Personally I think its mostly a matter of preference and doesn’t matter all that much. I like to run a fairly stock desktop environment with minimal tweaking so my setup aligns with what receives the most QA/testing and that means I generally pick distro based on the desktop environment they ship, how much I like their defaults, and how much information there is to find online.

I like vanilla Gnome so Fedora is a great pick. I was never super into how cinnamon looked so I never really gave mint a big try, though I did daily drive ubuntu budgie for a few years and liked my experience with that. Whether I am using yum, apt, pacman or dnf isn’t really that big a deal, they all work. Several years managing redhat servers professionally has given me a lot of comfort troubleshooting in that setting so I tend to go for Fedora. Also a nice bonus to have more recent software available without jumping through hoops.

I do want to try out Pop OS and a few others and its cool to distro hop, but generally I just kind of like stock Fedora a LOT so I am not really that tempted to revisit other options and have to get all set up with a different workflow.

I tried Fedora this year and really don’t like it. I’m sticking to arch/arch-based : the learning curve is steep but onse you get used to it it’s really efficient.

+1 for Fedora. It’s very stable even with very fresh packages, I’ve been on the same installation for years without a hitch.

I still recommend Mint for absolute beginners tho.

I prefer Mint just because it’s what I’m used to. Otherwise both are pretty solid distros.

I currently use Fedora Silverblue, mainly because of the easy rollback, and because it makes package management easier. I like having a default base to add and remove from (and being able to easily rebase onto a different spin). That said, regular Fedora and Mint are both solid distros.

Ive been on Manjaro for a little over a year and, aside from seeming like a second class environment to other Linux systems, I’m really enjoying it

I’m personally still loving Regolith Desktop on top of Ubuntu/Debian.

I think that it’s worth trying both- Fedora is a little more involved than Mint but tends to ship the most cutting edge-stuff, whereas Mint is well-integrated with Cinnamon and fairly user-friendly.

Fedora is a great and user-friendly distro but I wouldn’t really recommend it. Historically, Fedora has always been kind of test site for Red Hat and it still can be considered the upstream for RHEL with all the downsides that come with upstream software.

I am a Void user myself because I like its minimalist approach but it is not for people who are new to Linux. Whenever people I know tell me they want to try Linux, I usually recommend Mint (Which is a long-standing goto newbie distro, imo. It is polished enough and has a great community.), Pop!_OS (Great out-of-the-box hardware support.) and Endeavour (Polished and user-friendly arch-based experience.) to new linux users.

I’ve been using Pop_OS for the last several years (both work and home machines). I just want something that I can install my IDEs and Steam on with a few clicks. I spend enough time building containers and managing services at work, don’t want to put in more effort at home. If I was more of a hobbyist, I’d probably dive into something arch based.