Fedora is really just as retard friendly as Ubuntu and Mint these days if you leave it alone IMO.
Yes but also no. It's like 45% Yes normie friendly, 45% No normies allowed, and like 5% "goes either way."
(+) Fedora ships the latest versions of GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, and so on. Minimal patching so no distro-specific paradigms in the GUI.
(+) All versions of Fedora (official, Atomic, Spins, etc) ship with a modest, but adequate set of user goodies like LibreOffice, media players, and stuff like that. Fedora Spins even go a step further with stuff like Exaile, MPV, and YT-DLP shipping by default.
(+) Fedora does a fantastic job showcasing the FOSS ecosystem without unnecessarily kneecapping itself. All editions only ship FOSS programs, all the official repos are strictly FOSS, no binary drivers, but binary firmware in the kernel is the sole exception.
(+/-) Fedora's commitment to FOSS isn't necessarily a purely ideological commitment. Red Hat is a company created in and operating out of the USA. Software patents, export controls, civil liabilities, and stuff along those lines apply to them.
* All software in the repositories, even fonts, must be under FOSS licenses.
* Even then, some FOSS programs are too risky to ship by default.
*
libdvdcss is a wholly FOSS library, but it's a tool that breaks content encryption.
*
ffmpeg is deliberately gimped to avoid infringing on codec patents.
* You have gimped versions of Mesa that still function, but get rid of hardware codecs (i.e. VAAPI, VDPAU, etc).
* NVIDIA's binary drivers require the
user to agree to NVIDIA's terms.
** Clement Lefebvre can get away with shipping everything OOTB because Mint only makes money through sponsorships and small dollar donations are the norm.
** Canonical can kinda sorta get away with it because Canonical's a British company. They still ship a mostly FOSS stack, but then you also have
ubuntu-restricted-extras from
official repositories to offset the gaps.
(+/-) Fedora Workstation allows you to enable RPM Fusion for Steam and the NVIDIA binary drivers, along with a COPR for PyCharm at the time of installation via the live USB medium. No other Fedora version does this.
(+/-) I don't know what it's called, but there's some type of Python thing that activates if a command ain't found but the binary can be downloaded. It happened to me on Fedora Workstation for
yt-dlp. I know it's Python because it all installs to
$HOME/.local and there are various .py scripts lying around. Convenient sure... but if it exists in the official repositories, I'd rather have that version.
(+/-) Fedora Flatpaks ship all the runtimes in a single binary. Problem is that Fedora Flatpak selection is sparse, can conflict with overlap from Flathub, and can even break due to poor QA (re: OBS)
(+/-) GUI tools vary wildly from one version to another, contingent on the desktop environment itself. GNOME has adequate tools, KDE has an overwhelming amount of GUI tools, XFCE is a bit sparse but workable, Cinnamon is more of the same, MATE has a bunch of obtuse menus but still plenty workable... but then you have LXQt, i3, Budgie, COSMIC, and so on... you tell me how good the GUI tools are for those.
(-) RPM Fusion
is a hard necessity when using Fedora. Even if you skip the non-free repositories, RPM Fusion still has the full
ffmpeg, full Mesa stacks with hardware codecs, and various FOSS tools that are too damn risky to ship by default.
(-) Not necessarily a problem; setup is relatively painless. Problem is that normies don't wanna copy/paste the most
basic and clearly outlined commands
just to get things up and running. I think the terminal hatred from Linux refugees is a touch overblown, acclimatisation to using the CLI is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be, but normies don't wanna hear it.
(-) Fedora Atomic is not an adequate equivalent to SteamOS, and Bazzite is complete fucking garbage because of it. SteamOS does the "atomic" shtick better because you don't need to speedrun amateur distro maintainer any% whenever you need to rebase your system between version increases.
rpm-ostree is only meant for system utilities, Flatpaks are what Fedora Atomic wants you to use, but so much shit just doesn't exist on Flatpak to where layering it in with
rpm-ostree (often via RPM Fusion) is a necessity. But if you layer shit on with
rpm-ostree, you
need to speedrun amateur distro maintainer any% by hosting your own images, upgrading, and then rebasing.
