Fedora Is Replacing Ubuntu Linux As The Default

Key Takeaways

The landscape of Linux sister recommendations has always been a mess. Now, I've said many times before that I don't think the distro is that important for choice. A lot of people get stuck on it, but if you don't like it, you can always just change it. Just pick one of them and then go from there. But to a new user, that clearly hasn't been very convincing cuz people still love their distro recommendations. But what I've noticed over the last few years is that Fedora or more accurately the Fedora family of distros have now become far more frequent recommendations. Of course, there are still people that recommend things like Mint and Zorin, which are Debian and Ubuntu based. More recently, there are projects like elementary OS and this is Arch based. I think elementary OS is a great project. Would I put someone on something Arch based as their first distro? >> [sighs] >> Probably not, but if you know what you're getting into, I did it. You can make it work. But Ubuntu, Ubuntu is also still a popular-ish recommendation, but it's kind of fallen out of that spot as the default I don't know what you're actually doing on your system. Here is just a general basic recommendation. In many ways, Fedora has started to fill that gap. And people forget the absolute powerhouse that Ubuntu used to be. Ubuntu basically changed the landscape for what it meant to be a regular Linux distro and a regular Linux user. And we started seeing some of the earliest devices being sold actually shipping Linux. I know, this is something we'll talk about nowadays. That was happening like 20 years ago, just not that much. There's actually a news story of someone who bought an Ubuntu laptop, went to college, couldn't connect to their college's network. >> She quickly learned Ubuntu might look a lot like Windows, but it sure doesn't act like it. >> I tried to um get on the internet on it, and that did not work, and I found out that Microsoft Word is not compatible. >> That's because her Verizon internet CD won't load on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice and not Word. >> And this became some like big drama for one day where someone had nothing else to talk about at the time, and Canonical absolutely flooded the market with Ubuntu install CDs at a time where for a lot of people downloading an ISO was still a pretty difficult thing to do, and this wasn't just done in magazines. Obviously, there were magazines as well, but there was the ShipIt service. You could just go to the service, request a CD, they would just send it to you. They didn't care. They would just send it to you, and a lot of people ordered these. In fact, a few too many people ordered them, and that's a big part of the reason why it shut down because uh some people started to abuse the service. And at a time, Ubuntu was the go-to recommendation, so much so that people who weren't Linux users, when they were told about Linux, there were usually two things that came to mind. Arch, because of haha Arch by the way Arch is hard to install, it was a very big cultural meme, and Ubuntu. And a big part of that was also the fact that when you saw any media representation of Linux, it was GNOME, but it wasn't vanilla GNOME, it was Ubuntu GNOME, and that's still something that happens today. That's how much of a track record, how much of a cultural mainstay Ubuntu had been. Whilst other Linux did start a little bit before Ubuntu as Fedora Core, it spun out of something known as Red Hat Linux, not Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Linux. This is actually before RHEL came along. When RHEL did come along, basically Fedora was spun out as the community edition of RHEL, and in many ways it really was just RHEL, but minus all of the Red Hat Enterprise stuff, often being called basically the RHEL beta. But, over the years things have drastically changed, and this has led to a big shift in community sentiment. Fedora Linux now has its own identity. Yes, it is built off of Red Hat infrastructure. It is represented by Red Hat legal. It, you know, is built off the same initial package sources. It is very much run by Red Hat people. A lot of Red Hat employees work on Fedora. But, even though that is the case, it now doesn't just feel like RHEL. It is its own separate thing that does things that never would happen in RHEL, and this has ultimately been a good thing for Fedora, as it distro that wants to have a very long life into the future. And Ubuntu has also had quite a bit of community sentiment shift as well, but not all of it is because of Ubuntu. Following the launch of GNOME 3, whilst people look back now at GTK 3 and the GNOME 3 days as a great time for GNOME, going from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, that was a big shift, and a lot of people initially did not like it. Of the many reasons this led to Canonical making at There's plenty of other reasons like Canonical wanting to build one interface that works across every