You are correct, 4.10. it's been a while and I forget which month Warty was.
For me, Ubuntu has too many old packages, so it's too unchanging. The 6 month span is plenty for stability for me.
To me stability revolves around stuff breaking between updates, or installing packages causing incompatibilities that eventually degrade the system. I had a lot of that with Manjaro.
While Ubuntu has little of that, it's also too safe, too behind. There were so many times I needed a slightly newer version than what Ubuntu offered, so I would need to hunt for PPAs, manually maintain Deb files, or find other means of keeping stuff up to date. My sources.list.d would be littered with extra repos.
Fedora is a lot more up to date, their repositories are a lot more filled out. I found stuff in the repos that is not in the Ubuntu repos. They are usually fairly up to date, or at most x.x.1 behind kind of thing.
* 2 years is too old. Might be stable but outdated.
* I have had no problems with proprietary drivers. Most of my machines are amd GPUs, but I have a Nvidia 2070 laptop that works fine. Just installed from dnf and it works.
* I haven't hit any 3rd party driver needs. Printers, PC components, accessories. They all work fine without third party drivers. But it could also be because Fedora has a more up to date kernel.
Anyways, I value a balance of up to date software, stability, and just getting out of the way. Which Fedora, especially Fedora 36 that I'm using, does better than Ubuntu and it's derivatives do.
I will say, I just recently switched to Fedora after last trying it many years ago and hating it. I had a bit of hate for the RPM world since old Red Hat Linux days before I made the jump to Ubuntu. So it might be a honeymoom phase, but I'm so much happier with Fedora than the Debian based ecosystem.
I write about this stuff for a living these days, so I am trying to widen the range of distros that I try, that I use, and to learn more about why people choose particular ones.
Totally fair, and I appreciate you asking with an open mind. I have nothing strong against Ubuntu or any debian/ubuntu derivatives. Its still a good distro to recommend.
Also Fedora relies a lot on Flatpaks for most desktop software, so the repos only come into play for command-line tools or something more system related or if you want a native copy of something. Like Discord, Slack, Element, etc are all flatpaks on my install.
Then tools like exa, ripgrep, and so on come from Fedora repos or `asdf` if not in the repos or if i temporarily need a fix in a latest version that is a bit behind in Fedora.
For everyday users, the difference isnt huge if they want to word process, browse the web, play some games, print stuff, get some photos off a camera, etc.
I think in the end I just wanted something between Ubuntu and a rollign release system like Arch or even Suse Tumbleweed.
For me, Ubuntu has too many old packages, so it's too unchanging. The 6 month span is plenty for stability for me.
To me stability revolves around stuff breaking between updates, or installing packages causing incompatibilities that eventually degrade the system. I had a lot of that with Manjaro.
While Ubuntu has little of that, it's also too safe, too behind. There were so many times I needed a slightly newer version than what Ubuntu offered, so I would need to hunt for PPAs, manually maintain Deb files, or find other means of keeping stuff up to date. My sources.list.d would be littered with extra repos.
Fedora is a lot more up to date, their repositories are a lot more filled out. I found stuff in the repos that is not in the Ubuntu repos. They are usually fairly up to date, or at most x.x.1 behind kind of thing.
* 2 years is too old. Might be stable but outdated.
* I have had no problems with proprietary drivers. Most of my machines are amd GPUs, but I have a Nvidia 2070 laptop that works fine. Just installed from dnf and it works.
* I haven't hit any 3rd party driver needs. Printers, PC components, accessories. They all work fine without third party drivers. But it could also be because Fedora has a more up to date kernel.
Anyways, I value a balance of up to date software, stability, and just getting out of the way. Which Fedora, especially Fedora 36 that I'm using, does better than Ubuntu and it's derivatives do.
I will say, I just recently switched to Fedora after last trying it many years ago and hating it. I had a bit of hate for the RPM world since old Red Hat Linux days before I made the jump to Ubuntu. So it might be a honeymoom phase, but I'm so much happier with Fedora than the Debian based ecosystem.