...how? why? That's literally never a problem on Mint, so how come Fedora can't handle it?
Mint (and all Ubuntu LTS variants by extension) use the LTS releases of the kernel and assorted tooling. Fedora tracks upstream development
very closely. Not as quickly as Arch, but much faster than openSUSE Tumbleweed or Debian Sid. Not just the kernel, but also Mesa, Xorg/Wayland, systemd, PipeWire, etc. Highly valuable if you're running cutting-edge hardware (re: an RX 9070 XT in my case), not so much if you have older hardware that can tolerate an LTS kernel.
NVIDIA binary drivers are the odd man out because AMD and Intel already provide FOSS kernel modules
and directly contribute to upstream Mesa development. NVIDIA, for better or worse, decided to double and triple down on maintaining their proprietary stack for decades, only recently beginning the slow and painful process of
gradually making more and more parts of their driver stack FOSS. I think right now, only the headers are open-source, but I digress.
Point is: until NVIDIA decides to stop giving Linus Torvalds a reason to flip them off, you'll always need some semblance of a hackish workaround to maintain stability. You'd do similar shit on Arch where you pin a bunch of stuff in Pacman for the NVIDIA drivers to make sure that a kernel, Wayland, Xorg, Mesa, or whatever update doesn't bork your system when you run
sudo pacman -Syu.
>recommends Fedora to users new to Linux
>proceeds to mention arcane rituals needed to keep it working
Hey man, I did say that Mint >>> Fedora for normie's first Linux distro, I've said it like a billion times in this thread by now, and I told
@Sprocket as much before writing up the stuff about Fedora. It was meant as "hey, if you wanna keep using Fedora, here's how you do it to minimise your pain." Sprocket himself literally chose it of his own volition because his
grandson uses it. Not my place to say "drop Fedora altogether, use Mint instead" if he voluntarily chose to approach Fedora since someone with actual proximity to him is already using it. My biases ain't the same as his grandson, but I'm sympathetic enough to help him recover some of the sunken cost.
Also kinda irrelevant, more of historical trivia than anything else: Fedora used to be the distro that Linux For Dummies used to ship out in the 2000s (alongside Knoppix for hardware detection purposes). It's not
unprecedented for newcomers from Windows to give Fedora a fair shake. One could argue that Fedora is more painful to use as a fresh newcomer to Linux, but not insurmountable if the user in question has the wherewithal roll up their sleeves and fiddle with their system. Yeah, I know: a lot of this shit ain't pleasant to deal with. Sprocket said as much when he was talking about losing his hair with Fedora the first time around.
But I also detest this mentality where people in the Linux space just automatically assume that Windows users are complete and total retards who need all the painful parts abstracted or otherwise hidden away, clearly defined and idiot-proofed ways of doing X/Y/Z, guardrails upon guardrails, blah blah blah. Not to talk shit about abstractions and generally idiot-proofing Linux to make sure you don't bork your shit by following old StackOverflow comments from 2013, but like...
learning should also be part of the process.
"Terminal" is scary when you're a brand new Linux user, I'm 100% sympathetic to the anxiety that a blinking cursor with green or white text poses to a newcomer. But I also won't infantilise someone by telling them "stick to the GUI tools" if I
know those GUI tools aren't 100% idiot proof. You know what's worse than touching the terminal as a newcomer? Touching a graphical tool, having some success with it, and then the tool shits the bed without so much as an error code or a log output. Just "oops, we sharted, don't know why, figure it out mate."
That's why I explained how to set up Fedora without talking down to him like he's some invalid tard.
Linux Mint takes the cake because almost
everything in that distro is idiot proof. Your system updater is clearly defined, and properly tells you when to reboot. You have the driver manager that specifically outlines what NVIDIA binary driver you need for your specific graphics card, plus a one-click installer to get it going if it wasn't already auto-installed on your first boot. You can comfortably do just about anything in Linux Mint graphically across all its variants, and it's a smooth and seamless experience.
But not all distributions come even 1/10th as close to Linux Mint in this department. For better or worse, UX is fucking awful on Linux as a general rule of thumb. There are excellent programs with wonderful UX, but they're diamonds in the rough.
If Sprocket wants to learn Linux Mint over Fedora because it's too much too soon, that's his call to make. As it stands, he wanted to make Fedora work, and apparently it's working for him now since NVIDIA drivers are (seemingly) correctly installed and his Steam games work well enough.
