Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.
On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!
Thoughts?
I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.
Is Snap really that bad?
Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !
I gave up on Ubuntu before the snaps became a thing. Here's what I hated :
Upgrading between Ubuntu lts releases never fully worked for me either. Something always broke or went wrong....
I also have had trouble during upgrades in the past.
I'll have to disagree about the purple and orange theme though. I'm personally a big fan.
I also used it and dropped it years ago because it tended to break a lot in updates.
That, their poor kde support, their constant reinventing the wheel (poorly) drove me away.
Now I run opensuse as a rolling distro that's always up to date and just never breaks even when there are 6000 packages to update. It's boring and safe.