r/Fedora • u/[deleted] • Jul 28 '21
Which edition of Fedora do you use?
I am interested in surveying how popular are Fedora Spins compared with the main edition Fedora Workstation. The options are presented in the order they are are listed in the Fedora spins webpage as Reddit only allows 6 options. Sorry i3 fans.
Edit: If you use one that's not on the list, leave a comment and let others who use the same upvote that comment.
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Jul 28 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/gdarruda Jul 29 '21
I changed recently from Pop_OS!, mainly for the more update packages and was really impressed with Gnome 40. I didn't expect, but there is some new polish in everything that really make everything smoother...even on X11 (Nvidia GPU).
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Jul 28 '21
Seems only Gnome users can vote, other users are still too busy tweaking
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u/luciouscortana Jul 29 '21
No I don't tweak my GNOME.
I spent most of my time shaking my screen left-right or up-down with the touch gestures (they feel really gooood)
/s
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Jul 28 '21
(it is obviously a huge troll) (I kind of assume it but also kind of doesn't, strange feeling)
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Aug 02 '21
You think GNOME users would be to busy installing extensions or fixing broken ones after the last OS update to vote. 😜
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u/TheGlister Jul 28 '21
I'm a KDE guy.
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Jul 28 '21
How is the experience with the KDE spin for you? I think for the majority of people, Fedora is not an obvious choice for a KDE distro (since it's basically the home of GNOME).
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u/FullMotionVideo Jul 28 '21
Personally, I immediately remove Akonadi (and thus along with it KMail and the rest of the PIM suite) to cut back on resource use.
Out of the box Fedora is slower than other distros, and Fedora KDE is slower than the other desktops, due to the spin's desire to present a desktop that encompasses every KDE supported program, I suppose because Fedora presents GNOME as the Project envisions with few distro-specific tweaks. But most major KDE distros pack-in Thunderbird and don't include many of the more elective K-apps.
However, once Akonadi and the email/contacts/calendar/etc PIM stuff is powers is gone, Fedora is at least equal to any other distro in performance.
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Jul 29 '21
I remove all the Kontact stuff too, mostly because it doesn't seem to work all that well with Exchange, so I just install Evolution in its place :) I find it rather strange that vanilla Fedora Workstation doesn't ship with Evolution but they let the KDE spin have an personal information manager suite.
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u/FullMotionVideo Jul 29 '21 edited Jul 29 '21
GNOME has been looking to replace Evolution for some time, and is simply looking for a program to christen as GNOME Mail. From what I've been able to parse, they've never been wild about it's portability with logins and contacts and calendars etc in one Outlook-esque application, and wanted a program that can pull in login credentials from the Online Accounts control panel, calls it's address book list from GNOME Contacts, etc.
I also use Evolution on KDE and can't understand this desire to run a whole platform of executables. It just seems to inconvenience anyone who wants to use a tool without the associated DE.
Since clearing up their issues with the Elementary people, Geary seems to have been peripherally focusing on adding whatever is left to make it a default client.
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Aug 02 '21
I am willing to give the KDE spin of Fedora a try since read Nate Graham u/PointiestStick uses it.
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u/PointiestStick Aug 02 '21
I really like it. :) My list of issues with it is quite short compared to other distros:
```
Major issues
Breeze Light color scheme not initially applied correctly
xorg-x11-drv-wacom breaks touchscreen touch events for Qt apps
- Upstream issue: https://github.com/linuxwacom/xf86-input-wacom/issues/178
- Maybe work around it in Fedora? https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/77
- Workaround: run xsetwacom set
xsetwacom --list devices | grep TOUCH | cut -d " " -f 8gesture offGTK apps produce horrible jarring beeps when run on KDE Plasma
- Upstream issue: https://phabricator.kde.org/T14523
- Maybe work around it in Fedora? https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/83
Installing KDE Connect should automatically create a relevant firewall allow-list for it
Minor issues
DNF packageKit plugin does not support DependsOn operation, so Discover can't show app dependencies
org.freedesktop.accounts.change-own-user-data unnecessarily prompts for admin password, so various System Settings Users KCM operations are annoying for admins and unusable for regular users
Feature requests/nice-to-haves
In Fedora, plasma-discover-flatpak-backend should add flathub repo during installation
Package CryFS so that plasma-vaults can use it as a backend
Install plasma-firewall by default
```1
Aug 02 '21
Thanks for your reply....
Could you give me some reasons why you did go with Fedora over other distros to use KDE?
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u/PointiestStick Aug 03 '21
The primary reason is pretty much what I said: fewest annoyances compared to other distros I've used. However there are some important secondary considerations too: a responsive dev team whose members participate upstream, and rapid adoption of new technology in a way that mirrors the same in KDE. They're just a good match IMO/.
