And again as I’ve said before I don’t wanna distro hop anymore, this isn’t my first distro

Ah okay, somehow that went over my head. Apologies*. Thanks for clarifying, though!

so am focused on the long term and reliability of the thing.

it’s up to date but stable, and it’s basically taken the place that Ubuntu originally held as a jack of all trades of sorts

Noted. Thanks (again) for clarifying!

Ubuntu has been extremely hit or miss for me in regards to stability and updates (literally the system at one point nearly bricked itself when trying to upgrade and am now stuck on a specific Ubuntu version forever because of it, the updating thing seems completely borked for me, can’t upgrade it without wiping the whole thing and this isn’t the first or last time anything Ubuntu based has done this to me before, updating it is very dreadful for me because it’s a complete gamble), and as far as I know Fedora seems to be a lot more stable and polished on that front, haven’t heard anything majorly bad about it.

Pff…, there’s a lot to unpack here. Heck, I could dedicate a whole comment just on this. Unsure if you’d be interested, though 😅. Regardless, the gist would be that uncompromised stability across updates on Linux has historically been (and mostly remains to be) a hard problem to solve. This isn’t because the Linux ecosystem is incompetent, instead the onus is on the freedom we enjoy on this platform and the consequences that very freedom entails.

Anyhow, I do agree that Fedora (or at least some variant of it) does better than Ubuntu in this regard. There are high-profile Ubuntu veterans that have since migrated to ‘Fedora’ for stability and they’ve been very much enjoying themselves with the improved experience.

what legal stuff would be concerning if I may ask? Heard at one point they were gonna get rid of hardware acceleration or something because of legalities or whatever?? But then changed their minds? Idk, stuff like that worries me a bit haha.

Please feel absolutely free to ask fam. At least :P , as long as you can bear my ramblings 😂.

So…, like a lot of other^[1] independent distros, Fedora is not able to ship with everything the end user might require for smooth onboarding. Instead, for hardware acceleration and more, the end user is responsible to install it themselves if they desire full functionality. This shouldn’t be too much of a deal; some might just regard it as part of the first installation process. However, sometimes, Fedora (and the aforementioned distros) are legally bound to cease support of existing functionality. That’s where things get ugly 😅; see this thread. Note that this isn’t lost forever as changes like these just introduce more elements/bullets/articles to RPM Fusion’s Howto’s. Though, it goes without saying that Ubuntu handles this a lot more gracefully.

Thankfully, there are downstream projects of Fedora that are not -or, rather, don’t seem to be- legally bound to the same extent. As such, onboarding is handled better. Heck, some even come with exceptional system management promises (on which they deliver), that ensure your system continues to function as desired. I can share some of my first-hand experiences with these: on multiple occasions I didn’t experience any breakage or whatsoever from the supposed loss of functionality that other users were affected by. Why? Because the maintainers of the downstream project I run on my system handled it without requiring any input from me. It genuinely feels like dark sorcery at times :P .

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1. I believe at least Debian and openSUSE suffer from this as well. ↩︎