Historically, (at least for hobbyists/enthusiasts) Fedora and openSUSE have been a lot less popular compared to Arch, Debian and their derivatives. While not necessarily representative, Boiling Steam’s chart -in which ProtonDB’s data is used- does indicate to this as well.
I don’t know why, but openSUSE has had difficulty garnering popularity overall (aside from Germany).
A possible explanation, which also ties in to Fedora, is how both are the open source variants to corporate distros; SEL and RHEL respectively.
Arch and Debian are more community-driven by comparison.
For Fedora specifically, people couldn’t regard it as anything but a testing bed distro; especially if you see how back2back they were with adopting new technologies like PulseAudio, systemd, Wayland, GTK 3/4, PipeWire etc. To be fair, openSUSE was the first to default to Btrfs and auto-snapshotting with Snapper*. Fedora was also facing competition from industry darling CentOS; similar code base, but a lot more stable.
Thankfully, since a couple of years now, Fedora has recognized that it’s not cool to expect your user base to be sadistic. And together with the (unfortunate) downfall of CentOS, Manjaro and Ubuntu - Fedora has amassed a very healthy user base. And with how quickly Bazzite is becoming the face of gaming Linux (at least until Valve releases SteamOS), I don’t think it has even peaked yet.
There isn’t a best distro, tho I stick to the root of a distro tree, meaning arch / debian.
Why are fedora and suse often not mentioned considering theyre not forks of anything? (as far as im aware)
I didn’t mention them, because I simply haven’t used them yet.
Historically, (at least for hobbyists/enthusiasts) Fedora and openSUSE have been a lot less popular compared to Arch, Debian and their derivatives. While not necessarily representative, Boiling Steam’s chart -in which ProtonDB’s data is used- does indicate to this as well.
Just my 2 cents.
Kinda crazy considering fedoras perks and accessibility tbh. Dont know much ab suse tho as i have very little experience with it
I don’t know why, but openSUSE has had difficulty garnering popularity overall (aside from Germany).
A possible explanation, which also ties in to Fedora, is how both are the open source variants to corporate distros; SEL and RHEL respectively.
Arch and Debian are more community-driven by comparison.
For Fedora specifically, people couldn’t regard it as anything but a testing bed distro; especially if you see how back2back they were with adopting new technologies like PulseAudio, systemd, Wayland, GTK 3/4, PipeWire etc. To be fair, openSUSE was the first to default to Btrfs and auto-snapshotting with Snapper*. Fedora was also facing competition from industry darling CentOS; similar code base, but a lot more stable.
Thankfully, since a couple of years now, Fedora has recognized that it’s not cool to expect your user base to be sadistic. And together with the (unfortunate) downfall of CentOS, Manjaro and Ubuntu - Fedora has amassed a very healthy user base. And with how quickly Bazzite is becoming the face of gaming Linux (at least until Valve releases SteamOS), I don’t think it has even peaked yet.
steamos? its going to have its own release detached from the deck? thatd be so cool
Yup; at least to some extent.