I’m in the market to find a new distro that is similar enough to Fedora that switching won’t be as laborious as I’ve had it before. I keep hearing POP!_os is a good choice but I’m going to as the community what they think is good.
I’m in the market to find a new distro that is similar enough to Fedora that switching won’t be as laborious as I’ve had it before. I keep hearing POP!_os is a good choice but I’m going to as the community what they think is good.
I would recommend the following in descending order:
I think you’ll be right at home on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I personally recommend against using Debian Testing for anything other than testing the next Debian release. It gets slower security updates, and breakages get fixed slower than just using Sid directly. Since Sid has its own securirt team and since it moves faster, breakages are fixed sooner. Even in the official documentation Debian doesn’t not suggest using Testing for the same reasons.
While that’s true in theory, it’s still very common to run Debian Testing on a desktop in practice. For a user coming from Fedora, there would likely be culture shock from the dated packages in Stable. Using Stable with Flatpaks+Nix would be more usable, but OP’s experience does not sound like it would fit well with the effort/knowledge required for this solution.
I wouldn’t recommend Sid to a less-experienced user and I didn’t recommend Arch for a similar reason.
If you don’t recommend Sid, then Testing is out of the question. Testing is Sid, but less secure. Testing also has package freezing during the last stages of the release cycle. If you want a stable, and managed Debian, then the latest stable is the answer. If you want an cutting edge, semi-rolling release Debian, then you want Sid. Being in the middle has no advantages to the end user, and only invites complications. If something is broken in Testing, you have to wait for it to be fixed in Sid first, then trickle down to Testing at an absolute minimum. Why add an extra delay for nothing?
EDIT: offcial documentation https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/choosing.en.html#s3.1.6
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If you make use of Flatpaks and Nix package manager it can be made to work as a desktop distro. For users who don’t know what they’re doing I wouldn’t recommend this path though.
Hmm, so on top of living under a rock you also like to spread misinformation.
For starters, check Debian FAQ and read up on why Sid (Unstable) is preferred over Testing. Here’s a link: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/. Would you prefer a PDF version?
Next, I recommend reading the Flatpak FAQ: https://flatpak.org/faq/
+1 to OpenSUSE!
How stable is Tumbleweed compared to Leap? Is Leap suitable for a workstation?
It should be similar - both are stable enough for general usecase. Tumbleweed also comes with auto-snapshots and BTRFS, so you can rollback if anything breaks (I assume Leap does this too but I forget). Both are suitable for a workstation.
Because the OP specifically wanted something as close as possible to Fedora, and is moving away from Fedora because of Red Hat’s antics. SUSE is not Red Hat. I don’t want to impart an unfounded paranoia that all company distros are bad onto a user who may not hold that opinion.
They can decide if they accept a SUSE-related distro instead, or move onto my next recommendation, Linux Mint, if they don’t.
I don’t understand recommending an another company distro to user who is happy with using Fedora but want to change it just because it is a company distro. (They both are actually community projects but let’s ignore it for the purpose of this discussion)
Because the OP specifically wanted something as close as possible to Fedora, and is moving away from Fedora because of Red Hat’s antics. SUSE is not Red Hat. I don’t want to impart an unfounded paranoia that all company distros are bad onto a user who may not hold that opinion.
They can decide if they accept a SUSE-related distro instead, or move onto my next recommendation, Linux Mint, if they don’t.