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.
Oof, that would annoy me greatly. Obviously those are two of the heavier usage items I’d need.
If you want a KDE Fedora powered experience I definitely have to suggest Universal Blue Kinoite-main or Bazzite-Desktop. 🤟
Universal Blue project is OCI RPM OSTREE container native, atomic Fedora.
Silverblue/Kinoite/Serica/Onyx, but with extra batteries+codecs+hardware acceleration out of the box.
“Think Chromebook easy, but Fedora.”
Bazzite is pretty amazing 🎮:
Project Bluefin for Developers 🦖:
If you update your normal Fedora system, they should all be running the same kernel.
Sometimes the installers can be stale…you can try installing ISOs from the net installer or nightlies:
Rather… I tried to find links to share… But everything looks to be rawhide… 😕
On atomic side, ublu automatically updates the system image, any layered RPMs as well as flatpaks and other containers/Docker/Podman/Distrobox.
Like Steam OS, if you want to enable -testing channel for updates on Ublu, you can make it more bleeding edge.
So you convinced me, and not being a novice, I didn’t read the install instructions and just went for it. It wrecked my dual boot efi partition. No worries, been there done that before, spent all morning trying to get the eufi shell and grub sorted out. After a few hours of failing, I’m like hey I planned for this, I’ve got a USB recovery for windows, and my actual data is all backed up via syncthing (thanks to this community). Why am I bothering with this nonsense.
Omg… Recovering windows takes foreeeeever. So then I’m reading the kenoite instructions and it calls out that dual booting doesn’t work, here is a suggested partition scheme… Ffs… Anyway for anyone that doesn’t want to waste an entire day on this, rtfm.
I think most dual booters on Ublu use seperate drives for windows.
And use their BIOS to boot to that drive instead of grub.
Here’s the thing about that, my laptop does have two nvme drives, but the second one is strictly for games. It’s not negotiable.
FWIW, I’ve put some effort into explaining how a dual boot of Windows 10 and Fedora Atomic (read Silverblue/Kinoite/Sericea etc) can be achieved. While it’s far from exhaustive, it should be fine as long as your specific installation of Fedora Atomic doesn’t require special attention (which happens sometimes with owners of an Nvidia GPU*). After Fedora Atomic is successfully installed, proceed with following the instructions found on the following parts of uBlue’s documentation: here, here and finally pick whichever uBlue image you’d like to install from this list; specific instructions are found directly underneath the text boxes for each individual image, but ensure you’re installing the one with the correct Fedora version (37/38/39/stable/latest etc (which are accessed via tabs)). If you can’t decide on which version you’d like to install, then just go for 39.
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.
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.
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).
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.
