After several months of using Fedora, I think it should now be the default recommendation over Ubuntu. There are three reasons I made the switch from Ubuntu: speed, stability, and updates.

Speed

If you’re coming over to Linux from Windows, even Ubuntu will feel reasonably fast. But for those who have tried lightweight distros like Mint with Cinnamon, Ubuntu with either GNOME or KDE just feels heavy.

Part of the reason for the heaviness is Snaps. Ubuntu prefers to distribute their software in the form of Snaps, and these build a sandbox when launched, making them feel quite sluggish. For example, when launching LibreOffice in Ubuntu, it would take almost 10 seconds. When launching it in Fedora or Mint, it would take 1-2 seconds. When most of your apps launch that slowly, it makes the whole system feel slow and bloated.

Ubuntu only felt fast for the first month or two. Contrast that with Fedora, which has felt fast from day 1 to day 100. Even Fedora Workstation with GNOME ran significantly faster running inside a VirtualBox virtual machine, which was running on Ubuntu with GNOME.

Think about that for a second: I could boot up Ubuntu, then start VirtualBox, run a Fedora Workstation VM in VirtualBox, and get my work done faster in the Fedora VM.

Stability

Ubuntu LTS is supposed to be stable – and most people report it being so. Maybe I’m just unlucky, I don’t know. But I’ve never had good luck with it in all the years I’ve run it (and I started dabbling in Ubuntu in 2009).

• In 22.04 LTS, it would never remember my WiFi password. I had to set up a new connection every time I rebooted the PC.
• In 24.04 LTS, photo thumbnails stopped generating for all new image files in the file browser. I spent hours trying every method of fixing it that I could find online. Nothing worked.
• Also, AppImage files stopped working. I used to launch them from the terminal with –no-sandbox appended and that worked fine. But then that stopped working. Nothing I did could make AppImage files work – not even AppImage Launcher. Nothing.

Other things in the system started randomly breaking as well. And this was the second time (and on a different PC) that my installation of Ubuntu began falling apart. After months of instability, and having what felt like a dying OS, I decided it was time to find something else.

Fedora has surprisingly been more stable for me than Ubuntu – despite the fact that it’s reputed as being less stable. I’ve had an issue once with a kernel update that went badly with my display adapter, so I switched to a prior kernel and everything worked fine. All the other issues that I’ve had were bugs or quirks with the KDE desktop, not Fedora itself.

I was shocked when I switched to Fedora because I kept waiting for something to break, something to not work. But it was smooth sailing.

Updates

Fedora is not quite a “bleeding edge” distro like Arch. Some might call it “cutting edge” instead. Fedora developers take the bleeding edge updates, test them, make sure everything is going to work properly, and then publish them to Fedora users.

What you get is the latest Desktops, the latest bug fixes and security updates, a newer kernel, and the latest features.

Getting the “latest and greatest” does occasionally result in a bug, but it’s not anything more than what I experienced in Ubuntu or even Windows.

Challenges

I dislike glowing reviews that seem unrealistic, so I’ll tell you a few challenges that I’ve had with Fedora.

• As mentioned above, a kernel update caused the system display driver to malfunction on my laptop for external monitors. I rolled back to a prior kernel and was fine.
• Codecs – this is the biggest Fedora headache. Due to licensing and copyright laws, Fedora as an American company can’t freely distribute many popular media codecs. That means to do things like watch movies you transfer to your Fedora laptop from your iPhone, you’ll need to manually install the drivers yourself. This can be done pretty quickly and painlessly by going to the RPM Fusion website and following their directions. Installing a media player like VLC can also help.
• NVIDIA – this is the other big Fedora headache. Again, due to copyright laws, Fedora can’t include NVIDIA GPU drivers with their OS. So, you have to install them from RPM Fusion. Secondly, the Linux kernel in Fedora updates so frequently that it sometimes conflicts with the NVIDIA driver. When that happens, you’ll get a black screen at startup and will have to roll back to a prior kernel. This process takes less than ten minutes, but it’s still a bit of a pain.
• Immutable (Atomic) desktops aren’t for everyone. They’re great if you are a very basic computer user who needs nothing outside a web browser and what can be installed via Flatpak/Flathub. But for those who like to tweak their system, an immutable OS is a pain. Fedora offers several atomic spins, and I started out with one of these. It didn’t last more than a week before I went back to the standard desktops (Workstation and KDE).

Is Fedora Right for You?

Probably so. For most average desktop users, Fedora works great. It’s fast, free, efficient, and feels fresh and new. If you don’t mind spending 5-10 minutes getting media codecs installed, this should work well for you.

But if you are a heavy media producer or consumer, or you use your NVIDIA GPU for hours a day, then you might be better off with Linux Mint. On my computer I use for media production, music, and offline LLM work, I installed Mint. While I plan to give Fedora a try on that computer very soon, my everyday workstation has Fedora.