Comment by browningstreet

Some years ago when an older Macbook Air of mine need a bit of Linux upgrade TLC I cycled through a bunch of linux distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc) and found that Ubuntu had more automatic built-in support for the hardware and had no 1st hour niggles. So I kept it.

When I decided to wipe Windows off my desktop, I started with Fedora because I wanted more container/package consistency with some of the other environments I interact with, and I thought I wanted some of the bare-bones Gnome stuff. But Fedora just didn't feel right.. it was uglier than Ubuntu, the Super-key action was a bit jankier, I missed the menu, I had to manually configure the NVIDIA drivers, and the flatpaks didn't really seem like a huge improvement to me.

Anyway, I wiped Fedora and went again with Ubuntu. I feel like that last round of polish they add to it, and some of their device driver defaults, just work better for me. I have had no issues with snaps though I had to learn to mount external directories over symlinks for things like Thunderbird's snap security for relocated profile stores (moved my profile off the SSD and over to the internal spinning disc). But that was easy.

I tried Linux Mint before and thought about Pop_OS but decided to stick with one of the major distros. Ubuntu has won two of my recent "let's try a bunch of distros" so I think that itch has been quieted for a while.

I will say, for Linux in general, after configuring all the apps I use on the daily (browsers, Obsidian, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, etc) my Linux storage on / takes up all of 35GB of storage on a 256GB SSD. I am unreasonably pleased by that.