I am currently running Xubuntu on all my systems but there are so many things that feel rather unstable/buggy - I am sure it is not all Xubuntus/Xfce’s fault, but my knowledge is limited so I just attribute it to that.
Therefore, I am currently considering switching to Fedora. I feel like it is time trying out a new desktop (KDE) and a more up to date kernel. I am not entirely sure what I am hoping from this post, but maybe a “yea, it is worth it” would ease my mind a bit.
Also, I am a bit unsure how to easily move between them (programs and data).
To name a few of the bugs I encountered in the past:
- When connecting screens, quite often the created profile is ignored, screens get disabled, overlapped, … By applying the profile multiple times eventually you can overcome this issue
- Dell specific: Webcam does not work, system sometimes freezes after closing the laptop lid even if sleep mode is deactivated
- Certain shortcuts are bugged (WIN+Left works, WIN+Right doesn’t. When you reset WIN+Right, it works until the next restart)
I mean it is very stable in my experience and also you get updates within weeks of upstream release gor many programs (like KDE itself)
Fedora is known to be a good middle ground, and that’s why Linus Torvalds is running it on its work machine. But Fedora is more GNOME focus, while it does not stop you from using KDE, if you’re on Xubuntu you might want to consider Kubuntu.
There is an official Fedora KDE edition for more than one year now.
Folks may not like me saying this but some of this may be pretty common across linux distros, at least in my experience, though much of this feels like it may be desktop environment specific. May also be impacted by your specific hardware setup. It feels like technical folks kinda just don’t notice small polish issues or jank at times 😅
Your best bet would be to throw fedora or other options on a flash drive and try them out. You should be able to see if many/all of these issues exist on another distro/desktop without installing :)
Best of luck, I hope you find an option thats more suitable to you :)
Cheers! I agree that stuff like the webcam is likely a dell Linux issue with little impact from xfce. Remains to be seen. Trying a boot usb first makes a lot of sense.
Its a eternally handy thing to be able to do with linux
Hope you have a lovely day ☺️
If you just want to switch to kde you can install it on your current system:
apt install kde-full
Or
apt install kde-standard
No need to reinstall an entirely new distro.
This is the answer op should be looking for.
There’s nothing wrong with Ubuntu/Kubuntu. KDE with Ubuntu (Kubuntu) solved a lot of multiscreen issues I had with gnome. The customisation options with KDE are basically limitless.
I feel like a lot of people underestimate how easy it is to install multiple DEs and switch between them.
I don’t know, but I can tell you that I use Bluefin - Fedora Silverblue. I have it for 7 months now and had 0 stability issues.
I’ve tried most distros over the years. I liked arch with gnome, but maintaining it was a bit of work. And then I realized that when I was done setting it up the way I liked it, I was essentially just building fedora workstation. So I switched a few versions ago and I haven’t looked back.
Fedora is boring, like sometimes too boring. But then I remember that’s what an os is supposed to be. I now run it on all my PCs and it’s what I install on family members PCs. (Yup it’s even done well with windows converts who don’t know anything about linux - their transition has been easy)
Issues I have encountered:
- Rpmfusion is a must, otherwise the distro doesn’t handle much. It’s also the best way to nvidia.
- i still run into the odd codec thing even with rpm fusion-I just use VLC and it works fine
- it took me a while to figure out that the fedora based flatpaks are not always the same as the flathub versions. For example, back to point 2, the fedora flatpak of VLC is missing codecs while the flathub version works with everything.
- i don’t like how flatpaks update automatically. I’m sure I can stop that behavior but I haven’t bothered to look into it yet. It manifests itself with steam. The flatpak updates but the main system has not. Steam then has driver differences which leads to processing more shaders and sometimes outright conflicts and my games default to the integrated gpu. This is always fixed by simply updating the system, it’s never a real issue. But sometimes I don’t want to update, I just want to game.
