After lots of distro-hopping, using arch for many years, I switched to Fedora and never looked back. I just want things to work, and fixing little issues gets boring really quickly, so I stopped using arch.
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Exactly
mint is a really stable base, doesn't make me fiddle with the shell if i don't want to, just works out of the box, and has an installer that isn't ass.
fedora is pretty stable too but they also make things harder for users rather than easier.
Can't compare to Mint, but I'm happy with Fedora. I like it because:
- It's very up to date but not bleeding edge.
- Flatpak support is great.
- Ships with vanilla Gnome.
I prefer Mint just because it's what I'm used to. Otherwise both are pretty solid distros.
fedora works like a clock and adopts new tech first in the industry
mint feels like using windows 7 in 2023 - unreliable and dated
I like Mint. I've been a Linux user for a long time, and Mint has so many little refinements and doesn't get in my way - of course a lot of that is Cinnamon, but hey, they 're the originators of that too. Plus I'm used to apt at this point. I also find it easy to customize the way I like (nothing too crazy, just a bit): https://imgur.com/a/wPxLPkb
I tried Fedora this year and really don't like it. I'm sticking to arch/arch-based : the learning curve is steep but onse you get used to it it's really efficient.
What things do you not like about fedora?
The fact that it is difficult to personalize, firstly. Coming from Plasma and before that Zorin, I find it hard to change the look and feel of the OS.
Then there is the package manager. TBH, after having the Pacman/AUR combo, nothing ever comes close to it in terms of simplicity.
Plus I don't know but I find it bloated and laggy. But then again, maybe it's just me. That's the beautiful thing about GNU/Linux, it's that yog can choose the distro that fits your needs.
Ive been on Manjaro for a little over a year and, aside from seeming like a second class environment to other Linux systems, I'm really enjoying it
+1 for Fedora. It's very stable even with very fresh packages, I've been on the same installation for years without a hitch.
I still recommend Mint for absolute beginners tho.
I currently use Fedora Silverblue, mainly because of the easy rollback, and because it makes package management easier. I like having a default base to add and remove from (and being able to easily rebase onto a different spin). That said, regular Fedora and Mint are both solid distros.
I prefer Mint just for ease-of-use, really. I'm not a new user, by any means, and over the years I've bounced between Red Hat, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and a small handful of others that escape me at the moment. But I'm also not a power user.
With Mint, I don't have to tweak things, really. I can install and just go about doing what I want to do. As a bonus, guests aren't left scratching their heads as much if they sit down at my computer to browse the web or pull up a video. It's Windows-ish enough where they can muddle their way through with minimal issue.
I've been using Pop_OS for the last several years (both work and home machines). I just want something that I can install my IDEs and Steam on with a few clicks. I spend enough time building containers and managing services at work, don't want to put in more effort at home. If I was more of a hobbyist, I'd probably dive into something arch based.
Fedora is a great and user-friendly distro but I wouldn't really recommend it. Historically, Fedora has always been kind of test site for Red Hat and it still can be considered the upstream for RHEL with all the downsides that come with upstream software.
I am a Void user myself because I like its minimalist approach but it is not for people who are new to Linux. Whenever people I know tell me they want to try Linux, I usually recommend Mint (Which is a long-standing goto newbie distro, imo. It is polished enough and has a great community.), Pop!_OS (Great out-of-the-box hardware support.) and Endeavour (Polished and user-friendly arch-based experience.) to new linux users.
Mint is very opinionated and made explicitly for less technical users. If you have basic command line skills (or you're willing to learn) Fedora gives you more choice and in my experience it's actually more reliable than Debian based distros.
Personally I think its mostly a matter of preference and doesn't matter all that much. I like to run a fairly stock desktop environment with minimal tweaking so my setup aligns with what receives the most QA/testing and that means I generally pick distro based on the desktop environment they ship, how much I like their defaults, and how much information there is to find online.
I like vanilla Gnome so Fedora is a great pick. I was never super into how cinnamon looked so I never really gave mint a big try, though I did daily drive ubuntu budgie for a few years and liked my experience with that. Whether I am using yum, apt, pacman or dnf isn't really that big a deal, they all work. Several years managing redhat servers professionally has given me a lot of comfort troubleshooting in that setting so I tend to go for Fedora. Also a nice bonus to have more recent software available without jumping through hoops.
I do want to try out Pop OS and a few others and its cool to distro hop, but generally I just kind of like stock Fedora a LOT so I am not really that tempted to revisit other options and have to get all set up with a different workflow.
I think that it's worth trying both- Fedora is a little more involved than Mint but tends to ship the most cutting edge-stuff, whereas Mint is well-integrated with Cinnamon and fairly user-friendly.
I chose mint as I'm a relatively new linux user, and my understanding is that the learning curve is a lot nice for mint.
Mint cuz of the ecosystem and compatability, my only major issue with it was the outdated drivers, but I installed the kisak Mesa PPA and was off to the races :D. Mint also has really good flatpak integration so you basically get everything a normal soy user like me needs 😜
No-one is mentioning NixOS, which is strange. My next install will be Nix, I'm currently on EndeavourOS.
I'm using Fedora since I found it fast to setup, fairly stable and it just works. It's the community version of RHEL which hopefully means there will continue to be an incentive to support it.
I've always been a bit on the fence about Linux Mint since the incident where someone managed to publish a hacked distro on their site that installed a backdoor.
Other than that, I agree with what some others have mentioned; it's mostly a matter of personal preference.