single device they want to sell. They wanted to make phones and TVs and various other things. And initially, Unity was hated. And then eventually, they shifted back to GNOME 3. But then something crazy happened. There were people that started using Ubuntu during that Unity era, and now going to GNOME 3, there are a lot of people that love Unity and hated going back to GNOME. But then you go into the GTK 4 era with GNOME 40 and now GNOME 50, and people look back on that GNOME 3 time as what a great time that was. My point here is GNOME was going through a very turbulent time and frankly still going through a quite turbulent time, and being attached to GNOME had also led to quite a bit of drama being attached to Ubuntu as well. Now, some of the drama was their own fault. During that Unity era, they deployed something known as the Amazon search lens, which basically added a search function into the like file browser built into Unity. This led to Canonical being accused of being spyware because if you're searching Amazon, then you have to obviously send the key presses to Amazon. They were basically just sending them to Amazon. They were anonymized. It wasn't actually that big of a deal, but notably, a Richard Stallman did accuse Ubuntu of being spyware, and back then a lot more people cared about what Stallman was saying. However, Fedora Linux also ships GNOME, a much more vanilla GNOME, but GNOME nonetheless. But as of Fedora 42, Fedora KDE is now marketed directly alongside Fedora Workstation. So, you go to the Fedora website, you see Workstation, you see Fedora KDE right next to each other. This is a massive change because if you don't know what you want to download, you see something called workstation, you see something that is the desktop offering. These are both right there. Which one's better? Well, as a new user, maybe you don't know, but you know it's there. And I know this might sound dumb because Fedora KDE has existed for a long time, but if you're a new user, how do you evaluate all of the different spins there if you have no idea what GNOME, KDE, Sway, XFCE, Budgie, Cinnamon, all of these different things are? How do you even go through those options when there's something where you click the download button and it's right there? Having it just be right in front of your face as a clear, official offering is massive. But for a lot of you, you know about GNOME, you know about KDE, you actively make a choice on what desktop you want to use. Now, I know that GNOME has its fans, it still very much does, but like it or not, times are changing on Linux. GNOME is no longer what you remember as GNOME 2 and then the later GNOME 3 days, even though again, initially people didn't like GNOME 3, they do now. Community sentiment has been slowly shifting around that project. And a lot of people have been moving away. The numbers show that. Look at donations, look at package downloads, it's very clear this is happening. What helped GNOME very early on was it was the GPL counterpart to KDE. At the time, Qt didn't have an open source license. So, when GNOME came along, this was a massive, massive deal. Back then, the Foss part of the Linux space was considerably stronger. If something was proprietary, if something didn't have not even just an open source license, but a free software license, that was a much bigger deal than it is today. Whether you like that or not, this is the way it is now. There's a lot more people on Linux who are more pragmatic about the software they use, where they're okay using things which are just open source, that are proprietary, but would prefer that most of their system be Foss. What also hurt KDE early on is it had this reputation of being buggy and inconsistent. And frankly, it was buggy and inconsistent. They kind of did that to themselves. But combined with the amazing work that Valve has done with SteamOS, funding KDE developers, the amazing work that KDE developers have done by themselves, this has led to more funding, more development. They have done a lot of reputation building since the absolute disaster that was the launch of KDE 4. They have continuously made well-received changes to the project. Maybe you don't like every single change, but the thing about the changes is a lot of them have a toggle, so you can just not use them if you don't want to use them. They've ironed out a lot of the bugginess. It is a really good environment now. During the Plasma 6 days, they have completely changed what people think about KDE. This has led to a whole new generation of Linux users, who their first look at Linux isn't Gnome anymore. Now it's KDE. They've seen people using SteamOS. They might have a Steam Deck themselves. They've seen people using KDE with Bazzite. They've seen KDE with Cash-OS. They see KDE as the desktop they use. This is the desktop that Valve endorses. This is the desktop that you should be using. And yes, Kubuntu absolutely does exist. But right now, Kubuntu is in the same state that Fedora KDE was. Where yes, it