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?
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.
Plus one for ublue images
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)
I’d recommend fedora kinoite https://fedoraproject.org/kinoite/ because noone can fuck up the system unintentionally
Is this just Silverblue but KDE?
Yes
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.
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 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.
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!
