Fedora I have the least experience with. It seems to be a hit or miss distribution, but some may find their home here. Also ships with an interface that windows users would need time to adjust to.
This is my general impression after dual booting with Fedora on an old Macbook. You also need to install a bunch of drivers and codecs since they don’t ship by default. I get this impression that Fedora has noticeably less packages than Debian or Arch although there are ways around it by using Distrobox. Fedora comes with Flatpak, so I guess they want people to install apps with Flatpak.
Overall, I think it’s a poor distro if you want to introduce new people to Linux. There’s a Fedora-based distro called Nobara that seems to fix some of these issues although I can’t vouch for it since I’ve never tried it before. This is probably better than Fedora assuming it works as advertised.
Fedora is a poor distro for absolute newcomers because they do not ship any proprietary software by default*, nor do they keep any in their repos. If you want a free-software-only distro and have (the correct) philosophical inclination for a world without proprietary software, it’s an excellent choice.
Fedora is the distro I use, but with support from RPMFusion for things like FFmpeg with proprietary codecs, my stupid Nvidia proprietary driver, and so on.
I kinda wouldn’t recommend distros downstream of the big guys for new users because if they go down that road, they’re going to get into terrain they don’t know how to read. They won’t be able to tell a shady or poorly supported project from something more serious.
Also, small downstream distros are harder to troubleshoot for newbies when there’re issues, because there’re fewer people answering questions.
This is my general impression after dual booting with Fedora on an old Macbook. You also need to install a bunch of drivers and codecs since they don’t ship by default. I get this impression that Fedora has noticeably less packages than Debian or Arch although there are ways around it by using Distrobox. Fedora comes with Flatpak, so I guess they want people to install apps with Flatpak.
Overall, I think it’s a poor distro if you want to introduce new people to Linux. There’s a Fedora-based distro called Nobara that seems to fix some of these issues although I can’t vouch for it since I’ve never tried it before. This is probably better than Fedora assuming it works as advertised.
Fedora is a poor distro for absolute newcomers because they do not ship any proprietary software by default*, nor do they keep any in their repos. If you want a free-software-only distro and have (the correct) philosophical inclination for a world without proprietary software, it’s an excellent choice.
Fedora is the distro I use, but with support from RPMFusion for things like FFmpeg with proprietary codecs, my stupid Nvidia proprietary driver, and so on.
*https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/license-approval/#_licenses_allowed_for_firmware Fedora makes an exception for some binary firmware images
I kinda wouldn’t recommend distros downstream of the big guys for new users because if they go down that road, they’re going to get into terrain they don’t know how to read. They won’t be able to tell a shady or poorly supported project from something more serious.
Also, small downstream distros are harder to troubleshoot for newbies when there’re issues, because there’re fewer people answering questions.