is offered. But if you go to download Ubuntu, you don't see Kubuntu. You see Ubuntu. That is all. And then you're going to go over to the flavor and search through the list of flavors. And what are all these flavors? Which one's better than the other one? I don't know how to evaluate these. But if you try it out Fedora and you're like, "Okay, I like Fedora, but I'm not necessarily vibing with this environment." Well, there are the spins. You can go and look at the spins and try out something else. And this is what Fedora really has going for it. You don't have to leave the Fedora ecosystem to try out a bunch of different environments. Yes, there are all these Ubuntu flavors. But have you ever looked at how many spins there are? Most of the things you would want to try are on that list. Yes, there are notable missing projects like Hyperland, like newer things such as Mango WC. There are obviously random little desktop environments missing. It's not going to have everything. If you want everything, go look at something like Arch. But you have all of these choices to jump around without even leaving the Fedora ecosystem. But let's say you do like GNOME. In the early days of Linux, Ubuntu had a really strong visual identity. Not just the layout of the panels and the extensions they installed, but it looked unique, right? You knew you were looking at Ubuntu. It was themed in a very unique way. Nowadays, yes, you still see the additional extensions, you still see the layout, but LibreOffice Writer and the stop theme with my apps campaign, this basically put a stop to all of that and the interesting visuals you saw out of GNOME basically don't exist anymore, traded instead for visual consistency. So, if you look at GNOME on all of these different distros, it pretty much just looks the same. Yes, there are still some level of user theming which does exist, but it's not typically done at the distribution level. This I also think kind of hurt Ubuntu because Ubuntu had that visual identity. If you liked the way Ubuntu looked, yes, you could replicate it on a vanilla GNOME setup, install the extensions, install the themes, but that required a bunch of additional work. It acted as sort of a very minor, but a lock into the Ubuntu environment. One problem that's often raised with Fedora is what I'll call the Americanisms, the software patent problems, the lack of out-of-the-box proprietary drivers, making setting up Nvidia just quite a bit more tedious than a lot of other distros. External repos for things like Steam. This is a major reason that some people suggest against recommending Fedora, and I completely understand this. But this is why I said Fedora and the Fedora family of projects because this is where things like Bazzite come in, which are effectively Fedora-based SteamOS. Or you have more traditional systems like Nobara Linux, which was started by Glorious Eggroll, the creator of Proton GE. This again is a very gaming-focused environment, but you can use a distro for anything even though it is a gaming distro. But it makes a lot of those additional changes that you were going to make anyway just for you without having to deal with the just annoyingness of having to set up vanilla regular Fedora. Setting up these things isn't difficult. It's well documented. It's relatively easy to do, but if you're not fully comfortable doing so with Fedora, you have a very easy out, but it's still using the Fedora infrastructure, the Fedora tooling. You're still effectively on Fedora because they are very much tied to what Fedora is doing. They're not drastically changing things, right? They are still building off of that same package source. And really, this is what the Red Hat and Fedora line just didn't really have for a long time. There are Red Hat based distros, absolutely, but a lot of those aren't Red Hat based distros. They're Red Hat clones, things like AlmaLinux and Rocky. These are just slightly differently branded rail for the most part. Yes, there's some differences, but that's their core function. But also, you as a regular user probably are not going to be running those. You haven't really had this strong ecosystem of things like Zorin, of things like Mint until I would say relatively recently. Something else that has changed recently is a lot more interest in up-to-date software. And I think a big part of that is access to information. You can see people that are running Arch, that are using the latest version of software, and you want those features. You want to use those. And Ubuntu operates on a sensible slow model, but it's really slow, right? And for the people who want that, the most popular version of Ubuntu is the Ubuntu LTS. But I think a lot of people are realizing that as a regular Linux user, as a desktop user, not operating a server, you can kind of sacrifice some of that stability to get newer software, to get updates faster, to get features that you want without having to wait 6 months for the next point release to happen. And who knows if the update