> There's also the fact that Ubuntu ships with the GNOME desktop environment, and really only GNOME.

This is a feature. Standardization is what makes „Works on Ubuntu“ a stable target.

I also dislike Snap and the various other Ubuntu anti-features, which is why I recommend Pop OS - at least I did when it was a light weight Ubuntu fork, it may not be anymore.

This is just a rando‘s opinion, so it may not be based on that, but my intuition from a few years ago is that Debian/Ubuntu still has a reliable lead in the availability of software packages, especially less popular ones: You’ll almost never find something that doesn’t work on Ubuntu, for other distros this happens sometimes.

Has this changed? Maybe with the widespread adoption of Flatpak this is not much of an issue for consumer apps anymore?

If you use a Linux desktop professionally, it's only a matter of time until you hit that one GUI app that you need, that is only supported on Ubuntu.

I prefer Tumbleweed, but the sane choice remains Ubuntu.

Backed by IBM/ Red Hat a US based company.

I trust the German government to have more respect for privacy rights at this point.

So I use Open Suse Tumbleweed. It’s been pretty stable , although with nvidia you have to do a bit more.

I doubt Canonical cares much about the desktop segment, at least the segment that doesn't pay. They seem to be focusing on servers. Or at least that's what it seems to me.

How well does Fedora handle proprietary software nowadays? For example the Nvidia driver, Steam, Rider or video codecs. I negatively remember their patent paranoia regarding elliptic curve cryptography.

My favourite feature of Manjaro (and presumably Arch) is how easily I can install almost any software from a single package manager (which supports the official repos, flatpak and AUR). While on Mint I had to mess with custom package sources, or install individual vendor provided packages which lacked auto-update.

For brand new hardware, Fedora gets the niggle-free experience faster than Ubuntu. 5K screens are treated as two separate devices "under the hood", many Ubuntu software didnt honor the abstraction, hence the monitor layout, notifications, taskbar etc were treating each half as a full monitor.

Fedora may be becoming the default for desktops, not for servers (Debian possibly the default for servers).

Ubuntu has fallen out of favour with quite a lot of Linux recommender sites and reviewers and its mainly about flatpak and Gnome, but also gaming support by default. Other Linux distributions do things better now for the influx of gamers to Linux and with SteamOS being on Arch a lot of Arch deriatives are becoming increasingly popular. I don't think its Fedora picking up users, its Cachyos and Bazzite.

Recommended by whom?

I still don't understand how people can run Debian/Ubuntu. Every single time I have tried my environment in the span of a few months turns into a wet ball of mud with various levels of breakages. It's honestly astounding how bad it is. Once in a while I install a newly released version and naively think "Surely this problem is now fixed". But no, it's terrible.

Are they both still a nightmare to setup and/or use?