I Started with fedora, Distro hopped a lot during my college days, Currently settled with Manjaro on my work system, and solus for my daily driver.
But Fedora will always have a special place in my heart. From my personal experience, every student that I taught when I was a tutor, the students that started with fedora/redhat stuck with linux longer than students that got ubuntu as their first distro, they switched back to windows almost as soon as their course was over. YUM/DNF is a great package manager, Only other package manager I like is Solus's eopkg.
I believe that Ubuntu need to up their game on the end users market. Otherwise, for me, I think Windows is a better OS to use, i.e. better hardware support, also newer and wider software and drivers available. Nonetheless, it's a good distro for devs with huge supports from the communities, companies, and from a lot of individual projects as well.
Other distros, on the other hand, are actually present Linux techs, wow factors, reasons to move from Windows to Linux. Someone might call those features quirks 😂 But for the fans, this could be their playground, both in terms of technical and political.
From my personal experience with APT, DNF, and Zypper, Zypper is the worst as it's not playing in harmony with PackageKit (backend updater in GNOME Software). There's also no ETA when I can expect my download to finish. DNF looks more modern to me. But the best is APT, as there's a purge which can also remove configuration files (in the system, not in the home directory). For the end users, purge is huge, as they could purge any stupidly mistake that they did, a reset button for them. I don't know in deep details of those package managers, though. This is my view as an end user.
This might be personal preference but APT still has a long way to go, even though it is a big improvement over apt-get situation. About APT purge, dnf and eopkg does that out of the box when you remove some package. dnf remove is equivalent to "apt remove && apt purge". Also, I have frequently noticed purge to break dependencies of other packages, it is actually a big issue.
I actually did a reunion with my former students few years ago, it was at that time when I noticed that the students in batch which used fedora used linux longer than the students in batch which used ubuntu. Especially for their home use, despite the fact that online resource is better for debian based systems and fedora at that time had a pretty bad codec support. Some of the students who had to use Ubuntu at work actually hated the fact there was different command for doing different part of package management.
As a home user, DNF and Eopkg, has a cleaner command line experience, and these are the only two package system that has proper delta support and better debug symbols. APT and Pacman doesn't have official delta package support and community solutions are outdated. And APT dependency resolution is not good at present. DNF does a much better job than any other package system in my experience.
In India where we still factor in data usage and data speed, just looking at a message which says download will be a third of update size, makes it a better choice. Just today, I did an upgrade in Manjaro and Solus, Solus was about 40mb of download, Manjaro was about 700mb of download, for almost same stuff. Biggest difference was size of libreoffice, firefox and thunderbird update where solus had delta packages for them but manjaro didn't.
I Started with fedora, Distro hopped a lot during my college days, Currently settled with Manjaro on my work system, and solus for my daily driver.
But Fedora will always have a special place in my heart. From my personal experience, every student that I taught when I was a tutor, the students that started with fedora/redhat stuck with linux longer than students that got ubuntu as their first distro, they switched back to windows almost as soon as their course was over. YUM/DNF is a great package manager, Only other package manager I like is Solus's eopkg.
Wow, thanks for your input.
I believe that Ubuntu need to up their game on the end users market. Otherwise, for me, I think Windows is a better OS to use, i.e. better hardware support, also newer and wider software and drivers available. Nonetheless, it's a good distro for devs with huge supports from the communities, companies, and from a lot of individual projects as well.
Other distros, on the other hand, are actually present Linux techs, wow factors, reasons to move from Windows to Linux. Someone might call those features quirks 😂 But for the fans, this could be their playground, both in terms of technical and political.
From my personal experience with APT, DNF, and Zypper, Zypper is the worst as it's not playing in harmony with PackageKit (backend updater in GNOME Software). There's also no ETA when I can expect my download to finish. DNF looks more modern to me. But the best is APT, as there's a
purgewhich can also remove configuration files (in the system, not in the home directory). For the end users,purgeis huge, as they could purge any stupidly mistake that they did, a reset button for them. I don't know in deep details of those package managers, though. This is my view as an end user.This might be personal preference but APT still has a long way to go, even though it is a big improvement over apt-get situation. About APT purge, dnf and eopkg does that out of the box when you remove some package. dnf remove is equivalent to "apt remove && apt purge". Also, I have frequently noticed purge to break dependencies of other packages, it is actually a big issue.
I actually did a reunion with my former students few years ago, it was at that time when I noticed that the students in batch which used fedora used linux longer than the students in batch which used ubuntu. Especially for their home use, despite the fact that online resource is better for debian based systems and fedora at that time had a pretty bad codec support. Some of the students who had to use Ubuntu at work actually hated the fact there was different command for doing different part of package management.
As a home user, DNF and Eopkg, has a cleaner command line experience, and these are the only two package system that has proper delta support and better debug symbols. APT and Pacman doesn't have official delta package support and community solutions are outdated. And APT dependency resolution is not good at present. DNF does a much better job than any other package system in my experience.
In India where we still factor in data usage and data speed, just looking at a message which says download will be a third of update size, makes it a better choice. Just today, I did an upgrade in Manjaro and Solus, Solus was about 40mb of download, Manjaro was about 700mb of download, for almost same stuff. Biggest difference was size of libreoffice, firefox and thunderbird update where solus had delta packages for them but manjaro didn't.
Thanks. This is a very informative comment +1,000