Those are two very different philosophies to Linux. Fedora is much more bleeding edge than Debian (by a lot) so the question really comes down to which you prefer.
I absolutely love Fedora and run it on my main desktop. That being said I also cut my teeth on CentOS so I’ve always had a soft spot for the RHEL approach to Linux. As for the bleeding edge aspect, I’ve rarely encountered issues with the latest updates. I had to do a bit of troubleshooting with pipewire and my HDMI output, and once a Gnome update caused the hertz setting on my monitor to bug out and cause a black screen.
None of it was really traumatizing though, and I have my system set to run a DNF update automatically on every login since I like to run as up to date as possible, and generally trust the packages won’t be overly buggy by the time they get pushed live.
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After looking at your profile I realize you probably already are familiar with the philosophical differences of the two. Leaving the above for the potential benefit of anyone else who isn’t familiar.
Fedora has the release cycle of Ubuntu with the large development and QA team of Red Hat. It is upstream of RHEL, so they give a shit about quality and it shows. They also do things open whenever possible when Ubuntu will either keep things closed (Snap Store) or behind a CLA.
I am an independent IT contractor that games on his off time.
Recently, I switched to Linux from Windows and it has been a good experience so far. I went with POPos because of how they integrated steam and the video drivers into the distro. It works great except shit breaks like booting and other things some times when they release major updates. I actually really like way Arch is designed. I was thinking of switching to Manjaro for stability reasons and I dont want to rip my hair out trying to get gaming to work in other distros. Im really looking for release stability with the ability to keep my gaming environment working. Any suggestions?
It is such an absolute overhyped nightmare of a distro. If there were a shame corner for Linux distributions, Manjaro should be one of the biggest offenders.
I'm a fan of Fedora, but it would crash when my GPU was under high load. Since then I've switched to Arch and it's been pretty good. I've only had very minor issues, like printing support not coming preinstalled (I used the Budgie Desktop preset). If you're willing to deal with just a little bit of troubleshooting occasionally then I'd recommend Arch, it's been rock-solid.
If you've got an Nvidia card, then I have no experience with that on Arch, but here's the docs on Nvidia installation, it's easy: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA
Linux Mint could also be a good alternative option. It has easy Nvidia drivers installation as well.
For a desktop, Fedora is likely a better choice for most people because it offers more up-to-date software. How many times have you found yourself struggling to install something on Ubuntu because the version of some dependency in your package manager is out of date? That is much less common on a distro like Fedora (even less so on Arch Linux).
With bleeding edge comes instability though, so it's not all up-side. Personally, I've settled on Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite, which is an immutable version of Fedora. Basically, it gives me the best of both worlds: up-to-date software and stability. Since the system is immutable, it's really difficult to break it even if you try.
Another good, non-IBM alternative to that is OpenSuse Aeon/Kalpa/MicroOS. Or just Tumbleweed/Leap if you don't care about immutability.
You mean Bookworm? Packages are frozen though, so they have completely different use cases. I dislike RH so I wish there were other community controlled Linux distro with the same cadence as Fedora.
There is perhaps room for a new player to enter the market, but I think the correct path would be to direct that effort towards improving Debian as a whole. It's truly one of the greatest open source projects in existence.
