Linux

I have very little experience with Arch. I ran Mint for a decade before coming to Fedora KDE for Wayland's wider support for variable refresh rates and such.

A lot of my opinions on the matter have more to do with KDE vs Cinnamon. But as for Fedora vs Mint/Ubuntu/Debian, I have one major one: Software availability is nowhere near as good.

On Mint, a shit ton of stuff can be found in the APT repos, plus Flatpak is there. If the package you want isn't in either of those two places, there's probably an Ubuntu-style PPA (remember those?) or, if you're resorting to downloading and compiling from Git, they always include Ubuntu instructions and they work.

On Fedora, the standard repos via DNF have half a moldy butt in them. They maintain their own Flatpak repository, and there's Flathub. There have been a number of times where I've had to just give up having a piece of software I was used to because it's not packaged for Fedora. Build instructions are rarely written for Red Hat/Fedora, and "Well I'll just say DNF install instead of APT install" is usually "cannot find package."

I'll probably be moving on at some point, but it's working for now.

Fedora gives you a secure and functional desktop distro out of the box while with Arch, you can get that as well but have to invest more configuration time, since you have to configure things like Secure Boot, SELinux, disk encryption, firewalls, AppArmor and other security stuff by yourself, it's not going to have all that jazz by default, since Arch is a minimalistic and modular DIY-like distro, so it's up to the user to configure this. Arch doesn't put obstacles in the way of the user but also doesn't just preconfigure this stuff. But it's all there if you need it. Arch also offers a linux-hardened kernel variant which uses various hardening patches of the GrapheneOS project for the kernel (not sure if Fedora offers this as well). Experienced Linux users tend to like Arch's approach because of more flexibility, modularity and minimalism while still offering everything necessary, but the less experienced of a user you are the more you probably will have problems with this approach, and the more you want more things to be pre-configured out of the box, so that you as the user have to configure less stuff. The more you view it that way, the less suitable Arch is for you.

But both are excellent and modern distros. Fedora is generally for people who want to generally spend less time configuring their desktop distro. Arch is for people looking for either a more universal distro or something more modular, technically simple and customizable.

The RedHat backing of Fedora can be a blessing (lots of great stuff came from RedHat so far) but also could become a curse soon due to IBM's influence (which bought RedHat some time ago, and IBM isn't such a great company, and this can negatively impact RedHat as well) and current US politics (it's a US-based company). Arch, on the other hand, is even more independent than Fedora is and it's a fully community-run distro, and from all community-run distros, it's of very high quality, similar to Debian. Both Debian and Arch are also quite democratic in nature. If IBM hadn't bought RedHat, and US wouldn't be like it is today, I'd maybe view this differently but as it is I'd rather use a community-run distro than a US-corporation backed one. Even if Fedora is still very independent as a project, or so it seems.

If you're very well familiar with Arch there's really no need to switch to Fedora, but it can save you some time or configuration trouble overall in some cases, while it could also mean more potential trouble with major upgrades than with Arch with its frequent but lightweight updates all the time and never a big major version upgrade because Arch has no versions at all, it's purely rolling, whereas Fedora is a mixture of rolling and point release. That said, if you update your Arch very infrequently (e.g. only once every couple of weeks), you will also have a higher chance of update troubles (though these are often easy to solve for an experienced Arch user, but can be crippling for a newbie). To benefit from Arch's update mechanisms, you have to update frequently, as in every couple of days, at the very least once a week. And you really should set up a fallback mechanism, e.g. via filesystem snapshots, so you can revert an update which went wrong. Although so far, one of my Arch installations here is like 7 years old and there were only very minor update issues during that whole time, all of which were solvable via downgrading a specific package, waiting 1-3 days for the fix and then upgrading that package. So I'd say Arch is much more stable than its reputation, but still, even objectively small update issues can be devastating for you if you don't know how to solve them, so it again depends on the user.

Another factor is probably going to be whether the AUR or Fedora's community repos have more of the additional packages that you need for your use cases, from the packages that aren't in the default repos.

Which of the two distros makes more sense depends highly on the user, the user's familiarity with Linux basics, the user's available time, and general use cases. I'd say both choices are excellent for a desktop distro, and Fedora would immediately become my daily driver if I ever became unhappy with Arch. Which so far hasn't happened.

Another option if you still can't decide between those two excellent distros would be an Arch derivative like EndeavourOS or CachyOS, which pre-configure more of Arch for an easier desktop use out of the box. So they are more like Arch of course (based on it) but trade away some of Arch's subjective "weaknesses" for Fedora's subjective "strengths". I say "subjective" because those weaknesses and strengths can be different for each user and use case. Sometimes this gets forgotten in discussions like this. It's not a clearly defined drawback if your distro doesn't preconfigure most stuff out of the box. Whether that is a drawback or not depends on the user. However I'd assume that most users probably prefer more pre-configuration. But still, one size doesn't fit all.

Well this got longer than intended but I hope it helps for decision making.

I ran Arch for years, but I eventually realized I only really enjoyed Arch from a conceptual point of view.

The big plus for me is stability. I had a few major problems pop up after an update, and while I was able to fix them easily enough, It was still annoying that I had to do it. Fedora is nice and stable while not being too far behind.

The loss of the AUR wasn't that annoying because Fedora has the advantage of being one of the main OS's. A lot of developers treat it as a default

Fedora is excellent. Even major release upgrades run usually smooth. Big point is also, that you may find rpm packages beside debian package for software directly from vendor

In my experience, fedora is more stable and more of a hands off distro.

I like arch and mostly use it, but for things that I just don't want to have sudden issues that I need to take care of, I don't use fedora.

But really, at this point, I feel like all of the major distros are kind of the same once you know what you are doing. Best tip I can give you is to just distro hop, it's fun, it's educational and by the time you did 5 distros you kinda already know what you like and what works well.

I made the same move a few years back and really like it. Can't say much regarding SELinux and security though. Regarding the AUR, it depends on how much you use it but I only rarely miss it. A lot of stuff that is not in the default fedora repos can be found in copr https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/

It may be fixed and perfect, now, but I will never forgive Redhat for RPM, and by extension, every derivative. Fedora. CentOS. Anything rpm-based. I'm not a huge fan of debs, either, but I have never experienced dependency hell as bad as on rpm systems.

Lots of people like it. It's really popular for installing on a desktop configured to run an obscure, but mission-critical, service, putting the computer in a closet, and then later walling up the closet so that the physical computer can never be found again. It's great, as long as you never upgrade it.

there is OBS hosted by openSuSE that could maybe fill in the gaps left by AUR

After a decade of Arch, I was ready. Moved to Nobara and then vanilla Fedora with KDE. I think it was definitely the right move for me, I haven't found anything I couldn't install that I used to have in Arch. No regrets.

Last I tried, about a year ago, dnf had some bug where it would load the entire package tree into memory and require more than a gig to run. Whenever I tried to update my a minimum spec VPS, the package manager would get OOM killed.

Fedora is corporate bullshit. I stay away from it even though its works good.

For what purpose though?

You can use Arch inside a container. Install distrobox with the podman back end and you are golden.

I have never had luck with stability with fedora. But this was 5 years ago. Might try that.

Pretty much no reason to not just use bazzite instead of fedora though, just fedora with some QoL improvements around patents and other small things.

You can still use distrobox if you need an AUR Package really bad