Switch to Ubuntu, or Stay with Fedora?

Switch to SUSE or Arch :P

Seriously though, the optimal distro just depends on what you are doing on linux.

I'm amazed you're still with Fedora after all these years. About a decade ago it seemed every machine I had was either too old or too new to be supported by Fedora. For cloud machines I had a much easier time looking up instructions how to do this or that with Ubuntu so I switched a long time ago.

I have no idea about who you are, or what your use cases are, or how you even feel about Fedora currently.

I used both of these distros for a long long time. I enjoyed both of them for different reasons although they were both employed as desktop "Daily Drivers".

I used Fedora on my Lenovo T580 because that's what it's certified for. I used Ubuntu from 2006-2022 on more than one system.

I will tell you that I'd never go back to Ubuntu at this point. I was honestly prepared to "upgrade" to Debian at the next opportunity. I firmly recommend Debian over Ubuntu now.

I typically used the KDE environment, although my Raspberry Pi ran MATE quite nicely.

In some ways it's improved slightly, they gave up on Mir and Unity and now run a lightly modified GNOME on Wayland.

However, they now insist on Snaps so much that they'll install Snaps through apt and have replaced a number of packages this way. Its an incredibly stupid move, and unlike Flatpaks the backend isn't open and it only supports Canonical's own "app store" as a package source.

I'm on LMDE and highly recommend it. I think it's what Ubuntu should have been: a polished Debian-based distribution.

I've been really enjoying pop_os and am hopeful for a long life with continued support.

I’d choose Debian 12 over Ubuntu. It’s all the good with none of the bad.

With no other context, I would not suggest stock Ubuntu.

It’s had incremental improvements, but as a desktop OS, it’s a bit rough in my recent (within the last 1.5 years) experience.

If there are specific issues you have with Fedora, and/or you simply want something Debian based, I would suggest a stable Ubuntu derivative like pop_os! or Zorin OS.

Seeking recommendations is great, but as a desktop Linux user myself, I don’t think there’s any better substitute for having a spare “play” computer (even a junker or a cheap mini PC) that you can just try a few distros out without affecting your main PC until you find your match.

Fedora is objectively the better distribution by a large margin. Do not downgrade to Ubuntu.

I would take Fedora over Ubuntu every time. My biggest gripe with Fedora is a power outage during an upgrade will bork your system. Ubuntu will bork your system without external help.

Stay with Fedora, much better distributions all around. If you need to switch, than at least go straight to Debian.

Mint is arguably the most refined Debian variant at this time.

I used Ubuntu for many years but got tired of fighting with obnoxious snaps that I didn't ask for.

Mint doesn't use them, but supports flatpack instead. Not only that, but if you don't use them, you need not know they exist—unlike snaps.

Fedora on the other hand is fine. Although ultimately plays into the hand of Blue Hat, keep that in mind.

Ubuntu has actually gotten worse over the years ever since it started coaxing users into using Snap. It was revolting when Ubuntu forced Chromium to be installed as a Snap when the user attempted to install it through apt. Requiring Snap in this way is fundamentally hostile to Linux as a free and open source operating system, since the Snap Store server is proprietary and controlled only by Canonical.

If you are already using Fedora, there's no benefit to switching to Ubuntu. If you want to use something more similar to Ubuntu, I recommend Pop!_OS (downstream from Ubuntu) instead of Ubuntu Desktop, and Debian (upstream from Ubuntu) instead of Ubuntu Server.

Is Debian as compatible as Ubuntu for ML and LLM usage? I see tutorials all over the place for Ubuntu.

A lot of Ubuntu hate, and I totally understand why. We all remember Mir and Upstart. And now Snap. So if this bothers you, by all means look elsewhere.

On the other hand... I've used Ubuntu desktop consistently for about 15 years now. I'm not a power user by any stretch. I just want things to work, and the "just works" factor has improved considerably.

Installation is ridiculously easy. It's fast. It never crashes. It finds all the right drivers for me. Suspend works. Audio works great, including with recording software like Reaper/Audacity.

I just don't have time to mess around with stuff anymore. Gone are my Arch Linux days. I get about half an hour of time after putting our little one to bed, and I want to spend 0% of that on configuring stuff.

Honestly if Fedora is working for you and you don't have some compelling reason to switch I doubt it would be worth it. I had been running Kubuntu up until recently and it's meh. It's not horrible, but not good either. And like others have mentioned the whole snap thing just sucks. It's kludgy, poorly integrated and poorly documented. Even the management tools are broken.

I gave Ubuntu one last honest chance and I am done now. I switched back to Debian recently. Seriously I would not currently recommend Ubuntu to anyone. It was okay when Ubuntu was just fancy Debian but it's a hot mess now.

Fedora works for me :) But if you love to get fucked by Canonical and their snaps then you should switch.

Dropped out of using Ubuntu over the past couple of years. Snaps got annoying.

Stick with what you have.

My take: Fedora seems to be going in a good direction. Canonical/Ubuntu does not seem to be going in a good direction. I don’t believe Canonical has a good stream of long-term revenue and I don’t have confidence in how they manage their projects.

I wouldn’t switch. YMMV.

I never understood the point of Ubuntu. It always looked like a psyops to make nerdy teenagers install it on their grandmas laptop

I'm an Ubuntu guy eagerly waiting for the latest graphics stack for ever better 5k support (spoiler: they send two signals for each half of the screen and the abstraction breaks at many places). Will I feel stuck with Debian release pace?

I stay with Ubuntu, because it just works, and life is too short, spending it on debugging Linux issues with hardware, configure this and that, and so on.

Snap is a good idea from the security and software packaging perspective, and different approaches are needed to find out what works best. Snap might be better than flatpak in some respects.

I prefer apt-based distributions.

There's always opensuse, but for your request specifically.

I got a few grips with Ubuntu.

It's very inconsistent with package updates, even on their non lts, certain packages can be quite out of date and take forever to be updated.

Apt I feel is a bit outdated, and while generally stable it'll at times do things you didn't want to (config getting updated without input despite having a feature where you can decide if you want).

General layout of configuration files in /etc is not my personal preference.

If I were recommending a distro today, I would say one of the following:

- Linux Mint (Debian version)

- Debian

- NixOS

Pop!_OS - way, way better than the name suggests

Late to the party but Ubuntu LTS is nice for servers but on a desktop/laptop it's just pain these days. Fedora is a good choice, Manjaro is fun too if you don't mind breaking things sometimes :)