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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

> Swapped to Arch and haven't looked back yet, Arch took me a lot more work to get set up but once it was it's been pretty invisible, which is how I like my OS to be.

I think that Fedora Workstation[1] is a #1 alternative to Ubuntu in terms of smoothness and ease of use. And if .deb is a requirement – then simply Debian.

[1] https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/

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I went to flavours of Ubuntu (Pop/Mint) to Manjaro, to Fedora.

I love fedora, it just works. I've had 1 issue so far, NVidia GPU on Dell XPS 15. Had to disable noveau and its rock solid.

Kind of creepy, but you just described, step for step, how I ended up running Fedora's KDE Spin on all my boxes over the past year. I really wanted to like Manjaro, I mean the AUR is incredible and their visual design even uses all my favorite colors, but despite my best efforts it felt alien to me in a way I can't well articulate.

Now enter Fedora for the past 4-5 months and I have to say I'm rather impressed. In particular, their package archives seem to keep current with a lot of the software I rely on far better than Debian/Ubuntu. Using dnf feels much more familiar than pacman ever did, and as of now I feel like my search for a daily driver has ended. I would recommend anyone else that's not happy with the experience of Ubuntu anymore to do likewise and see how Fedora feels in its place.

I went Fedora because of someones recommendation on HN when complaining about some issues I was having with other distros. But i too feel like my search for a daily driver has ended!

eh Fedora requires many additional steps to get hardware accelerated video decoding or proprietary drivers working.

With Ubuntu it's all out of the box.

Seconded. Fedora is very much NOT an all-ready-out-of-the-box experience, unless you are a FLOSS dev.

> Fedora is very much NOT an all-ready-out-of-the-box experience, unless you are a FLOSS dev.

Nah it's pretty close if you have an integrated Intel or AMD system, you really don't need closed-source drivers for much except Nvidia these days. Chrome is in the non-free Fedora repositories (or can be installed easily from the website with an .rpm) and that's all most normal users need.

Do they stroll restrict nonfree audio/video codecs?

I would use fedora, but I want my repository set limited to trusted sources only. Core repositories are RedHat endorsed, afaict the user managed ones are not.

I want the ability to say that packages are from maintainers that are well trusted in a court of law. I cannot do that with fedora due to this, Ubuntu seems to be my only solution and it’s rapidly becoming unusable (I don’t hate snap, but it’s broken my workflow).

> Do they still restrict nonfree audio/video codecs?

Yes they do. If you don't like to use RPMfusion you could use something like the mpv flatpak from flathub that has all codecs bundled.

Plus codecs, plus font rendering, plus cutting edge being too cutting edge sometimes.

Like I said, FLOSS devs don't rely on closed blobs so they don't have this problem.

> codecs

Most websites people care about use open codecs these days (Google and Netflix use VP9 and AV1, both are open and royalty-free).

Never had an issue with font rendering. And cutting edge being too cutting edge might be an issue with some dev things but having up to date Gnome and apps is fine.

People care about fans spinning up and batteries draining. Video not being hardware accelerated is a bad ootb experience and the type of reason Ubuntu became so big.

You don't need to be a developer, the average computer enthusiast is capable of googling the matter figuring it out. It may not be appropriate for the "colloquial grandmother" sort of user, but you certainly don't need to be a computer programmer to figure it out. There's a lot of ground in-between those.

My dad is a retired accountant and a computer enthusiast since the 80s. Never a programmer, but he does this kind of stuff. Has managed his own linux installations for about 15 years.

Googling =\= ootb.

Able to google =\= FLOSS dev

Arguing that one, if skilled at Googling, can configure the distro correctly underlines my point.

Nobara Project[1] helps with this. It is somewhat gaming-on-linux focused, but for some, like myself, that's a win. I use it on both my desktop (Intel CPU, AMD GPU) and my Thinkpad T480: works great on both.

[1] https://nobaraproject.org

Another good alternative could be openSUSE: https://www.opensuse.org/ - also pretty smooth, with user-friendly configuration tools, and no snap nonsense. WSL users might also be interested in using that for their distro instead of Ubuntu.

I used to use opensuse around 2010, and had very pleasant experience with it. Things just worked, and their Yast tool was very handy. I used to joke that opensuse is the Mercedes of linux distro :).

I am wondering why it isn't more popular. Is there any sentiment/experience people would like to share about this distro?

It's the second biggest Linux company behind Redhat, so I think it's reasonably popular. It's also been a while since I used it, but I'll also point out that it's developed primarily in Germany, so it's entirely possible it's just not as popular in the English speaking community.

However, the licensing agreement with Microsoft put many people in the open source community off, so I think that's contributed to its decline among hobby users.

Ubuntu does a pretty good job marketing-wise, many people start they journey with Ubuntu and never look for other distros. Or on the other hand, they end up on advanced/continuous-maintenance distros like Arch Linux.

Do you really think 'continuous maintenance' is an appropriate category for Arch? That hasn't been my experience.

If you go to an Arch community and you say you haven’t updated your system in a month, they will be mad.

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