- it’s got some funny ways of doing things. Always worth googling before you do something. For example, the way you update grub, there’s a special fedora way to do that. They push Podman instead of docker and despite what they say, it doesn’t always build cleanly - just use docker. That kind of stuff.
What I like about fedora
- It’s boring and “just works” not even mint “just worked” as good for me
- the upgrades between versions are boring and non events. It works if you go into detail cleaning up old things from the command line, it works if you just click the “upgrade” button in the gui.
- its not bleeding edge but still pretty new. I’ve thrown some brand new hardware at it and it was supported, whereas all other distros failed except arch
- It’s cake to maintain. Updates don’t require the attention arch does, and honestly I’ve had more issues with Ubuntu updates. It sets up btrfs by default - some may see that as a detriment - but it sets you up nice for snapshots and whatnot right out of the box.
I say give workstation a shot and give it a little time to get used to things. Definitely do rpmfusion. It’s the one time I’d recommend just jamming commands into the terminal exactly like the website says without thinking. (You still have to read the website for the right commands). Good luck!
Thanks! rpmfusion sounds super helpful:
RPM Fusion is a repository of add-on packages for Fedora and EL+EPEL maintained by a group of volunteers. It distributes packages that have been deemed unacceptable to Fedora for various reasons, such as patented codecs, nonfree drivers, or tainted software.
I will definitely take a look at it. Knowing about a few oddities definitely helps, too.
This comment very much resonates with me. been distro hopping for a while, with ubuntu, arch, debian, and nix. fedora has been very awesomely boring, with the caveats mentioned above.
codecs were confusing at first, just like flatpaks.
in just one way my personal preferences differ here. i love using podman and always try using that first, and only then switch to docker if necessary. i also use fedora on my work laptop, and was surprised how many more steps it took for my colleagues to get podman running well. (still more enjoyable than docker imo)
Fedora Gnome and Nobara KDE have been pretty solid for me. Most resume from sleep bugs feel like they’ve been worked out. You may still have problems trying to get your Dell laptop webcam working though.
I have been using Nobara KDE for about a year now and it has been an extremely smooth ride. But, I still have that resume from sleep bug and it’s extremely frustrating. I have to keep my machine on with the screen off because of this bug. Apart from this, it has been a very smooth ride.
Mine works fine. But it did fuck up after I’d been messing around with some graphics card settings (trying to get davinci resolve to play nice). You could try troubleshooting with an LLM and see if you have any luck.
I’ve been using Fedora (gnome) as my main distro for over 5 years and have zero issues with stability. Webcam, etc., all work by default with no problems. Would definitely recommend!
Been running Fedora with KDE Plasma as a daily system for 9 years now. It’s more stable the longer I use it, but I still keep using a version until a week before end of life. I just don’t want to deal with quirks I have no patience for these days, and rarely I need the newest version of what’s in repos, it’s usually pretty new anyway with two releases a year.
Keep in mind if you are using a lot of normie applications (or maybe stuff for work), it may only be officially supported on ubuntu and Fedora may be a bit of work to get going. But there’s tools to turn debs into rpms and such. I don’t miss ubuntu at all.
I’ve moved the whole house to Fedora KDE. Every laptop. The only things not running it, Steamdeck and Unraid server.
I wrote a script for first installs, its mostly to make my life easier, but you might like it too. I wrote it for Fedora 42, and updated it for 43, but it should run fine on 44 as well.
Just take a minute to esit then parameters at the top. https://github.com/mortalic/firstrun
Could this be… a script sharing thread? Anyway, here’s a fedora updater and a fedora installer
Lol love it. It’s a script sharing thread, if we all share our scripts. 🤘🔥😄
Sounds very interesting. I took a quick look and might run it, too.
Nice, if there is anything you run into that doesn’t work feel free to let me know. I do accept pull requests too.
You’re looking for stability and KDE Plasma. Fedora doesn’t seem to be the right candidate.
