Linux

Hey there!

I used Mint for the last years and it is my main distro for Desktops for more than a decade with the exception of Manjaro for a couple of years. Since I wanted to try KDE, I was looking for another Distro for my new notebook.

I really like Debian based distros, because I'm very familiar with it. And I do like Ubuntu. I do not like all of Canonicals desicions, but have to admit, that they do a lot of good stuff for the linux community too.

Still, there were some reason why I did not want to use Kubuntu. I also wanted to have up to date software and kernel and therefore Debian itself was out. Time to look for a new distro.

After trying Nobara, Auroora, openSUSE Tumbleweed and PikaOS and finding some super anoying stuff in all of them, I thought I should give Fedora a try. That should have been the obvious choice in the first place, but I think I wanted something more "special".

And what should I say? It just works. Installation and setup was easy, all my hardware was detected, I got used to dnf super quickly and I'm super happy with it. It has only been a week and therefore I have no long term experience, but my first impression is, that it is a super clean and well defined distro. I'm super positive that it will be solid choice for a daily driver.

as others have said KDE is going to work the same on Fedora as it does on your current Kubuntu system. You may be thinking "oh Fedora KDE, it must be really good on that" no that's just how Fedora does things. I mean they have Fedora Sway and it doesn't mean that Sway is superior on THAT version of Fedora. it just how they roll with their distro. Like say you install CachyOS as an example and during installation it presents you the option to install pretty much EVERY DE and WM in existence. Feodra simply doesn't give you that option during install, you need to figure out which one you want to use before downloading the specific ISO for it.

So is it a better experince? it's the same experience honestly.

SeLinux can be a minor nuisance if you have a container centric workflow. Otoh podman is a first class citizen.

Other than that it's pretty good. I've had some pain updating so I went back to Arch / void. All my servers are Fedora and I much prefer it over Debian as it's somewhat up to date.

Consider a Universal Blue image instead.

Chromebook easy Fedora out of the box experience. Batteries, Bells and Whistles included.

Easy peasy rollbacks and upgrades.

No more needing to manually add RPM Fusion just to get working hardware acceleration for Media in Firefox or to install Steam. Or extra steps for Nvidia drivers.

I started on Fedora KDE 32 eventually migrated to Fedora Kinoite 38 and have been a happy Bazzite enjoyer ever since. 🎮🐧🥹

Baked in #Distrobox, #Homebrew and #Bazzar Make installing and exporting .rpm or .deb files painless. Integrated Homebrew and Flatpak installers for installing apps.

And super useful and convenient #ujust commands you won't find on Fedora.

Can even Fork/Make your own Image, or checkout some Community images.

George made a Project Bluefin LTS image. Or you can also be more bleeding edge with testing branches.

Developer Experience images are also available.

I usually wait for a month or two before upgrading to the latest version, but haven't had any troubles.

First thing I do is enable rpm nonfree per this documentation
https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

And the second is to switch to ffmpeg and add some HAC as per this documentation
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia

If you run an newer Nvidia card you might wanna grab some drivers too, see
https://github.com/devangshekhawat/Fedora-43-Post-Install-Guide?tab=readme-ov-file#nvidia-drivers

switched to fedora coming from windows and ubuntu. I update when I feel like it (every one to two weeks). It is largely rock solid and the only times i had Trouble was because of xone, which I installed via the source and then forgot to remove/update for quite a while.

dnf and apt are quite alike, took only a short while to adjust and now i like it as much if not more.

The KDE Plasma experience is very nice. I can fully recommend Fedora

Better in what way? What are you unsatisfied with?

I use KDE on Debian and I have zero complaints.

Why would KDE work better on Fedora than any other distro?

It uses DNF which has its own set of features compared to APT. In general I think DNF is much better although it does have more overhead.

You also could look into Fedora Atomic https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

Atomic desktops use overlays instead of packages which means you get a much cleaner system at the expense of some flexibility.

You might have to learn about working the SELinux, since Fedora uses it. There are some things, like enabling custom systemd units, that require steps that aren't needed on Debian to comply with the extra security settings.

My set of recommendations:

RPMFusion is recommended to add to your system. It's the best way to use Steam, certain drivers (nvidia, v4l2loopback, etc.) as needed.

SELinux is present, but the default policy sets are unlikely to impede your usage. The SELinux applet (seapplet) is a useful tool for diagnosing on the very rare chance you're finding permission denied somewhere that cannot otherwise be explained.

If you pull most of your software as flatpaks from Flathub already, your day-to-day experience won't be much different from Debian.

Fedora's equivalent to LTS releases would be the downstream LTS releases provided by Redhat, RockyLinux, AlmaLinux, and others. They don't have the same package sets as base fedora, and may need extra repositories to get some of the less essential, but 'core' software back. Ultimately not much of a reason to run them on a desktop workstation for personal use.

Upgrading is pretty seamless. It's as easy as graphical updates now or otherwise using the system upgrade module in dnf. I generally have the policy of waiting 2-4 weeks for any minor bugs that made it into a new release to settle. I have been expediting my upgrades for the past few releases in order to catch bugs before friends and family upgrade their machines and haven't found any large problems regardless.

Fedora doesn't inherently expect a system to upgrade forever without maintenance, with 5 years being a typical target for things that may break. With that said, it is good to read the release notes before upgrading to the next edition, as there can rarely be something (like the recent recommendation and changed default for a larger /boot partition) that may require maintenance on a long-term system before upgrading. That said, you do have time to hold off on upgrading the distro, as the general lifetime of each release is ~13 months, giving 1 month overlap into a release two releases ahead. For instance, Fedora 43 will still be maintained up to a month into Fedora 45's release.

I have Fedora KDE on a few mini-pc’s as well as a Framework 13 laptop, I love it. I used to use various Debian-based distros for many years before this as well.

I love Fedora’s up-to-date packages and kernel. It’s not quite a rolling release like Arch but it’s far better than the older than dirt Debian stuff. Yes, I know why Debian is the way it is, but I have discovered that I like being more current than that these days.

There is no LTS release, Fedora aims for two major releases a year. It’s pretty seamless since underlying packages and kernel are already current.

Give it a whirl, you will enjoy it :)

A lot of parts are more integrated with each other on fedora and rhel (compared to debian and ubuntu). IIRC fedora now defaults for offline updates. It comes with SELinux enabled by default.

I did a similar change years ago, the Fedora KDE. I've been maintaining a script of things I install on a fresh install.

Helped me get better writing bash. But feel free to use it.

https://github.com/mortalic/firstrun

Lack of some multimedia and bluetooth codecs out of the box. You will need a third party repo for those (or flatpak browser/video player)

Nice new programmer socks that fits with your new fedora hat.