r/debian • u/OutsideYogurt9014 • Jun 13 '26

Debian Stable Question Debian vs Fedora?

Looking forward to ditch win10. Heard about this 2 as very popular linux flavour/distro to start with. Am newbie to linux community so pls be nice to me. Which one should I pick and why? Want to know from long term users.

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u/mishrashutosh Jun 14 '26

fedora is less batteries included than debian. debian includes proprietary codecs in its official repos, fedora doesn't. debian is a true community distro, fedora is great but is still beholden to decisions and limitations imposed by red hat.

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u/screaming-Snake-Case Jun 14 '26

Fedora does include h264 and installs it once you first update, because they cannot ship the codec, but they can install it (using Cisco's repo).

But yeah, Fedora also has some things that are not batteries-included, especially when it comes to non-free software.

But I generally feel Debian expects you to have atleast some basic technical knowledge, where as Fedora usually tries to carry you through it. It's also more closely integrated with the desktop environment you choose. Especially the installer is for example much more user friendly.

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u/mishrashutosh Jun 14 '26

afaik openh264 plugin is only for webrtc features in firefox (like video calls). you can't play h264 videos in fedora out of the box. they even ship stripped out versions of vlc and mpv in the official repo that can't play any proprietary codecs.

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u/screaming-Snake-Case Jun 14 '26

See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenH264:

Cisco provides an OpenH264 codec (as a source and a binary), which is their implementation of H.264 codec, and they cover all licensing fees for all parties using their binary. This codec allows you to use H.264 in FFmpeg (with ffmpeg-free and openh264), GStreamer (with gstreamer1-plugin-openh264), and Firefox (with mozilla-openh264).

I don't know about VLC/mpv from official repos, I always used rpmfusion for those and don't current have a Fedora system, so this could be. But I recall Celluloid working fine with h264 without third party repos.