A lot of people are saying that a lot of things here aren’t Fedora/Red Hat’s fault. It doesn’t actually matter whose fault it is, does it? Is it user friendly or isn’t it?
Indeed. You can find solutions/workarounds to most problems. But, I am sure that even 1% of people won’t bother to go into the difficult way. I am just a privacy conscious person, so why should I have to spend hours for basic information and configuration?
How many of us really use Fedora or GrapheneOS as daily driver?
My points is switching to Linux is already a difficult choice for an ordinary user, and Fedora makes it more difficult.
I would posit the same question against Ubuntu. My opinion is Ubuntu used to be much more user-friendly before prematurely pushing snaps. Last I checked, the Libreoffice snap has a massive performance penalty compared to native. Firefox and Thunderbird had the same problem, but it has seemingly been mitigated. Now Ubuntu users are left to wonder if snap packages are performing worse than their native counterparts, and choose app by app whether to go native or snap (at least for those apps where they still have a choice). IMO this is a much bigger UX failure than any and all of Fedora’s limitations.
Mint meanwhile may indeed remain a better experience for new users, but the lack of wayland support is a dealbreaker for me.
I do. Both counts.
i daily drive both but i am an IT person. i have never thought of Fedora as not being user friendly, and actually think the only thing easier imo would probably be Ubuntu due to the community and larger user base. i do think it’s by a pretty small margin.
i also think it’s interesting that of all the recommendations on the linux page, Fedora is the one being called into question over user friendliness. Unless YaST really makes up the difference, openSUSE would be even worse due to being far less popular/fewer packages, and Arch…well, it’s not focused on user friendliness, it’s focused on minimalism.
Hi Jonah,
any news on this also the Fedora guides?
An Ubuntu guide would be like if PG had a CalyxOS guide, and both are unecessary IMO. Ubuntu would have hardening steps already similar to the desktop Linux hardening guide, like CalyxOS with the Android overview.
Indeed, I think this is not in scope for our current site anymore. I would be happy if an Ubuntu user around here wanted to make a guide in Community Wiki though. It is the best place in our community for any privacy-hardening guides about products that we don’t encourage using.
I may also still work on a Fedora guide myself, but I have no updates on that, and can’t promise it will be anytime soon unfortunately.
If anything Ubuntu is hard to use without snaps than it used to be. You used to have Ubuntu-managed apt repos and snaps were a later addition, but now core default components and software are snaps so you have to manually de-snap Ubuntu to get rid of them if you don’t want them.
It seems clear to me that the winning modern software packaging method for Linux is flatpak, not snap or appimage which both have negative security/privacy implications.
The original poster’s frustrations would have been easily solved by enabling flathub repos where he could install Signal if he trusted the flathub community to package it, which is probably a reasonable compromise compared to depending on snaps.
Ubuntu is almost unusable without snaps and the trend will probably increase. I tried to install Flatpaks on Ubuntu and they actually did not run for some reason. Debs are using the older Ubuntu libraries which make them insecure. But Ubuntu snaps have their place. I think Ubuntu + snaps is a great option for grandmas or moms because snaps auto-update without needing restarts and the OS is relatively stable. I cannot trust my grandma to keep her browser updated on Fedora and to be around when there are hiccups (and there will be).
Debian and Ubuntu are the distros with which I had the most problems. Especially Ubuntu was quite problematic and problems were rather difficult to solve, even though I am an experienced Linux user. Documentation and help info found online was quite bad for both, despite making up a huge amount of market share.
I’d blame their insistence into hard locking their snaps ecosystem into everything. They’ve literally robbed us of options, apparently out of spite(?) for not choosing snaps over the competing technologies.
I seem to remember a time when they were the easiest to find fixes for. These days I am unsure.
Same experience here. Ubuntu is very easy to pick up, but in the medium and longer term it’s the most painful desktop linux experience. If I hadn’t switched away from it as a beginner, I would probably still be using Windows.