I hardly see Fedora in most places (Western and Eastern Europe is mainly Ubuntu), but Fedora seems to be quite strong in the US, relatively speaking. If it has a strong following there, it's probably sustainable.
In my totally-unscientific-and-anecdotally-based theory:
1) The US is where all the sexiest, high-end laptops are made.
2) The newest hardware often has flaky support at first, basically until the people who are using it (Red Hat engineers, etc.) submit patches to get hardware support into the kernel.
3) Getting those laptops working thus requires using a bleeding edge kernel, which is most easily achieved by using Fedora.
Again, just my personal experience. It happened to me twice (first with the original Chromebook Pixel and then with the Dell XPS 13 9343) where I used Fedora because only Fedora with the latest kernel properly supported the hardware. Now my XPS 13 is several generations old and well-supported by all the major distros, but I stuck with Fedora because I really enjoyed the distro.
I'm not so sure it's strong anymore. Ubuntu all but owns the set it and forget it desktop market and Arch is effectively the standard for power users. Fedora's market share is just dwindling, because there's no where that it outperforms the competition.
> I'm not so sure it's strong anymore. Ubuntu all but owns the set it and forget it desktop market and Arch is effectively the standard for power users.
In my neck of the woods, neither of these is true. Ubuntu was the standard for a long time and is almost certainly a strong majority of new desktop installs, but I've seen Fedora make something of a resurgence over the last couple years to the point where "all but owns" is too strong a phrase.
I know one person who uses Arch. (I will say this: unlike the Gentoo folks, you can't tell an Arch user.) And it seems...fine. But I think calling it a "standard" for power users is a stretch.
Maybe power users wasn't the right term. It's the standard for perfectionists or the detail-obsessed? Interesting that you're seeing a resurgence of Fedora since I can't think of the last time I talked to a Fedora user. I suppose that's the nature of anecdata.
You are right now. ;) I went to Fedora (28 on my work laptop, Rawhide on my desktop) largely because it mostly resembles my RHEL/CentOS production environments--dnf rather than yum, but that's a performance improvement more than anything--and is roughly as supported as Debian/Ubuntu for third-party software.
I found Fedora easier to install than Ubuntu, and it has a more polished UI. I've also never had to wait 2 years for a library I care about to be updated in their repositories.
I got started with Ubuntu around 2008. I wish I could remember why I took the leap from Windows to Linux exactly, but I've forgotten what prompted me to try it. Ubuntu seemed to surge in popularity around that time. Now that I've tried both though, I have a hard time understanding why anyone who is familiar with both Fedora and Ubuntu would choose Ubuntu.
Nope, this is about usage statistics. Fedora was huge years ago, but Ubuntu has taken the "easy" desktop user, Arch has taken the power user and there's a ton of competition in the server space, with CentOS being an effective drop-in replacement.
Fedora just doesn't really have a home anymore and hasn't done anything to really set itself aside from the competition.
Apart from being an integrated, polished distro that brings together all the latest development tools. And being the basis of RHEL, CentOS etc. And the distro used by tons of Linux developers. Yeah it's done nothing at all.
Fedora users are testers for RedHat, this does not mean that next RH release will be identical to Fedora from today, as an example the current RH uses a classical GNOME setup by default in a way telling us that GNOME UX innovations were not appreciated by RH for the workstations
I understand that, but what is the advantage of a Fedora user, your are testing bleeding edge stuff for RH, only if you are in for the bleeding edge and experimental features and you also are working with RH and CentOS servers.2
In case you haven't been paying attention Canonical came to the same conclusion as Red-Hat and decided to pivot into server and IoT space, as Linux desktop hardly brings any money into business.
No it isn't. Canonical didn't pivot, they entered the space. Brand awareness is what the underlying desktop market is for, while server provides income via support contracts. But Ubuntu desktop isn't going anywhere (on the contrary, Ubuntu subsystem for Windows shows Canonical wants to embed more into the desktop market).
At work, most of our Linux installations are Red Hat and CentOS, so for me, Fedora is the ideal distribution for a cutting-edge Linux which is mostly compatible with our software platform. Besides that, I quite like Fedora.
I see the same with Ubuntu. I've seen a lot of developer switch to Ubuntu based distributions because they've become comfortable with using it as their production environment, and it's nice to have the same underlying environment for development. I think moving into the server space was beneficial to Canonical on its own, but It's also brought a lot of developers to their desktop platform.
