Linux

I’ve tried most distros over the years. I liked arch with gnome, but maintaining it was a bit of work. And then I realized that when I was done setting it up the way I liked it, I was essentially just building fedora workstation. So I switched a few versions ago and I haven’t looked back.

Fedora is boring, like sometimes too boring. But then I remember that’s what an os is supposed to be. I now run it on all my PCs and it’s what I install on family members PCs. (Yup it’s even done well with windows converts who don’t know anything about linux - their transition has been easy)

Issues I have encountered:

1. Rpmfusion is a must, otherwise the distro doesn’t handle much. It’s also the best way to nvidia.
2. i still run into the odd codec thing even with rpm fusion-I just use VLC and it works fine
3. it took me a while to figure out that the fedora based flatpaks are not always the same as the flathub versions. For example, back to point 2, the fedora flatpak of VLC is missing codecs while the flathub version works with everything.
4. i don’t like how flatpaks update automatically. I’m sure I can stop that behavior but I haven’t bothered to look into it yet. It manifests itself with steam. The flatpak updates but the main system has not. Steam then has driver differences which leads to processing more shaders and sometimes outright conflicts and my games default to the integrated gpu. This is always fixed by simply updating the system, it’s never a real issue. But sometimes I don’t want to update, I just want to game.
5. it’s got some funny ways of doing things. Always worth googling before you do something. For example, the way you update grub, there’s a special fedora way to do that. They push Podman instead of docker and despite what they say, it doesn’t always build cleanly - just use docker. That kind of stuff.

What I like about fedora

1. It’s boring and “just works” not even mint “just worked” as good for me
2. the upgrades between versions are boring and non events. It works if you go into detail cleaning up old things from the command line, it works if you just click the “upgrade” button in the gui.
3. its not bleeding edge but still pretty new. I’ve thrown some brand new hardware at it and it was supported, whereas all other distros failed except arch
4. It’s cake to maintain. Updates don’t require the attention arch does, and honestly I’ve had more issues with Ubuntu updates. It sets up btrfs by default - some may see that as a detriment - but it sets you up nice for snapshots and whatnot right out of the box.

I say give workstation a shot and give it a little time to get used to things. Definitely do rpmfusion. It’s the one time I’d recommend just jamming commands into the terminal exactly like the website says without thinking. (You still have to read the website for the right commands). Good luck!