Arch Linux (or Endeavour / Manjaro), or OpenSUSE are better candidate.Fedora doesn’t seem to be the right candidate.
Why do you think that?
Arch Linux (or Endeavour / Manjaro)
If you mean that they’re more stable, then I simply have to assume that you think those are more robust than Fedora (because the other interpretation[1] wouldn’t make any sense). Which (again) begs the question… why do you think that?
The way Debian uses the term Stable for its slowest moving release. ↩︎
My experience with fedora was the opposite of robust. I’ve tried multiple times over the last decades, my last experience is fairly recent (a couple of years ago) but always disappointing: hardware issues, minor but annoying bugs, etc.
And KDE Plasma has always been neglected by the core team. So clearly not the right distribution for OP.
Ah, okay. I do concede that -historically- Fedora wasn’t robust, no. They weren’t shy about breaking changes, which even led them to be referred to as Red Hat’s test bed distro by the community and beyond.
However, for (at least) the last 5 years or so, Fedora’s direction has changed significantly. I’m not entirely sure what prompted this change, but it has definitely been a welcome one. For example: most recently, Fedora has somewhat even formalized this new approach with their new initiative.
Basically, Fedora wants to be innovative like they’ve always been known for. But, this shouldn’t come at the cost of alienating your own user base. Thus, the proposal details how these two perspectives can see eye to eye with each other.
As for KDE Plasma; again -historically- it has been a second-class citizen on Fedora; at least, compared to GNOME. But, KDE Plasma has since been promoted. There’s no meaningful difference between the two variants when it comes to how Fedora regards them. Even the website alludes to this:
Thanks for the additional context. I may have misunderstood the announcement 5 years ago as I remember reacting very negatively to that news. Are they still defaulting to flatpak for new apps?
Sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer:
I may have misunderstood the announcement 5 years ago
I didn’t reference any 5 year old announcement. If you didn’t imply that anyways, then please consider sharing the 5 year old announcement.
Are they still defaulting to flatpak for new apps?
Did Fedora ever default to flatpak for new apps 🤔? For Fedora Atomic, sure. But I don’t recall traditional Fedora ever doing so. This isn’t Canonical that re-installs an .deb installation as a snap.
I got confused with CentOS changes in 2000: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
It eroded my trust with anything Red Hat-related. And the acquisition by IBM in 2019 had already damaged its image.
Last time I tried Fedora (around last year), anything installed via the “software” app in GNOME defaulted to a flatpak install.
This became a lot longer of a writing than I expected. My apologies*. So, without further ado.
I got confused with CentOS changes in 2000: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
It eroded my trust with anything Red Hat-related. And the acquisition by IBM in 2019 had already damaged its image.
Ah okay. Thanks for clarifying! I remember that the pushback was real on that one. But, I’m not sure if it was justified. If anything, I’d say that people had a knee-jerk reaction to it and it soon after became a ‘toxic’ environment in which reasonable discourse was (almost) non-existent.
However, Gordon Messmer[1]’s piece on this suggests that CentOS was everything but what was idealized by the community. As such, being converted to CentOS Stream might have been a positive change.
Anyhow, honestly, I’m not well-versed with RHEL(-clones). So feel free to dismiss anything I’ve said 😜.
Moving on… What’s perhaps important to note is that Fedora’s relation to Red Hat is a curious one. For example, Fedora defaults to Btrfs for its file system while Red Hat has deprecated it for quite a while now. Furthermore, while Red Hat seems to go pretty hard on Image Mode, Fedora didn’t even block a major update (until very recently) if some bug impacted its atomic variants very negatively. So, basically, Red Hat’s priorities =/= Fedora’s priorities.
But, having said all of that, I do respect your choice to not trust anything Red Hat-related. Perhaps, I would have done so as well, were it not for the fact that I’ve been daily driving Fedora(-derivatives) for quite a while. Yes, I admit that I’m probably biased 😅.
