Fedora or Ubuntu for workstation?

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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Evening All,
So I have a friend that is looking at building a new PC and is likely going to be switching to Linux as A: its free B: No microsoft.
He does photo editing work and digital drawings and also a bit of light gaming, he accepts he will loose access to a few games but isn’t bothered as he has completed most of them.
We did a little bit of testing with Ubuntu and Fedora using live USB at the weekend but he cant decide on what he wants, I have been asked on perference but I want to stay out of it.
But generally he is looking for stability (Not a major techie) which both systems provide, doesn’t want to be left far behind (debian stable/centos levels) and just wants the system to work generally (wireless printers, wacom tablet etc) and I don’t want to have to fix things.
Now unfortunately I don’t use Linux in a professional sense like he will so I also feel my choice may not be good, personally I would pick fedora but ubuntu seems to be doing good things and 18.04 is around the corner.

What would you suggest? I believe he will also be going Nvidia unfortunately (tried pushing him to AMD but pricing is a bit steep still) so I need to know his GPU will work (likely 1050ti).
I know this is all opinionated but would like some thoughts from people who use Linux for design work daily if possible also and what they use.

Many Thanks

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Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or one of it’s derivatives.

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Ubuntu 18.04 LTS which is out on the 26th.

Fedora changes rapidly. Every 6 months I think.

You will have to make a trade off on stability and not being behind the curve.

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Fedora is the cutting edge which rarely means stability. Ubuntu 18 would be the one if your friend has actual work to do. if they are OK lagging 1 or 2 fedora releases then they will have similar stability.
You could also partition the home and then you can test them for a month each and blow them away with very little issue.

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Does he do this professionally?

You should set realistic expectations on this.

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Honestly, it’s not one of the options you suggested but ignoring Ubuntu, Debian is by far the most widely used distro and for good reason. Great support, stability and community. Plus so many distros are based on it that pretty much anything is easy to get up and running on it.

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Ubuntu 18.04 LTS would probably be the best choice; it is available with various desktops as the default, e.g. Unity (now deprecated), Gnome (the default), KDE and MATE. I have used Gnome (good), Unity (hated it) and now for several years, MATE. I used KDE a long time ago when Redhat was my platform. If your friend knows exactly what packages he will be using, he should find if they have a preferred desktop environment (most likely Gnome or KDE), but most things should be OK with Gnome, MATE (forked from an earlier Gnome), perhaps more Windows-like) or KDE (European). Unity may have more incompatibilities. There are lightweight environments, e.g. xfce, which probably hark back to 1990’s environments such as fvwm.

Ubuntu is probably the most popular distribution for general individual use. It is based on Debian. Redhat Enterprise and SuSE are more commonly found in vendor-supported business outfits. Redhat’s Fedora is more of an enthusiast/hacker distribution and definitely not for those seeking long-term stability. CentOS is based on Redhat Enterprise, Mint on Ubuntu and they have quite a wide following.

Your friend can’t go too far wrong with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with Gnome, KDE or MATE, when its available.

[PS: Starting in 1995, I have used Slackware, Redhat, Ubuntu and the Mint/MATE based Distro Astro. UbuntuMATE LTS is what I’m settled with.]

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While Fedora is great, it sounds like Ubuntu is what he is looking for. Ubuntu LTS versions have a longer support cycle (5 years) and are what game developers target when releasing games for linux, which means better support. And being new to linux, it makes sense to go Ubuntu, as there is a plethora of resources for the platform, as well as software for it. In addition, almost every desktop environment has passable support on Ubuntu; the same is true for Fedora with the exlusion of KDE.

Really there are pros/cons to either:
Ubuntu LTS will be more stable and supported longer/packages will age longer.
Fedora will have almost the newest stuff/you will need to hop versions every 6 months to keep up.

Some minutia:
Ubuntu has better support for Nvidia.
Nvidia works on Fedora, but they don’t stick with the same kernel throughout a release, so the driver may break after an update.

