Linux

Coming from Fedora/Cinnamon, I went with Tumbleweed/Plasma. As dumb as it sounds, checking out those "X things to do after installing openSUSE Tumbleweed" articles really helps get the ball rolling with adding the Packman repo, using opi for codecs, installing MS Fonts for compatibility, and other basic quality-of-life things like that. YaST does a lot of heavy lifting and hand holding, which can be good or bad depending on your Linux journey, experience, and/or philosophy - but it is very convenient. Honestly, like with anything Linux, you just kind of adjust til you find things you don't like - which, to be honest, my main list of things is less with openSUSE itself and more with KDE Plasma.

I guess that's a long way to say, I've been fine and haven't missed Fedora.

Having done the same trip (years of Fedora, then OpenSUSE) I'm super happy with my experience

Not OP, but I used Ubuntu for years and just installed OpenSUSE on my laptop last week. I really like Plasma compared to Gnome. The package manager repos needed a lot more configuring on openSUSE compared to Ubuntu, as there were a lot of software not available in the default repos. Things like my graphics drivers for my dedicated GPU needed a repo added. I also like apt a lot more than zypper. Zypper seems to complain about incompatibilities a lot, and it's much slower. OpenSUSE has far more up to date packages than Ubuntu, which was the main reason I switched. I also really like btrfs and snapshotting built in. I haven't figured out Yast yet. It seems confusing to me. I prefer to set configs from command line.

Once I had everything set up though, I can't really tell the difference, which is ideal.

This is the contentious part and also why I left Fedora.

Don't get me wrong, you'll be hard pressed to find a better community, better support or even a more innovative bunch. Besides RedHat's involvement, Fedora has been in the vanguard for desktop technologies like PipeWire, Flatpaks, Wayland, heck they were one of the first to push systemd.

But my problem is that since RedHat holds sway over the Fedora leadership we cannot guarantee that the community will have the users best interests at heart.

So when people say "use a community distro", they mean a non-captured one.

And again; Fedora is awesome, the community is awesome, been using it for years, but switched to NixOS like a month ago because I don't trust the direction RedHat/IBM is taking Fedora.

Most likely they'll push some of these projects to Fedora, make them maintain the projects, then some years down the line sell those projects as apart of their service.

There is a conflict of interest here and a clear opportunistic angle. RedHat wants to use the Fedora community as a free of charge testing grounds, in effect creating a userbase of free QA testers for future software.

This is predatory, it is an insult to the community, but the community is captured, and therefore will play ball with RedHat. This is the problem. If the community would give some assurances and protections, that would be nice, but so far it seems the Fedora community is more than willing to play ball with IBM/RedHat.