is even going to be in that point release. And I think having access to things like flat packs and snaps and app images has also really encouraged people to want more up-to-date software because they can have parts of their system up-to-date like that, but why have just parts when you can have even more of it? But most people are not really happy to deal with the problems that come with a full rolling system like an Arch, for example, that I'm using. Arch is great, but you get things quickly, and things aren't always fully tested, and if problems occur on Linux, Arch users, Gentoo users, a lot of people like that are usually the people to start reporting them because they end up seeing them before anybody else has the package being shipped. Not always, but for the most part, that's the way it goes. But then there's Fedora. Fedora you might even call it semi-rolling to some extent. Not exactly, it's it's it's a That's a weird term that's not really well defined, but it's certainly a lot closer to that model. You're going to get those software updates, but it's still going to be done in a well-tested environment that you know that you can rely on, that has all of this infrastructure behind it to make things good. But you don't have that massive delay until you get the software, especially so when it comes to the desktop. When a new version of Fedora comes out, it's going to have the latest version of KDE, it's going to have the latest version of GNOME. When we look at Ubuntu, yes, it does get the latest version of GNOME, but on Kubuntu, there have been times where you've been stuck like three or four versions behind for seemingly no reason. Then there's the matter of snaps versus flat packs, and a lot of this argument has already been hashed out over and over and over again. And you know what? A lot of people don't know or don't care why they don't like snaps anymore. They just don't like snaps, right? Like there's just this idea in their head, snap bad, but no connections to ideas on why that might be the case. But the general sentiment is snap bad and Ubuntu forces snaps, therefore Ubuntu bad. Whereas Fedora, they're quite a bit more involved in the flat pack side of things. And yes, there have been issues with again, the Americanisms and FlatHub, but Fedora's mostly gotten over those problems and isn't being really, really stupid with how they offer flat packs anymore. Historically, one of Ubuntu's greatest strengths was really the community resources. The fact that there was this giant group of people that were making PPAs and PPAs aren't exactly the preferred third-party packaging solution at this point, but that was a big deal at one point in time. Oftentimes, when you saw a random package, it would be packaged on Ubuntu as a PPA, maybe a deb that's catered towards Ubuntu, and then Arch. That's pretty much it. So many projects I saw in the early days of looking at software, that is the combination that I saw. Fedora now though, I think it's at a point where this distinction is getting smaller. Obviously, there's been a lot of shift away from these third-party repos to things like Flatpak, AppImage, to some extent Snap, but not as much. But also, Fedora has Copr, and more people know about Copr, more people are treating it kind of like the AUR, and it's getting more and more software in it. But also, you know, there's other solutions like Nix, for example. And if you're going to do Nix, you can just run anything. But Fedora has this incredibly active community around it with the forums. And if you're ever wondering how to do something on Fedora, you can likely find someone who has already done that. And as there's a lot of interest in Fedora, there's also a lot of coverage of Fedora as well. And this sort of feeds back into the interest loop, and it's created this system where there's just a lot of people either talking about Fedora or things based on Fedora, notably, obviously, Bazzite. Now, here's the key thing. Just because Fedora is a popular recommendation, that doesn't mean it's actually a replacement for Ubuntu. It does a lot of things different. The Americanisms are a big one. Fedora, whilst they do adopt software features very quickly, they also adopt changes very quickly, you know, in the past, like Wayland for example, bringing it in before it was even usable outside of developers. This doesn't happen anywhere near as much now, frankly, because there hasn't been a major change like that in quite a while to adopt, but it is something that's still part of the ethos of Fedora. If something comes along like that, it's probably going to happen again. So, with all that being the case, let me know your thoughts. Do you think Fedora is a good recommendation? What about the family of Fedora distros? What do you personally recommend to someone as just a basic general recommendation? I'd love to know. So, let me know your thoughts down below. If you like the video, go like video. Go subscribe as well. 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