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.
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.
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.
