For new users Ubuntu is by far the sanest distribution because it ships with codecs and drivers, is backed by a sizable company, and has by far the widest software support. Only Linux enthusiasts are obsessed with snaps.
It ships with more up to date hardware support then Ubuntu.
I usually recommend Fedora for stability and up to date packages. And this is someone that has used Ubuntu since 4.04 and recently a ton of Arch/Manjaro usage. I have personally switched to Fedora with how little fiddling i need to do and how stable everything is, and things just work. If you want to go Arch, I recommend EndeavorOS for that.
I would recommend PopOS as a 2nd option after Fedora though, its the better distro of the Debian descendents.
I find it interesting that you say that, though, if only because Warty is when I personally moved from SUSE to Ubuntu, and I've never seen any reason to switch. My occasional trials of Fedora seem to have drawn the reverse conclusion to you.
* There are no stable releases. For boxes I work on, I want something slow-changing and stable. For boxes I experiment with, I want something fairly fast-moving and agile. For me, the LTS/short-term split is perfect for that.
* Ubuntu is more pragmatic about proprietary drivers and so on. Fedora makes it a pain.
* Ubuntu's 3rd party driver support is the best in the industry, AFAICT.
So I am curious to know in what ways you find Fedora better than Ubuntu.
For me, Ubuntu has too many old packages, so it's too unchanging. The 6 month span is plenty for stability for me.
To me stability revolves around stuff breaking between updates, or installing packages causing incompatibilities that eventually degrade the system. I had a lot of that with Manjaro.
While Ubuntu has little of that, it's also too safe, too behind. There were so many times I needed a slightly newer version than what Ubuntu offered, so I would need to hunt for PPAs, manually maintain Deb files, or find other means of keeping stuff up to date. My sources.list.d would be littered with extra repos.
Fedora is a lot more up to date, their repositories are a lot more filled out. I found stuff in the repos that is not in the Ubuntu repos. They are usually fairly up to date, or at most x.x.1 behind kind of thing.
* 2 years is too old. Might be stable but outdated.
* I have had no problems with proprietary drivers. Most of my machines are amd GPUs, but I have a Nvidia 2070 laptop that works fine. Just installed from dnf and it works.
* I haven't hit any 3rd party driver needs. Printers, PC components, accessories. They all work fine without third party drivers. But it could also be because Fedora has a more up to date kernel.
Anyways, I value a balance of up to date software, stability, and just getting out of the way. Which Fedora, especially Fedora 36 that I'm using, does better than Ubuntu and it's derivatives do.
I will say, I just recently switched to Fedora after last trying it many years ago and hating it. I had a bit of hate for the RPM world since old Red Hat Linux days before I made the jump to Ubuntu. So it might be a honeymoom phase, but I'm so much happier with Fedora than the Debian based ecosystem.
I write about this stuff for a living these days, so I am trying to widen the range of distros that I try, that I use, and to learn more about why people choose particular ones.
Also Fedora relies a lot on Flatpaks for most desktop software, so the repos only come into play for command-line tools or something more system related or if you want a native copy of something. Like Discord, Slack, Element, etc are all flatpaks on my install.
Then tools like exa, ripgrep, and so on come from Fedora repos or `asdf` if not in the repos or if i temporarily need a fix in a latest version that is a bit behind in Fedora.
For everyday users, the difference isnt huge if they want to word process, browse the web, play some games, print stuff, get some photos off a camera, etc.
I think in the end I just wanted something between Ubuntu and a rollign release system like Arch or even Suse Tumbleweed.
This again leads to the conclusion that they did not understand what a distro is about. Of course you want to support all the packages / desktops that come with a distro, not just your preferred set of packages. In fact they are actively destroying other parts of the distro with that.
Instead they should just offer a PPA repo with their modifications / addons - but much better would be if they just fed their changes to upstream instead of pretending to release a whole distro when in fact they just release some packages and maintaining the whole thing is way too much for them.
That leaves a bad taste. It is not clear why they need to release their additions and modifications in such a way, but for me as a new Linux user it was one of the most interesting revelations that I could (un-) install several desktop environments without any problems, this was a huge learning motivation.
So unfortunately this POPOS thing must be declared as a "false" attempt on how to distribute software for Linux. I still would recommend Ubuntu for newcomers, but teach them that several problems that might come up still exist - that is the price for software freedom you have to pay. Still snaps are not a real problem for many users and I understand why they exist, but personally find them horrible, too.
I also tried kubuntu starting out because i wanted a plasma desktop but found it a bit janky defaults wise. I settled on Manjaro KDE tho. Much nicer defaults, much more software available after checking some boxes in the software centre and choosing the nvidia drivers was relatively easy. (a neat menu to choose between the various options of open source or nvidias own stuff)
That said I think it's still a fine distro to explore for folks new to Linux.