If you watch YouTube you will find that people seem to prefer Fedora over Ubuntu or other distros. Why?
I watched several videos about this and considered my own introduction into Fedora. I tried it because I had watched so many YouTube videos that praised it. In the past I had avoided it because Red Hat in the past did some unethical things and I don’t support unethical companies.
I think there are several reasons for this. The first is that it is easy to install so people who aren’t IT experts can manage this process. The second is that it looks pretty with different windows managers as I have already talked about. I think that people are attracted to what is shiny and pretty and Fedora feels more usable and polished than alternatives.
Yes I can hear some Linux nerds saying but LM created the Cinnamon desktop which is amazing and arguably one of the best ones. However not everyone knows that, and so they might randomly watch a video on YouTube or have a friend who has Linux or have it at work and so that is their introduction.
I think also that having Red Hat maintain it gives a certain level of trust to people. Individual projects like PearOS no matter how good, are inherently more risky to use. How can we trust one person to not have a financial motive or other motives? As an IT person if you work with the government, there has to be trust, and so that means that automatically there needs to be some level of accountability in the OS.
As a home user this doesn’t matter, but in another sense it does. I don’t feel safe using an OS that I can’t trust even on a vague and undefined sense. As attractive as PearOS looks, I couldn’t make it a daily driver because for me there isn’t enough transparency in how it operates. Frankly with better alternatives it isn’t worth my time. I already have a mac, so I don’t need to risk a second rate interpretation.
I also think that its a matter of group think and jumping on the bandwagon. If people see that people are getting YouTube views by saying a Linux other than Ubuntu is good, they are going to do it. I have to be transparent and say that I have tried Ubuntu repeatably over the years and they just aren’t it. They continue to make user hostile decisions like snap package management when the Linux community prefers flatpaks. It just doesn’t make sense. Just like Windows they are killing their own usefulness.
Probably in a few years another Linux distro will become popular like Linux Mint which is amazing or Nobara for gaming which I love. Social media requires hype, and just like celebrities once the media builds something up they then tear it down. Sells ads, and repeat. Aren’t we so guidable for believing the hype?