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 (Kinoite). 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 Kinoite!
edit: i am DYING at the number of "you're using it wrong" comments here. never change people.
You joke, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's at the back of some people's minds.
There's also the whole association with Red Hat, and since Red Hat got bought, went corporate and murdered CentOS, Fedora is tainted somehow.
These things aren't necessarily good reasons to not recommend Fedora, (for those see other comments) but they're reasons nonetheless.
Ehh that is rather unforgivable and I did not even know!
Deff no fedora for me now!
They didn't murder centos, they changed its development so that its upstream of RHEL, one point release ahead. For 95% of deployments it makes no difference, for the last few percent RHEL proper is available for free for non-commercial purposes and if it's commercial then buy a license or use another clone.
Most people have bought into FUD, and spout off the same BS points, and were never centos users to begin with.
You say that like it was a small thing, but small things don't create such bad feeling, cause most of the Centos volunteer team to resign, create off two entirely new distributions (Rocky and Alma). The subsequent paywalling of RHEL sourcecode and its accompanying spiteful communications make it clear where Redhat's focus is - or, rather, isn't. People judge companies by what they say and do, and I and many others are deeply concerned for the future of RHEL after the IBM takeover and are moving away from it.
I think there is a lot of nostalgia about the great work that Redhat did (and still does, at a smaller scale) and are overlooking what it's become but RHEL as a business product is not the force it once was. I think it's entirely possible that Redhat/IBM will simply pull the plug on RHEL and the entire EL universe will need some serious remapping if its to survive.
(Was a Centos user, still maintain 180 EL servers, am quite aware of the FUD, much of which originated and still does in the other direction from Redhat and its employees. The Centos 8 announcement came just after I'd manually migrated 60 vms to it, which then needed migrating again to another distro - so this did cause us some significant work and cost.)
The centos volunteers never resigned because of RH. The reason RH got centos was because centos almost didn’t get a few major releases out. It wasn’t until other companies started providing support for their own RHEL derivatives that they chose to restrict sources.
RH had taken over the Centos project and Board by that time. You're right that Centos was already circling the drain in terms of resources (I remember waiting many weeks for point releases), but the way they did this was brutal and poorly communicated.
And remember those downstream 'rebuilds' only appeared to fill the vacuum caused by Centos disappearing. That they're both doing very well does make you question whether Centos could have been sustained in its traditional form. (As opposed to Stream, which is only of benefit to Redhat and those in its testing cycle)
They murdered it, hollowed it out, then re-used the name for something completely new. Granted, what’s new is far from a bad thing, and despite having half the support cycle, the cycle itself is way more consistent and constant because there is no lag time between minor updates (because there are none). Releases are still apparently checked by RH QA, and bug fixes now come a little faster, too.
I’ll do you one better: the centos users got exactly what they paid for, and were able to step in at any time to keep centos from turning into centos stream by making their own supported distro. Nobody did until centos original was gone, and were somehow surprised that a distro with a fixed 10 year support cycle takes a nontrivial amount of resources to run. I guess Oracle kind of tried to make their own version of centos with OL before the advent of CentOS Stream, though it was far from being “by the community, for the community”.
a lot of reasonable for the money shot tho
I’ve actually had someone thumb their nose at linux because of that name. “You mean the hat OS? The one those weird guys use? No thanks.” I’m paraphrasing but ya, that association is there for some people.