I am intrigued with Fedora after listening to Destination Linux episode 195 with Fedora’s project lead Matthew Miller. The last time I tried Fedora was release 23 and after a dnf update I rebooted to a black screen and couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so I moved on. I just don’t have time for those kinds of issues.
Fedora is heavily connected with Gnome but I can’t stand it, so I use Plasma on all my machines.
Anyone tried the Plasma version? Has Fedora been stable for you?
Thanks
I had a similar experience to be honest. I installed fedora 32 a few months back on my laptop with kde. And I had lots of weird screen tearing kind of issues. Like it would flicker sometimes or it would leave shadows of the previous screen and the current screen would go so faint as to be illegible.
Admittedly, I didn’t try very hard to sort it out so there may have been an easy fix, but I don’t have an IT background and at the time wasn’t inclined to search hard for a solution. I ended up installing standard Ubuntu Gnome with the dssh to panel extension and that’s been fine for my needs and I haven’t looked back.
I was actually going to try Fedora 33 KDE Jam spin when I got home tonight. I’ll report in later.
Ok great. Looking forward to hearing your experience.
@Conan_Kudo convinced me to give Fedora 33 a try about a month ago for the KDE Spin of Fedora. It is very very vanilla version of Plasma so that’s not ideal for me but the rest sounded great and the fact that Fedora seems to be interesting in improving the Plasma offering, I have sent in some Design UX contributions that I hope to be implemented in the next release.
So I will be testing it out for a little while. I dont know when I will be doing the big move but relatively soon I suppose.
I don’t mind a vanilla version so much as long as I get reasonable stability. I look forward to hearing your experience as well.
I’ve been using Fedora with Plasma Desktop since 2015, and it’s been pretty good. The unfortunate thing often is that from time to time, Plasma itself is not in the greatest of shape upstream, but Fedora’s policy of updating KDE software to newer versions throughout the life of a Fedora release makes it a lot less painful. I think that’s the best you can do, given the circumstances. That said, Plasma hasn’t been a problem for me for a couple of years now, so I’ve been enjoying continuous improvement from Plasma.
Thanks for the information. I think I’m going to give it a go after reading that it’s very stable for most people. I like the idea of having relatively new kernels and software but not too bleeding edge like Arch.
So after quickly deciding to reinstall with the vanilla KDE spin, a good six hours poking and prodding, I concur that this is a basic Plasma experience and I do like the effort Fedora KDE team is making to make Plasma on Wayland available. I tried my first Plasma Wayland experience and it seems ok. I just played around in the Wayland session and didn’t do any real gritty interactions.
Obviously I can’t give you a definitive experience in six hours, but this seems about as stable as any major distribution these days with a robust package manager and plenty of user base for support issues. Plasma 5.12+ has been pretty solid plasma releases and I really haven’t had a major Plasma issue on any distribution in a while. I wish these distributions worked with Flathub (shoutout to Pop_OS!) to provide a central source of in demand Flatpaks and help with quality control but that isn’t a Fedora problem.
Fedora seems to be a little more aggressive than Ubuntu with package updates but I have not looked in to if that is actually the case or just my mind making things up.
For me this actually cements my belief that Linux distributions in general are pretty much stable and the Wild West days of yore are mostly gone.
Addendum: I really wish they would default the KDE releases to use LibreOffice, Krita, Inkscape by default. No offense to the Calligra and KolourPaint developers but come on.
I decided to install it this morning and after a few hours I am EXTREMELY impressed. Everything has worked well so far except Discover doesn’t work and displays a gpg error when I try to install software. Other than that it’s been great and I have an NVIDIA card which was surprisingly easy to install the proprietary driver.
dnf is much slower than pacman but that’s not too big of a deal for me. Printers and wireless scanning was the easiest it’s ever been for me on a Linux distro.
Currently researching how to get the fastest update mirrors.
I’ve never considered a package manager more than the cost of doing business on a particular distribution.
Fedora used to do DeltaRPMs. I don’t know if that is still a thing or if it is a failed technology from yesteryear. It was a way to minimize download sizes and times by comparing the old RPM and the new RPM and only downloading the difference. If it still exists, it might speed things up.
EDIT: Actually, I must have misremembered DeltaRPM tech because the Internet is telling me it is actually slower because you have to build the RPM. It was mainly designed for people on strict metered connections.
This quote needs to be desktop wallpaper for every Alpine Linux dev. lol
I was able to tweak dnf so it is now just as fast as pacman when installing or updating. It’s like lightning now. For anyone else who wants to make it noticeably faster just do the following:
Open /etc/dnf/dnf.conf with your text editor of choice and add these lines:
fastestmirror=true
max_parallel_downloads=10
The first line will make dnf use the fastest mirror available rather than random mirrors.
The second line will download 10 package updates at a time.
Both of these tweaks have made updates and installation almost indistinguishable from other package managers.
So far so good with Fedora 32 Plasma since installing yesterday!
@MichaelTunnell I agree that there are some theming issues after using it for a few days.
I’m using the Breeze Dark global theme but Firefox and Thunderbird don’t display properly. For example, when I compose an email in Thunderbird, the background is black but the font is black as well, so I can’t see anything I’m typing.
Do you have a recommendation on how to fix this? I see I can install GTK 2 and 3 themes in the settings but I’m also willing to use a global dark theme that displays everything properly. Can’t seem to figure out how to get it to display properly with all these different theme settings. Thanks
I do not know about pacman but whenever I use dnf or even zypper on Tumbleweed and then I go back to Debian with apt, oh boy, apt is so fast compared to the others. Yes, the output is more spartan but I do not have to wait to refresh the repos and whatnot.