Hello all, I’ve been distro hopping a lot lately and have a long term goal of settling on one distro for the family laptops.
Currently it’s a smattering of linux distro’s and some M$ across all the systems in the house.
In short the fam has had a pretty negative reaction to Gnome for all the usual reasons, so there is a kubuntu instance, Nobara, but the KDE version, Manjaro etc… I kind of want to give Fedora a stint on my laptop and noticed the Fedora spins project and was wondering if anyone has played around with it at all?
I spun up the KDE version in a VM alongside the default Fedora and noticed it’s running a newer kernel than the default, which is interesting…
Is it an equal partner in update cycles?
KDE on Fedora is great. My only complaint is by default Firefox doesn’t use the KDE file picker, it uses (presumably) Gnome’s file picker. This is fixable but I shouldn’t have to do it.
Even the flatpak version? No idea why fedora is still not yet on the flatpak version.
I use the Flatpak version of Firefox on Fedora Kinoite and it uses the KDE file picker without problems, I guess it’s an issue with the RPM version.
No idea, I try to avoid containerized software on desktops unless absolutely necessary like discord and jellyfin.
Why?
Oof, that would annoy me greatly. Obviously those are two of the heavier usage items I’d need.
I’d recommend fedora kinoite https://fedoraproject.org/kinoite/ because noone can fuck up the system unintentionally
Is this just Silverblue but KDE?
Yes
I have no knowledge about or experience with immutable distros, but I’ve been maining the Fedora KDE spin on my laptop for several major releases now and so far have found no reason to switch away from it. The Plasma Wayland session has been solid from the beginning and everything has just worked.
Perfect, just what I was hoping to hear.
My experience with Fedora KDE has been very positive with the caveat that the default package selection has been a bit bloated and it’s not just my impression. https://github.com/edythawne/KDE-Minimal-Install exists for a reason. Stability-wise the experience is good, the liberal update cycle is nice.
Personally, I did not find Kinoite so appealing but maybe things changed since then (I think I tried it out a year or so ago).
Yeah, it works fine. You might want to tinker with the packages as others have suggested but it’s exactly what you expect from Fedora. The only difference is it’s Plasma instead of GNOME.
I had the same experience with GNOME on the family computer. I had to add extensions to make it more accessible. Then when they auto update you get dumped into vanilla GNOME until you log out and back in to re-enable extensions. I would get called over every time that happened. I switched it to Plasma and everyone is happy.
One thing worth pointing out is the dash to dock/panel, just perfection and appindicator GNOME extensions are all in the Fedora repository. When you install them from there, you don’t get that janky behavior during updates where you have to re-enable them. Those extensions go a long way towards making GNOME more accessible to users coming from Windows or Mac. Default GNOME is great if you use keyboard shortcuts but it’s not very intuitive when you’re starting out.
I don’t think you could have explained this any better… yeah, this exactly. I don’t want to get a phone call every time the update the damn system. Gnome can be different, simple, that’s fine, but it has to do that and get out of the way. If you make changes to it, it has to respect those changes. Everything else is garbage.
KDE has been a treat for me after having used Gnome so long, I like both and in fact I still keep Gnome on the laptop, especially for the smooth gestures.
On the desktop I’m keeping KDE as it feels more suited by default, for that I suggest Fedora Kinoite because I honestly can’t ever imagine running a mutable system anymore, unless it is strictly for tinkering and, since it seems you’re looking for something that has to just work, that will be a great fit!::: ..Now to talk about what hasn't just worked for me
I used to experience freezes and crashes, but don’t see them happening anymore (maybe it was my hardware being too new?); containers (mostly distrobox), I don’t know what the heck is happening behind the scenes, but I think I’ve seen my containers breaking for the third or fourth time across updates this year, luckily it’s not a tragedy as you can usually roll back the system temporarily (OSTree rocks!) and/or remake them from snapshots or apply fixes that are mentioned in the issue trackers and whatnot when they pop up, the podman devs and others folks are fast and responsive.
All in all, these being the biggest issues for me, this distro is one of the most rock solid there are!Seems like Fedora Kinoite is getting several votes. Maybe I’ll give that a go for myself. I also like the idea of Fedora more since they are starting to offer their own Laptops with pretty nice hardware it seems.
The idea of buying new laptops that all just have proper OS support seems, novel.
Be careful with these containerized distros. I would read bit more before jumping into something not standard as of now. In particular, making changes to the root image by installing packages works a lot differently than good old Linux distros.
Otherwise Fedora’s KDE spin is quite good, too. They include a lot of extraneous packages, though.
Maybe I’ll give that a go for myself
Good luck!
they are starting to offer their own Laptops with pretty nice hardware it seems
Oh that’s neat, I must have missed those news, were they announced anywhere?
I’m not sure where I ran across it, but here’s their site. Fedora slimbook
Awesome hardware, but damn, 1299€?
Guess I’ll be looking respectfully… from the sidelines (o.o )Yeah, now try adding components to it in order to make it a bit more modern, decent RAM, nvme, I’m at 1900. Pass. But hey, I support them and if I had that kind of money, I’d buy it.
You took the words out of my mouth, that’s what I felt with most, if not all, “Linux laptops” I’ve seen up to now: concept is great, hardware is great, price is, well, greater.
I do hope that everyone that can afford System76, Slimbook, Starlabs, etc. (hey, I’m noticing an unusual pattern here 🤔) will buy from them because I’d love to see both more adoption and makers that can improve Linux as a whole thriving
I’ve been using Fedora Kinoite for a few months now. Before that, I also hopped between different distros quite a bit, including Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora Workstation, openSUSE. To be honest, I really appreciate the immutable nature of Kinoite and maybe that is why I am really happy with the experience. Even “normal” Fedora Workstation caused a lot of problems during my usage and with Kinoite, nothing like that so far. So I can really recommend it.
There’s only one really small problem I’ve noticed, which is a problem with the rendering of some fonts on web pages (e.g. lemmy.zip). These fonts are not rendered correctly, or are replaced with some default fonts, and they just look weird. There was nothing like this in openSUSE KDE, so I assume the problem is with Kinoite itself, as I have this problem on two machines. However, it is so rare (I only noticed it on two websites) that it can be ignored.I’d recommend Mint or Manjaro for family computers.
Probably Mint, just because Pamac still has issues.
Fedora is a bad choice because you’re stuck in the dnf ecosystem with no real benefit.
I’m a firm believer that the only value in Fedora is for Red Hat. Their shills are the ones who promote it over more practical options.
In case you really want/need some more modern drivers/software,… Nobara is also recommendable stable.
I had a few random log outs in Fedora KDE, nothing major, but I would recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed instead.
Ok, why opensuse? I kind of forgot about them.
Opensuse is stupid fast + its very very stable. Would risk saying its unbreakable(at leaat with regular updates)
Unstable? Would you mind elaborating with some examples? I was literally just downloading it
STABLE****
Hah! Ok I was so confused
Great info thank you. Maybe I’ll just try the kde install first and see how it goes.
