In my case, I've repeatedly had bad experiences with Fedora itself, and bad experiences with a lot of other software coming out of that part of the Linux ecosys

In my case, I've repeatedly had bad experiences with Fedora itself, and bad experiences with a lot of other software coming out of that part of the Linux ecosystem. For example, I had one computer about a decade ago where the Fedora installation image wouldn't boot properly. It didn't matter if I burned it to disc or used a USB key, and I remember trying a number of different versions of Fedora over the years. It'd lock up very early on, without giving any useful diagnostic information. Meanwhile, I had no problems installing and using distros like Debian, Ubuntu, and Slackware with that same computer. Whatever the problem was, it seemed to be isolated to Fedora, while other distros worked fine. As software like GNOME since version 3, NetworkManager, PulseAudio, PipeWire, Wayland, and systemd started making its way into other distros like Debian and Ubuntu that I did frequently use, I almost immediately ran into a lot of problems that just didn't exist before. I find GNOME since version 3 to be very unintuitive, and very inefficient to use. If it's the default desktop for a distro, I have to strip it out and replace it with something else. Wayland has either not worked, or has been horrifically slow, or has had annoying glitching on the systems I've tried to use it on. X, meanwhile, works fine on the same systems. I've found software like NetworkManager, PulseAudio, PipeWire, and systemd to be unstable. Too often they will kind of work, but then they'll spontaneously break, often in ways that are a hassle to debug. These days, I try to use FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of Linux. They tend to just work for me, unlike Fedora, and unlike the other non-Fedora distros that have started incorporating more software from the Fedora world.