Because distros from the Debian family are more popular, any random help article aimed at beginners is likely to assume one of those distros. (If you know how to map from apt
to rpm
, you’re probably not a beginner.) Plus, I don’t trust Red Hat, who have a strong influence on Fedora.
(Note that I don’t generally recommend my own distro—Gentoo—to newcomers either, unless they have specific needs best served by it.)
Red Hat’s interests often don’t seem to be aligned with those of the average user. The result is that they push for the adoption of software and conventions that make things better for businesses running RHEL, but worse for almost everyone else. This goes back a long way, and makes me question the long-term suitability of any distro Red Hat is involved in for any user who is not paying them for support. It’s the pattern that bothers me, not any single event (and yes, part of that pattern does arise from the fact that they’re a for-profit corporation).
It’s the sort of thing that many people won’t really care about, and if the alternative was Microsoft or even Canonical (which is prone to weird fits of NIH and bad monatization ideas), then fine, I would go with Red Hat. Still, I would recommend a community distro above anything that a corporation has its fingers in.