Will Red Hat's acquisition hurt fedora?
There’s a difference between what you want to happen and what you think will happen...
How so? Is there some official statement from Fedora? That's surprising.
Fedora just doesn't really have a home anymore and hasn't done anything to really set itself aside from the competition.
Fedora users are testers for RedHat, this does not mean that next RH release will be identical to Fedora from today, as an example the current RH uses a classical GNOME setup by default in a way telling us that GNOME UX innovations were not appreciated by RH for the workstations
Somehow I dont see the emoji picker making it into rhel 8 though!
So the "easy" desktop user is on its way out.
I got started with Ubuntu around 2008. I wish I could remember why I took the leap from Windows to Linux exactly, but I've forgotten what prompted me to try it. Ubuntu seemed to surge in popularity around that time. Now that I've tried both though, I have a hard time understanding why anyone who is familiar with both Fedora and Ubuntu would choose Ubuntu.
Since Fedora 28, I agree. Prior to that, I very much preferred the Ubuntu installer to the Fedora one.
In my neck of the woods, neither of these is true. Ubuntu was the standard for a long time and is almost certainly a strong majority of new desktop installs, but I've seen Fedora make something of a resurgence over the last couple years to the point where "all but owns" is too strong a phrase.
I know one person who uses Arch. (I will say this: unlike the Gentoo folks, you can't tell an Arch user.) And it seems...fine. But I think calling it a "standard" for power users is a stretch.
1) The US is where all the sexiest, high-end laptops are made.
2) The newest hardware often has flaky support at first, basically until the people who are using it (Red Hat engineers, etc.) submit patches to get hardware support into the kernel.
3) Getting those laptops working thus requires using a bleeding edge kernel, which is most easily achieved by using Fedora.
Again, just my personal experience. It happened to me twice (first with the original Chromebook Pixel and then with the Dell XPS 13 9343) where I used Fedora because only Fedora with the latest kernel properly supported the hardware. Now my XPS 13 is several generations old and well-supported by all the major distros, but I stuck with Fedora because I really enjoyed the distro.