This is my experience. I don't get the fascination with Ubuntu. Whenever I hear about something that doesn't work it's always Ubuntu. That could be confirmation bias though. From my perspective it's old & busted vs Fedora's hot & sexy, using more up to date software revs everywhere you look. It's low maintenance (unlike Manjaro/Arch) yet still fresh. You have a choice of desktops, or no desktop at all. There is Fedora Server available. Everything feels more modern and advanced. There is clearly a huge amount of work put into producing Fedora yet it has less users. I don't get the Ubuntu craze. Is it just peer pressure? Am I antisocial if I prefer Fedora to Ubuntu? What am I missing here?
In my domain (bioinformatics), if it's self managed, Ubuntu is the standard. I would attribute much of the popularity to the Biolinux project, which built upon Ubuntu LTS and bundled in many popular bioinformatics packages which are a pain to setup and configure on your own. Besides these, many popular packages provide deb bundles, which makes it easy for a PhD student to manage on their own.
> There is clearly a huge amount of work put into producing Fedora yet it has less users.
You're saying that like no work is being put into new Ubuntu's releases. Or its developers don't contribute to GNOME, for instance.
I tried Fedora Core several years ago. Got some broken package resolutions the very same day.
Reinstalled to Ubuntu, it had been more stable (probably simply thanks to 'apt', but still), and I didn't bother with Fedora since. Also, I'm not relishing having to learn rpm/yum/whatisname, with its new arguments, its different set of capabilities, and different names for packages I'm already familiar with.
Speaking of "modern and advanced", though, does it also support the NVIDIA driver's new "offload" PRIME mode? The one where you don't need to reboot or even relogin to use the discrete card.
I never got it either, outside of possibly just the momentum of having a relatively easy to install Linux distribution early on.
Rather than Fedora, though, I opted to run Debian sid. I get all the up to date fresh-from-the-oven software packages I care about, can pilfer from external Ubuntu apt repos if I need to, without having to clear out any of the garish brown and sponsored Ubuntu junk, and it's fairly easy to install and maintain. Despite being the permanently unstable branch, it's never really meaningfully broken on me.
I work with a guy who has been sysadmin for 20± years (and he is good) he says something like this (I am paraphrasing):
It is a problem if Hipster-Developers work on bleeding edge Linux, because their software will run on their system but nearly nowhere else (including their own system a year later). If you wanna develope do it on a debian or buntu - if it works there, others won't have a problem
Not sure with I totally agree with him, but we had multiple problems which seemed to proof his point.
