Fedora or Mint in 2023...or whatever
Fedora or Mint in 2023...or whatever
mint is a really stable base, doesn't make me fiddle with the shell if i don't want to, just works out of the box, and has an installer that isn't ass.
fedora is pretty stable too but they also make things harder for users rather than easier.
Can't compare to Mint, but I'm happy with Fedora. I like it because:
+1 for Fedora. It's very stable even with very fresh packages, I've been on the same installation for years without a hitch.
I still recommend Mint for absolute beginners tho.
I prefer Mint just for ease-of-use, really. I'm not a new user, by any means, and over the years I've bounced between Red Hat, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and a small handful of others that escape me at the moment. But I'm also not a power user.
With Mint, I don't have to tweak things, really. I can install and just go about doung what I want to do. As a bonus, guests aren't left scratching their heads as much if they sit down at my computer to browse the web or pull up a video. It's Windows-ish enough where they can muddle their way through with minimal issue.
Personally I think its mostly a matter of preference and doesn't matter all that much. I like to run a fairly stock desktop environment with minimal tweaking so my setup aligns with what receives the most QA/testing and that means I generally pick distro based on the desktop environment they ship, how much I like their defaults, and how much information there is to find online.
I like vanilla Gnome so Fedora is a great pick. I was never super into how cinnamon looked so I never really gave mint a big try, though I did daily drive ubuntu budgie for a few years and liked my experience with that. Whether I am using yum, apt, pacman or dnf isn't really that big a deal, they all work. Several years managing redhat servers professionally has given me a lot of comfort troubleshooting in that setting so I tend to go for Fedora. Also a nice bonus to have more recent software available without jumping through hoops.
I do want to try out Pop OS and a few others and its cool to distro hop, but generally I just kind of like stock Fedora a LOT so I am not really that tempted to revisit other options and have to get all set up with a different workflow.
I'm using Fedora since I found it fast to setup, fairly stable and it just works. It's the community version of RHEL which hopefully means there will continue to be an incentive to support it.
I've always been a bit on the fence about Linux Mint since the incident where someone managed to publish a hacked distro on their site that installed a backdoor.
Other than that, I agree with what some others have mentioned; it's mostly a matter of personal preference.