Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
I personally prefer OpenSuSE, but Fedora is reasonably close second.
One reason OpenSuSE wins out for me is admittedly just because it’s not a US based project or related to a US based company like RedHat. Not that SuSE is “good” as a sponsor company; it’s just based in Germany and owned by a Swedish investment company, which edges out based in the US and owned by a mega corp like IBM. I know both OpenSuSE and Fedora are mostly independent, but both are under some control of their main corporate sponsors. So I prefer European.
Maybe that’s silly, but I have lost a lot of trust in the US legal system, project governance and their ability to exist without interference by the US state.
but fedora really is community driven. ibm (redhat) could disappear today and fedora would continue with out interruption
Are you talking about Leap or Tumbleweed?
As far as Leap goes. Isn’t it a bit behind compared to Fedora in terms of software package versions? And aren’t their package repos a bit smaller/limited in terms of what’s available?
I’m shopping for a new long term distro myself and can’t seem to make up my mind. I was set on Debian stable, but the software is kinda old. Especially for desktop environments like KDE Plasma. There’s some really cool stuff that came out in the more recent versions and I don’t want to wait 2 years before getting them.
PikaOS is Debian-based and maintaining its own repository based on trixie and unstable with similar patches to Bazzite & team. I’ve been using it as a daily driver on 3-4 systems for at least a year or two with no serious issues, and the updates are quick to fix any minor issues. Excellent for gaming. It’s probably not up to CachyOS gaming standards nor Debian stability but I find it’s a comfortable spot for me.
Fedora is limited to non-licensed products in the base repos IIRC. But there is EPEL and RPMfusion that provide a lot of additional packages.
There are also copr repos which I think are similar to AUR in that they are user submitted.
Tumbleweed is a very cool project