Comment by nwallin

I would recommend Fedora only hesitantly.

Fedora's release cycle is usually a little over a year from final release to EOL, at which point, you need to upgrade. My Mom and Dad ain't gonna wanna do that. For them, better to install the latest Ubuntu LTS once, and then I can upgrade for them at Christmas in 4 years.

Fedora is usually a bit...evangelical about open source software. If one of the things you really want is closed source, you'll have to take a few extra steps. Notably Nvidia drivers, but also stuff like Discord or Steam.

Fedora tends to move fast and break things. They tend to adopt things before they're good and ready. I believe Fedora was the first to switch to Wayland, and they did so before it was really ready, but I might be mistaken.

For a lot of users, #1 and #3 above are good things; they want the latest and greatest stuff, but don't want the occasional breakages that result from using a rolling release distro like Arch or Gentoo. For a lot of users, notably my Mom and Dad, they don't want to deal with shit like that, they just want to turn their computer on and forward funny pictures to me and their friends and do their word puzzles.

Fedora is a great distro, and it's the perfect distro for a lot of people, but some of its core philosophical principles make it a suboptimal distro for the less computer literate.