Last time I tried Fedora (around last year), anything installed via the “software” app in GNOME defaulted to a flatpak install.
Interesting. I literally did a fresh Fedora install within a VM and the results have been interesting:
- If it catches (!) that the package is available within any non-flatpak repository, then it will prefer the
.rpminstall by default. Examples include Steam and GNOME builder. - However, if for some strange reason the
.rpmpackage is not picked up, then it does default to flatpak. And it’s not possible to select the.rpmpackage within the GUI either. Even thoughsudo dnf install <package name>does work as you’d expect 😅. Examples include Neovim.
I wonder if you had to deal with the above shenanigans last year as well. Or, perhaps, it was even worse for some awful reason. Anyhow, there’s more truth to it than I expected. Though, I’d argue it’s probably some bug or otherwise unintended behavior.
If you’ve read all of my ramblings, then I’d like to thank you for the effort 😊! Have a good one, fam!
Yeah, yeah; he works at Red Hat, so you might be rightfully skeptical whether he can even be unbiased. However, he has build so much good will through his community efforts that I’m absolutely giving him the benefit of doubt. Though, please feel free to disagree with me on this. ↩︎
- If it catches (!) that the package is available within any non-flatpak repository, then it will prefer the
i found fedora hard to work with because of its hard “no non-open source” stand. e.g. i had trouble playing a x265 HEVC file with vlc where as i never encountered anything like that on any other distro and solving this was not trivial.
i am on kubuntu rn but if i were to switch i’d go back to cachyos with KDE.RPM Fusion exists to address some of these points. It’s a set of RPM repos based in Europe that provide software that the Fedora Project itself will not.
if you are aware of it and its solutions it surely is a non-issue but for me as a linux noob it was reason enough against fedora. getting into linux is already complicated enough without extra obstacles.
you’re right, it was also one of the reasons I avoided fedora originally. Company of Heroes for example would work OOTB in any other distro, but on fedora it would crash as soon the game opened - unless I skipped the intro movies with the steam command. My guess it was the codecs, even though I supposedly had installed them.
But just you know, if someday you give it another shot, you can use this link: https://nattdf.streamlit.app/
It’s basically a script builder that helps you get fedora up and running with everything you want. Codecs was never an issue since I used it
Saving that link, looks super handy. Thanks for sharing it!
It’s not about proprietary stuff, it’s about US software patents. The codecs are open source, but you can’t use them under US law because of patents. Fedora cares about that because they are closely tied to Red Hat which is an American company. Community distros without any corporate affiliation like Arch or Debian generally don’t give a shit since there is no commercial entity to sue. IDK how Canonical circumvents that though.
I had issues with this and ended up just switching to the flatpak for VLC.
Once you find rpmfusion, working with non-open-source packages becomes a lot easier. It includes libraries for x265 HEVC for example, and they have tutorials that are usually pretty helpful.
I use gnome on my laptop and stuff like scaling worked on several projectors in the school. Webcam (Lenovo) works, I think I recall it didn’t work on another distro.
KDE no problem on desktop with monitor and projector plugged in. Panels etc customisable on both screens (I also make it look like gnome ha).
I’ve been using Fedora KDE since V40.
I have had some weird issues in the past where a network adapter randomly won’t work on startup a few years back, but haven’t had issues since.
Also back when I had a Nvidia GPU, I remember it having issues updating drivers due to not waiting long enough before restarting even though it said update complete and causing the driver the not work properly.
Those are really the only issues I’ve had with it, mostly just works for me personally.
Thanks for sharing your experience!
I’ve been using Fedora for years across several devices. I’ve only seen my device compatibility improve over the last few releases. For example, my HP Victus laptop’s camera would work but not the mic, this has been fixed. My desktop runs several monitors with no issues and keyboard shortcuts have never done anything goofy. It is my preferred distro so I am biased but I’ve used a lot of others and I think Fedora is one of the more consistently good distros.
