when i worked with RHEL,centos and rpm, I liked it quite a bit. However, ever switching to ubuntu, everything just works better and it seems like more people use ubuntu based distributions.
If fedora software is actually newer, it might be a worthy desktop
I think it switched cause I wanted Wayland and more recent Gnome at the time. Everything more or less always seems to work without issue, I’ve done upgrades, swapped out hardware over the years and never had any show-stopping bugs.
More recently I became a package maintainer and it’s been an excellent process, from the documentation to the community. I used to be weary of RPM and the “dependency hell” but it’s not really a thing anymore.
I like picking the right tool for the job, and so far Fedora has worked out well in this regard, but Ubuntu, MacOS, Windows, etc all have their place.
I've been using it since Fedora 21 which amounts to almost 8 years. In these 8 years, I've had zero problems with the OS - besides some proprietary Nvidia driver issues which are/were pretty common on Linux; since I've switched to AMD GPUs I haven't had any problems whatsoever. Upgrades go smooth every time, even when upgrading to beta versions.
Fedora is a rock-solid distro and I always recommend it over alternatives.
Not that you asked, but for servers, it has been ubuntu all the way for me...but that's simply for familiarity, and work has only required a basic ubuntu server to do a job, and cary on with other matters. I have no experience with non-ubuntu stuff on the server side. While i know tons of people who run CentOS on servers, i don't know anyone who personally runs fedora on the server. (I'm excluding mention of good ol' Solaris, BSD, and other unix systems from back in the ol' days of course. ;-)
I think it depends which sub-populations you measure. The modern web and social media can make it hard to understand how your anecdata are sourced. I think the marketing behind Ubuntu is a large part of its visibility, expanding into a bit of a vacuum left by Red Hat's turn towards enterprise and away from regular users. This has compounded over the years with more network effects among new users. I'd say that cloud hosting and blogging environments have had more novice user influence than prior enterprise and university-based environments that had more senior-driven inertia.
From my POV of academic and scientific computing with a sprinkling of enterprise consultancy, there used to be a strong Red Hat bias in US (maybe North American?) Linux usage with SuSE having a similar role in Europe. When RHEL emerged, this preference was inherited by CentOS and Scientific Linux. I don't know exactly how my own filter bubble developed, but I had little awareness of Debian until the Ubuntu marketing arrived and I read the back story. It was one of those parallel world experiences. Perhaps I knew more about SuSE as "the competitor" due to high-performance computing conferences being dominated by US, western Europe, and East Asia participation back in those days.
Although I did accidentally screw up the Windows install while doing an upgrade.
It's great.
It also typically "just works" and has much newer packages in it's repos.
I am much preferring the experience vs. [k]ubuntu.