fedora
I work with hundreds of computers in many data centers, the vast majority are redhat ( and clones like AlmaLinux )
we do have some debian based systems, but I would say 99% of them are redhat based. The fact is redhat owns
the datacenter. More than all other distro's combined. If you want a job as a professional Linux admin, your best
bet is to learn redhat commands. There are many enterprise tools that are ONLY available for redhat.
fedora is compatible with redhat, the dnf commands are the same, the package names are usually the same.
The commands are basically all the same as redhat.
For example, fedora was the first distro with systemd, first distro with wayland, first distro with pipewire, over the years
fedora has proven to be a trend setter. Now almost all other major distro's use these things.
Redhat 6.2 was the first distro to support Wi-Fi.
A lot of non-vendor packages only comes in .rpm and .deb packages. If your vendor includes them, that's great, but
if not, you have to compile them yourself ( not a bad skill to have ). This is less of an issue these days because of
snap, flatpak and appImage. Which brings me to another reason I use fedora. It still uses rpms, it still manages
"dependency hell" pretty good. In my opinion, flatpaks and snaps are used because developers are just too lazy
to manage library dependencies. So then you have to install the same libraries over and over again dozens of times.
No thanks, I'll stick with rpms. Yes hard drive space is cheap, but you eventually you will still run out.
I tend to run newer hardware. I tend to need newer kernels. We just bought some desktop with Intel Arc
video cards in them. I'm not the guy who makes the decisions on what hardware to buy, but in the case, they were
quite a bit cheaper than the systems with nvidia and radeon video cards, and supposedly just as fast ( we'll see )
But you need a 6.12,x kernel in order to support Intel Arc video acceleration. I understand Ubuntu 24.10 runs
the 6.11 kernel which doesn't have these drivers but you can install them with a "graphics preview" package.
Still they aren't supported out of the box in Ubuntu or Mint.
The same with many wi-fi cards, you need a newer kernel to run some of them.
In some rare cases, in sound chips require a newer kernel.
It has happened ( even here on Linux.org ) where someone wants to runs a newer version of a software
package, not realizing that it may require a newer kernel with newer system libraries. If you need the latest
applications, run a distro that supports them.
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The argument against fedora is that it's a rolling release, everything gets updated almost every week.
Even the kernel. But that's a bit of a misnomer. Even my LTS redhat systems update the kernel from
time to time (not as often as every week, but usually every month or two). The difference is, the LTS distro's
keep the same kernel version, just update the release. 5.10.100 to 5.10.105 to 5.10.120, etc... whereas
fedora will completely install a new kernel version, 6.11.7 to 6.12.7.
This has never caused any problems for me, and in fact has fixed some problems. I do have back ups
( which everyone should have anyway ) and I can always use the grub menu to roll back to the previous kernel.
Another argument I hear, is, I just want it to work, I don't want to deal with updates and upgrades.
Fine, keep using the old buggy versions of software with the security holes. Every week literally over
a hundred bugs and security fixes are updated in Linux applications. You really should keep your system updated
no matter what distro you use.
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fedora has always been stable for me, it just works, usually out of the box.
rant finsihed, off soapbox now.
Edit: We do have a few SUSE enterprise systems also.