Personally, the stability vs up-to-date dichotomy is the reason I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Very up to date and potentially unstable packages, but a easy rollback feature that lets you undo an update in about a minute. I’m obviously biased when it comes to this distro as it is what I use, but it has been a great daily driver for me.

In closing: I doesn’t matter what he starts off with as it will rarely be what he finally ends up using, just make sure he uses a separate home drive or partition, and changing distros should be no problem at all.

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I disagree. I like fedora better than Ubuntu. However, if you want stable, you should go for Debian and use containers.

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I’ve been a user of both (along with slackware, debian, redhat before fedora existed, etc. in the past). I was a long term Debian proponent, before Ubuntu existed.

Currently, i have Ubuntu 16.04 LTS at work and Fedora at home.

That said… IMHO it depends how recent his hardware is, and how keen he is to get hardware upgrades. You said “new PC” so i gather his hardware is new…

Ubuntu LTS is/was a pain in the balls to get working with Vega. Fedora works with it out of the box now.

Ubuntu at least 16.04 had unity that causes all sorts of hassles with VMware workstation under Linux. Yes, you can use a different window manager, but it was just annoying.

Fedora seems to be where projects like looking glass, new drivers, etc. seem to end up on first. Fedora is also a bit of a precursor to RHEL and works similarly to what RHEL will do in a few year’s time. RHEL seems to be more common in the enterprise in my experience - and many virtual appliances seem to be based on CentOS (maybe ubuntu more popular in the cloud, but i don’t have huge experience in cloud hosted stuff yet).

So, I’d vote to dive in and get his hands dirty with Fedora.

“Stability” is also relative. I haven’t come across an “unstable” Linux for many years. What Debian or Ubuntu LTS will get you in terms of stability is package stability - or software that doesn’t change much. Sure, there’s a bit more of a risk on say fedora of running into a buggy piece of software, but generally by the time it makes the official distro it’s reasonably well tested.

So count me as a vote for Fedora. I’ll be rebuilding my work machine with Fedora when time permits.

edit:
if he is doing photo editing and digital drawings as a day job, he may be better off buying a Mac (i run Mac, Linux AND -grudgingly-, Windows). I know that opinion might not be popular here, but if he has work to do and wants the OS to just get out of his way, then that will likely be the path of least resistance. The hardware is nice, the software is nice, the work he is doing doesn’t demand the ultimate in high end performance. You also won’t have to fix it. Check out Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.

Sure, you can compare spec for spec to a PC and bitch about the hardware being inferior for the price, but hardware components aren’t the be all and end all of a usable platform for work. The software on the Mac is right up his alley and makes the difference.

It’s also a field where linux software support for said work is just trash. Network/sysadmin stuff or development? Linux, sure. Art? Not really Linux’s strong point.

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I prefer very much prefer Fedora over Ubuntu, but I actually use Ubuntu because of general driver support and ease of making drivers actually work. A large part of the time normal software (and drivers) that say they are Linux compatible, just have an Ubuntu version of it. Sure you can usually get around that, bit for someone that’s new to Linux or wants the stability it’s better to just go with the platform which it was designed to run on.

Also the help that’s out there in the form of pre-existing forum threads is much higher for Ubuntu than Fedora, which is great for people new to Linux.

There’s also the support cycle other people have mentioned, which is also a positive for Ubuntu.

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Now is a good time for Ubuntu because it is close to Fedora. I think Ubuntu will be a little rocky considering they moved to Gnome only recently but its kernel 4.15.

Myself, I prefer Fedora.

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I am a bit of an amateur but I have been running Linux Mint for over a year and it’s been very stable.
Mint is basically just a fork of Ubuntu with the Cinnamon desktop.

Playing games on Linux Mint/ Ubuntu works great so long as the developers actually put in the time to maintain the Linux variants. Just last week I had a memory leak whilst playing Rust. I had to restart the game hourly, but it’s gone now so it’s all good.

