Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.
On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!
Thoughts?
I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.
Is Snap really that bad?
Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !
If it works for you then use it, however if you want the latest packages you'll have to NOT use the LTS releases in which case be prepared to do a FULL REINSTALL every time a new version comes out.
Or use the LTS but use Snaps for those applications that you want to have the latest versions of. Snaps are getting better and I think eventually you won't notice the difference between them and native apps, except for the space they just up. But that goes for Flatpak too.
Personally I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I'm not happy with the way Canonical is going. In most cases the "old" apps are fine for me, but if I felt need the newest version I'll use a Flatpak.
Another rolling option is OpenSuse Tumbleweed however, being a Mac which uses proprietary WiFi drivers, your WiFi will break with kernel updates, which can be irritating, unless you have ethernet.
I dont think you need a full reinstall for version upgrades on LTS? But traditional Distro upgrades suck a lot, Fedoras rpm-ostree is so much better.