I’ll fully admit that some of my dislike of Fedora goes way back, and I mean way back to probably around 2003-4 when I first tried it. It sucked hard and was extremely difficult to get the things you needed to make a working computer, such as codecs. Most of that is better now but I still just don’t like it.
The installer:
Lets start from the start of any OS, including Fedora. The installer UX is terrible. There are buttons on opposing corners of the screen and you have to mouse all over your living room just to click things. Who thought this was a good design? I’ll admit it’s pretty, but usability needs to be first and foremost.
Take Ubuntu’s installer for example, it’s design is really basic, but the usability and harkens to the early 2000’s, but the UX is actually really great with very little mouse movement needed.
Let’s look now at OpenSuse’s installer. It’s extremely dated looking but the mouse travel is so much better than Fedora’s, and the installer for OpenSuse is very powerful in what you can do during your initial install.
Gnome vs other DEs
Fedora proper ships with a very vanilla Gnome, and let’s be honest, I hate Gnome. It is designed to not actually be very useful and they leave it up to the community to add extensions to add usability to the Gnome desktop. This leads to potential breakage as Gnome gets updates that sometimes break the extensions. Now I’ll fully grant that this is more of a Gnome issue than a Fedora issue, but they don’t seem to care that vanilla Gnome is garbage. And I’ll also admit that there are users using vanilla Gnome without any extensions or add-ons, but these folks are few and far between. The majority of Gnome users have at least one or more extensions installed to get Gnome to do what they need it to do.
The fact that Fedora proper uses Gnome only is very apparent when you use a Fedora spin with any other DE that isn’t Gnome. Take KDE Plasma for example, my beloved DE for a long time. Mostly it works and they also leave it fairly vanilla, but KDE Plasma is a complete desktop so it just works better without adding anything. But even that feels, well….. not really cohesive. It feels like KDE Plasma was thrown on top of something that was built from the ground up to work on Gnome. Take Kubuntu as an example of much the same thing, but done better. Kubuntu is still an awesome OS, even though the mother (father?) distro is Ubuntu, built with Gnome. The Kubuntu devs do a better job of making Kubuntu feel like KDE Plasma is a first class citizen more so than those that slap Plasma on top of Fedora.
Too Locked Down
Fedora is too locked down in that you can’t really do with it what you want if you need to do something a little different. Not signed kernel modules cannot (afaik) be installed, period. No matter how much you need it, forget about it.
Failed me too many times
Many times I have tried to install Fedora (the KDE version of course), and so many times I have been disappointed in something Fedora. The most recent of these was just about 2 weeks ago. I have a testing desktop that I was going to run some benchmarks on of different Linux distributions. OpenSuse Tumbleweed performed fine, as did Manjaro-KDE. No matter what I did I just could not get the very same benchmark to run on Fedora, neither Fedora proper, or Fedora-KDE. Once again, Fedora proved itself disappointing.
Updates like Windows does
When you update Fedora through the GUI, it makes you shut the computer down while it does the updates. Sound familiar? Windows does it’s upgrades in the exact same manner, and most people don’t like that, me included. The part of Windows updates that people hate is that Windows forces this on you, sometimes when you’re in the middle of something. Fedora avoids the forcing bit, but the action is the same. My understanding is you can avoid the restart to update bit if you update with dnf by command line.
sudo dnf updateIt’s a good Linux distro
I say it’s a good Linux distro in that it’s good, but in my opinion not great. There are great distros out there that are much easier to install, and maintain, Fedora is not one of them.
