I've used Fedora, off and on, for many years and Red Hat before it, back in the late 90's.
I still have 2/3 of my machines on Fedora. My main development workstation is running Arch now and I plan to migrate my music production workstation and my all-rounder ultrabook as well.
Despite moving away from Fedora, I really can't say much against it and little against it that's actually in favor of Arch or any other distro.
It's a good solid distribution. The only real pain points are installing non-free drivers and that some things aren't packaged for it. I'm comfortable repackaging things, doing manual installs, or adding necessary repos--no distribution has 100% of all software ever created in its repositories.
I mainly switched to Arch because I wanted a rolling release distribution where I wouldn't feel "left behind" after a couple of years of being too lazy to reinstall my whole OS. (Which is different than LTS, because I want more than just security updates and fixes, I want the latest everything, forever.)
The secondary reasons I ended up liking Arch are the AUR and that Arch does much MUCH less for you out of the box in terms of default configurations etc than Fedora does and I was getting a bit frustrated with not having things the way I wanted them while having default configurations that were adequate enough to settle for.. so I wanted a distribution that would be basically almost unconfigured after installation so that I would arrive at the configuration I wanted. In this regard, Arch has been better than Fedora but that isn't "user-friendly" that's more "user-challenging".
Either way, Fedora is a good distro, I would recommend it to a raw newbie or a power user. I can't really say anything other than that, it's definitely Linux. It's also really easy to install. (I auditioned Ubuntu and some Ubuntu-derived distributions some time ago found things like getting my RAID working at install-time to be impossible. I use BTRFS now, but I was trying to use my mobo's RAID-controller then.. which was trivial in Fedora and not happening in Ubuntu.)
If you're curious to know what I don't like about Arch.. it's that updates seem like they should be done pretty regularly and I'm not in the habit of rebooting more than about 2-3 times a year. There was even a year in recent history where I did not reboot once and my uptime was somewhere around 1 year before I irrationally became worried that I didn't -know- that my computer was capable of booting because I hadn't tested that capability in so long, so I rebooted it and then updated just to demonstrate to myself that it would work.
I still have 2/3 of my machines on Fedora. My main development workstation is running Arch now and I plan to migrate my music production workstation and my all-rounder ultrabook as well.
Despite moving away from Fedora, I really can't say much against it and little against it that's actually in favor of Arch or any other distro.
It's a good solid distribution. The only real pain points are installing non-free drivers and that some things aren't packaged for it. I'm comfortable repackaging things, doing manual installs, or adding necessary repos--no distribution has 100% of all software ever created in its repositories.
I mainly switched to Arch because I wanted a rolling release distribution where I wouldn't feel "left behind" after a couple of years of being too lazy to reinstall my whole OS. (Which is different than LTS, because I want more than just security updates and fixes, I want the latest everything, forever.)
The secondary reasons I ended up liking Arch are the AUR and that Arch does much MUCH less for you out of the box in terms of default configurations etc than Fedora does and I was getting a bit frustrated with not having things the way I wanted them while having default configurations that were adequate enough to settle for.. so I wanted a distribution that would be basically almost unconfigured after installation so that I would arrive at the configuration I wanted. In this regard, Arch has been better than Fedora but that isn't "user-friendly" that's more "user-challenging".
Either way, Fedora is a good distro, I would recommend it to a raw newbie or a power user. I can't really say anything other than that, it's definitely Linux. It's also really easy to install. (I auditioned Ubuntu and some Ubuntu-derived distributions some time ago found things like getting my RAID working at install-time to be impossible. I use BTRFS now, but I was trying to use my mobo's RAID-controller then.. which was trivial in Fedora and not happening in Ubuntu.)
If you're curious to know what I don't like about Arch.. it's that updates seem like they should be done pretty regularly and I'm not in the habit of rebooting more than about 2-3 times a year. There was even a year in recent history where I did not reboot once and my uptime was somewhere around 1 year before I irrationally became worried that I didn't -know- that my computer was capable of booting because I hadn't tested that capability in so long, so I rebooted it and then updated just to demonstrate to myself that it would work.