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I used to recommend Ubuntu or Mint. These days, it's switched to Mint or Fedora. Ubuntu's ability to "just work" has been unsatisfactory for a while, while Mint's and Fedora's has only been getting better. I recently did a Fedora upgrade, and the only thing that broke was my hacked-up xmonad setup, which was to be expected. Everything else was either the same or better.

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If Ubuntu can get unity very responsive and polished I'll give it another go. Ever since unity came out i've overheard a disturbing number of people complaining about stability and just the user experience in general.

Who are you recommending Fedora to?

Ubuntu was a good recommendation for people who could just about re-install Windows. Fedora, not so much.

((Ubuntu is also good for many other users too!) I'm using Fedora on my other machine.)

Generally, I'm recommending Fedora KDE (what I use) to somewhat tech-savvy people who are seriously looking into Linux and asking me for recommendations. If I'm just trying to get someone off of Windows, I recommend Mint. It's the first Linux distro I genuinely enjoyed using, since if I wanted to tweak I had room to tweak, and if I wanted to get work done it tended to Just Work. (I used Fedora 11 directly beforehand, and it was horrible. When Fedora 13 came out, I hopped on that and it was great.) While I haven't used it for any significant length of time since then, what I've seen of it has been great. A friend recently started using it when I suggested it - quite a tech-savvy guy, actually - and he loves it, so I'd say it's still good.

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