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...
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!
Seems like Fedora Kinoite is getting several votes. Maybe I'll give that a go for myself. I also like the idea of Fedora more since they are starting to offer their own Laptops with pretty nice hardware it seems.
The idea of buying new laptops that all just have proper OS support seems, novel.
Be careful with these containerized distros. I would read bit more before jumping into something not standard as of now. In particular, making changes to the root image by installing packages works a lot differently than good old Linux distros.
Otherwise Fedora's KDE spin is quite good, too. They include a lot of extraneous packages, though.
Yeah, now try adding components to it in order to make it a bit more modern, decent RAM, nvme, I'm at 1900. Pass. But hey, I support them and if I had that kind of money, I'd buy it.
You took the words out of my mouth, that's what I felt with most, if not all, "Linux laptops" I've seen up to now: concept is great, hardware is great, price is, well, greater.
I do hope that everyone that can afford System76, Slimbook, Starlabs, etc. (hey, I'm noticing an unusual pattern here 🤔) will buy from them because I'd love to see both more adoption and makers that can improve Linux as a whole thriving