Why does nobody here ever recommend Fedora to noobs?
I have tried Linux as a DD on and off for years but about a year ago I decided to commit to it no matter the cost. First with Mint, then Ubuntu and a few others sprinkled in briefly. Both are "mainstream" "beginner friendly" distros, right? I don't want anything too advanced, right?
Well, ubuntu recently updated and it broke my second monitor (Ubuntu detected it but the monitor had "no signal"). After trying to fix it for a week, I decided to wipe it and reinstall. No luck. I tried a few other distros that had the same issue and I started to wonder if it was a hardware issue but I tried a Windows PC and the monitor worked no problem.
Finally, just to see what would happen I tried a distro very very different than what I'm used to: Fedora (Kinode). And not only did everything "just work" flawlessly, but it's so much faster and more polished than I ever knew Linux to be!
Credit where it's due, a lot of the polish is due to KDE plasma. I'd never strayed from Gnome because I'm not an expert and people recommend GNOME to Linux newbies because it's "simple" and "customizable" but WOW is KDE SO MUCH SIMPLER AND STILL CUSTOMIZEABLE. Gnome is only "simple" in that it doesn't allow you to do much via the GUI. With Fedora Kinode I think I needed to use the terminal maybe once during setup? With other distros I was constantly needed to use the terminal (yes its helped me learn Linux but that curve is STEEP).
The atomic updates are fantastic too. I have not crashed once in the two weeks of setup whereas before I would have a crash maybe 1-2 times per week.
I am FULLY prepared for the responses demanding to know what I did to make it crash and telling me how I was using it wrong blah blah blah but let me tell you, if you are experienced with Windows but want to learn Linux and getting frustrated by all the "beginner" distros that get recommended, do yourself a favor and try Fedora Kinode!
edit: i am DYING at the number of "you're using it wrong" comments here. never change people.
As a packager I’ll just say Debian is the one with the weird package names. Fedora just matches upstream names generally, similar to Arch.
For me program names in the repos were the same on Arch and Debian but Fedora packages had architecture suffixes and sometimes weird names.
I think you are mistaken. An example:
https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/glib2/
https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/glib2/glib2/
Debian:
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/libglib2.0-0
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/libglib2.0-cil
This is the common case, but Debian gets really out there some times.
And I'll just say
dnfis a much easier to use tool:dnf install /usr/bin/aprogramdnf install 'pkgconfig(glib-2.0)'Never noticed. I don't use much developer stuff. I was talking about regular apps like htop. Fedora names are uncommon for them.
No its not, the package is literally “htop”.
Hmm in my case many packages were in package.x86_64 format or something similar.
Every package has an architecture but you never have to care about it.
But I never saw architecture being in the name of the package that you actually type to install it.