I last used 17. At least they seem to have fixed the network management. Anyway, the recent upgrade to 25 killed my display adapter, and after spending way too much time trying to sort out and reinstalling, I switched back to Ubuntu for desktop. I still use Debian for servers/beaglebone. I also like having a common package manager and config files for both systems. YMMV....

> it lacks several packages that I use (Kodi comes to mind

    $ dnf search kodi
    kodi.x86_64 : Media center
    ...

> They also changed the package manager from Yum, so a lot of new things to learn since I last used 17

    $ yum search kodi
    Redirecting to '/usr/bin/dnf search kodi' (see 'man yum2dnf')

    kodi.x86_64 : Media center
    ...

Try using it. It doesn't have the same modules as Ubuntu, so the answer is to load from a separate source. Even then, Kodi Remote wouldn't work (SELinux?), no visualizations, sound subsystem issues and I was done. I have bettter things to do with my time.

Xubuntu has been fantastic for me, hasn't changed much in many years.

How well is KDE supported in Fedora?

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