I can attest that Nvidia runs well on Ubuntu/Linux Mint systems. I have a GTX980ti and haven’t had any issues.

If your friend does photo editing commercially or on the side and now uses windows based software even if he is moving to say Gimp I’d still suggest hooking him up with a VM or Looking glass if the PC you’re building has the resources otherwise duel boot just in case he gets caught between a rock and a hard place. You can always delete Windows later once he’s settled.

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This is the only case where I recommend Ubuntu: If you already have Windows and would like to dual boot then Ubuntu (or a derivative) is the best in my opinion just for the sake of installation. For most people, I’d still recommend Fedora.

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So I have shown him this thread and gotten him to read over all your comments, which first he thanks you all for.
He did a bit of reading up on Fedora and Ubuntu last night and believes he is leaning more towards fedora, coming from Windows 10 where he would update twice a year (same as fedora cycle) he believes with good backups he should be able to handle this.
To be fair I could easily script his system to just pull the packages in he requires and save it to a drive which he can just ./run if the worst should happen, I can’t imagine he will be doing any crazy tweaks, maybe a bit of theming.

Also @thro he looked at a mac but pricing for him was out and he wanted something he knew could be fixed easily and quickly (likely by me) if some hardware failed, while he does like the idea of something like a macbook pro and eventually a thunderbolt accessory (GPU likely) the price was just too much to take.
And while I agree macs can compete against custom builds, when it comes to fixing them you need to stick to the hardware they came with (which maybe seriously out-dated by that time) and it costs much more than a PC part to replace and would generally take longer, we have a computer shop up the road so I can get most parts same day easily, but thanks for the suggestion anyways!

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Have you looked into Solus?

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The differences between those distros are pretty minor. I would actually recommend Mint myself. But if he’s never used Linux before, expect that he will need a lot of support. Linux doesn’t “just work” on the desktop.

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I’d like to take a moment to point out that “old package versions” does not equate to stability. The corollary to that is that new package versions does not equate to instability, except in the case of Arch.

A lot of people have this mindset that old equals stable and they use that as an excuse to recommend certain distributions that aren’t staying up to date.

Fedora does a wonderful job of remaining stable and the release upgrades are painless. That said, Ubuntu is a more turnkey solution because of certain design choices by fedoras leadership.

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I’d still recommend looking at the Mac and maybe adjust his hardware expectations down a little (in terms of getting work done, Mac software punches above its weight vs. the hardware it runs on). The software does make a difference. Doing video in final cut for example, the workflow is comparable on a retina macbook to a desktop PC. Because the software intelligently does pre-rendering in the background on the Mac. Maybe he should go play with one in the apple store and ask to try some of the software.

if he has applecare, it doesn’t matter if it breaks. Take it back, get new machine and restore from backup. Not your (or his) problem. Even without applecare, a friend had his 2011 macbook pro motherboard replaced, for free, last year (Discrete gpu failure). 6 year old machine. Out of warranty. Zero cost. Yes, that was due to a known GPU fault, but the point being: apple support is generally very good.

Don’t forget to take software costs into account also.

The Mac app store has gems like Affinity photo and Affinity designer which are very cheap (like, 50 bucks or so from memory). There are no comparable linux alternatives, and the windows alternatives to run in wine are often far more expensive.

Anyway, just wanting to point those things out. If you’re just comparing hardware price and ability to repair vs. a PC, sure the Mac loses out, but there’s a bit more to it than that when you compare the actual ownership cost (never mind that you’ll likely be able to sell a 3 year old mac for about half what you paid for it or so come upgrade time - a PC will be worth very little). I’m amazed at how little i’ve had to spend on software since I’ve had a couple of Macs (in addition to PCs) and I’m fully legit. Not a single warez program on my machine.

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this :arrow_up: