Seconded. Fedora is very much NOT an all-ready-out-of-the-box experience, unless you are a FLOSS dev.

You don't need to be a developer, the average computer enthusiast is capable of googling the matter figuring it out. It may not be appropriate for the "colloquial grandmother" sort of user, but you certainly don't need to be a computer programmer to figure it out. There's a lot of ground in-between those.

My dad is a retired accountant and a computer enthusiast since the 80s. Never a programmer, but he does this kind of stuff. Has managed his own linux installations for about 15 years.

Googling =\= ootb.

Able to google =\= FLOSS dev

Arguing that one, if skilled at Googling, can configure the distro correctly underlines my point.

> Fedora is very much NOT an all-ready-out-of-the-box experience, unless you are a FLOSS dev.

Nah it's pretty close if you have an integrated Intel or AMD system, you really don't need closed-source drivers for much except Nvidia these days. Chrome is in the non-free Fedora repositories (or can be installed easily from the website with an .rpm) and that's all most normal users need.

Plus codecs, plus font rendering, plus cutting edge being too cutting edge sometimes.

Like I said, FLOSS devs don't rely on closed blobs so they don't have this problem.

> codecs

Most websites people care about use open codecs these days (Google and Netflix use VP9 and AV1, both are open and royalty-free).

Never had an issue with font rendering. And cutting edge being too cutting edge might be an issue with some dev things but having up to date Gnome and apps is fine.

People care about fans spinning up and batteries draining. Video not being hardware accelerated is a bad ootb experience and the type of reason Ubuntu became so big.

Do they stroll restrict nonfree audio/video codecs?

I would use fedora, but I want my repository set limited to trusted sources only. Core repositories are RedHat endorsed, afaict the user managed ones are not.

I want the ability to say that packages are from maintainers that are well trusted in a court of law. I cannot do that with fedora due to this, Ubuntu seems to be my only solution and it’s rapidly becoming unusable (I don’t hate snap, but it’s broken my workflow).

> Do they still restrict nonfree audio/video codecs?

Yes they do. If you don't like to use RPMfusion you could use something like the mpv flatpak from flathub that has all codecs bundled.

Nobara Project[1] helps with this. It is somewhat gaming-on-linux focused, but for some, like myself, that's a win. I use it on both my desktop (Intel CPU, AMD GPU) and my Thinkpad T480: works great on both.

[1] https://nobaraproject.org