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?
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.
Why ublue over fedora’s images? You won’t have fedoras signatures anymore. You can install the same stuff on official images
Ya, but you’re overlaying all that stuff, codecs, nvidia, etc. ublue works out of the box and updates are quicker due to not having to re-overlay everything. It’s just less friction. Also it comes with automatic updates enabled which is really nice (and safe in an immutable, intrinsically rollbackable environment)
Overlaying isn’t bad. It’s kind of what we’ve done the past years anyway.
Does the speed of updates matter in any way? Unless it’s not days, there’s no reason for me to complain update the duration since everything is done in the background.
What’s the difference to the auto update in silverblue?
Ootb fedora doesn’t even have gnome extensions installed. We have to adjust our systems anyway
Why ublue over fedora’s images?
Personally, I’ve been enjoying uBlue over vanilla Fedora Atomic for what they offer in terms of system management.
To give you a better idea on what I mean; just a month ago an update to Podman caused breakage and people weren’t able to use their containers created with Distrobox/Toolbx[1]. Sure; a rollback is accomplished relatively easy and I’m sure some would even be able to fix it themselves. Regardless, every Fedora Atomic user that relied on Podman would have been interrupted to some capacity.
Which, of course, begs the following questions… Isn’t it very inefficient for everyone to fix this issue themselves? Wouldn’t it be easier if somehow Fedora forced some fix upon all of us so that just one entity is burdened instead of all of us? Heck, wouldn’t it be better if Fedora just withhold the update until it’s fixed? Is this perhaps some pipe dream that will never see the light of day? etc…
The interesting part, though, would be how I (a ‘uBlue-user’) didn’t even notice Podman was causing issues in the first place. “How?” you might ask, well… The uBlue devs noticed the issue, applied some magic so that I and many other uBlue users like me just went on with their day like they would otherwise; without being interrupted because Podman just had a bad update. (Did the supposed pipe dream actually already exist in some form or fashion?)
This is just the most recent example of this. But in the last year or so, out of the top of my head, there have been a few more times in which uBlue users didn’t even notice a thing while the others either had to rollback or fix their issues themselves. If you enjoy this interruption and/or are willing to deal with it for the sake of whatever, then please feel to continue to do so. However, I prefer to have a system I can rely on at all times and uBlue offers me just that while remaining very close to vanilla Fedora Atomic.
You won’t have fedoras signatures anymore.
It depends if you have the luxury to rely on them in the first place.
If setting up your workflow (or whatever) requires you to get to the nitty gritty of things and change those parts of the system that strictly speaking isn’t well supported by just
rpm-ostree, then -for almost a year now- your best bet would have been to (instead) experiment with (what’s been referred in Fedora’s Wiki as) Ostree Native Containers.And the truth is, unless you really know what you’re doing, that uBlue offers the best platform to engage with this system. Heck, within a week after Kinoite’s very own maintainer blogged about how to sign container images via Github actions, one of uBlue’s maintainers tried to implement this for uBlue to improve their own platform and succeeded.
Finally, let’s not forget that uBlue is even endorsed by Fedora (or at least by whoever maintains its documentation). Heck, even the inception of uBlue was due to an interaction between Jorge Castro (one of uBlue’s maintainers) and Colin Walters (one of the masterminds behind the whole
rpm-ostree-ecosystem).P.S. If I hadn’t made it clear, it’s totally fine to continue to rely on Fedora Atomic directly without any interventions from third parties for system management or whatsoever. I just wanted to elaborate why I, personally, prefer to use images provided by uBlue.
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.
Plus one for ublue images
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.
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.
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.
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 had a few random log outs in Fedora KDE, nothing major, but I would recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed instead.