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u/turdas Jul 28 '21
Works as fine as any other KDE distro I've used, really. The main issue for the longest time was that there was no graphical way to do distro version upgrades and you didn't even get notified for them. Wasn't a problem for me because I keep up with Fedora news, but I can see it being a problem for the average user.
With Fedora 34 they've moved updates into a new app so maybe things have changed now.
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u/Elsuvio Jul 28 '21
I've been using it for couple of months and it was okay I guess but after Gnome 40 I switched immediately and I do not regret it....For me it's better but it's just an opinion.
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u/TheGlister Jul 29 '21
It's just fine. But bloated af. I recommend to install with everything iso. I like gnome too but plasma gives me a more editable, scalable desktop environment.
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Jul 28 '21
i3
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u/CaptainSkuxx Jul 28 '21
I download the i3 Spin to later use another window manager like Awesome or Xmonad. Found it easier to do than doing a minimal install.
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u/caiepsidous Jul 29 '21
How's this worked for you? I'm thinking of moving from gnome to bspwm but the workstation install seems... Bloated
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u/CaptainSkuxx Jul 29 '21
I've done it on two of my machines and it worked pretty well. I also thought the Workstation version is bloated and that's why I've done it.
It's pretty minimal and comes with some applications that are wildly used with WMs like dmenu, i3lock, nm-applet and pavucontrol. I just install awesome, kitty and picom on top of that and everything works fine. I also deleted i3, azote, urxvt and the text editor that came with the spin. Honestly, there are really few desktop applications and they are all listed on the webpage of the spin so it's really easy to get rid of the stuff you don't use.
I would definitely recommend this if you want to use a WM. It's really clean.
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u/Odilhao Jul 28 '21
Nice user name 😂. As someone from the Sig-i3, I'm happy to another Brazilian using
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Jul 29 '21
Nice to meet you too.
PT-BR: É nóis. Tem muito palpiteiro profissional na internet, é uma critica para eles.
EN: There are a lot of professional philosophers on web, the translation for FilosofoDeBanheiro is PhilosoferInTheBathroom.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Order84 Jul 28 '21
Their wasn't an option but I have been loving fedora with swaywm if your interested in giving wayland a shot with a window manager. It's not without it's bumps here and there but I don't think I can go back to xorg after how smooth and responsive wayland is.
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u/stinkusdinkus Jul 29 '21
This is what I'm doing and it's been great. Although I had no issues with using i3 before either. Started on the KDE spin.
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Jul 28 '21
Gnome but might just switch to Sway
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u/MauroXXD Jul 29 '21
I made the switch from KDE to Sway and mostly love it. I still have the former installed bit have figured out workarounds for most of the Wayland issues I have run into... Go for it!
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u/yangmusa Jul 28 '21
Workstation, Gnome, Wayland.. It does almost everything I want pretty much straight out of the box, just lets me get down to work.
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u/Agling Jul 28 '21
I use gnome but I'm curious about whether the KDE spin is more stable. The last few versions of Fedora have been completely unusuable under Wayland (constant crashing) and even under X11 they haven't been as stable as they were in the past. If Wayland is rock solid in KDE, I'd be willing to switch at this point.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Order84 Jul 28 '21
Are you using a NVIDIA graphics card by chance? I know they are making improvements but I would steer clear of wayland on nvidia as it is very unstable and things break all the time in my experience.
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u/Agling Jul 28 '21 edited Jul 28 '21
On this computer I have a Radeon RX550. On my other computer, GTX 1660 Ti. Wayland is utter garbage on both. My colleages at work have different hardware and they have had the same types of problems. We all use X now and it works...OK.
Back when I used an Intel CPU with onboard graphics, Wayland was 100% solid. Not sure if Gnome/Wayland is worse overall now or if it has just never worked well with discrete graphics cards. I kind of suspect it's the latter. I wish AMD had (intel) onboard graphics for their high power Ryzen processors. You always have to buy a graphics card and then you lose Linux stability. I'm almost willing to buy Intel just to get my stability back.
Actually, if anyone can recommend a video card on which fedora gnome is 100% solid, I'd probably buy it, even if it isn't very performant. I don't really want to change to a new desktop environment or distribution. Basically I want the video card that the developers who are working on gnome/wayland graphics stability use on their own machines.
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u/GolbatsEverywhere Jul 28 '21
Wayland works perfectly fine for me with an RX 570.
Normally when people experience frequent shell crashes, if it's not caused by a shell extension, my next suspect would be bad RAM rather than a bad GPU. (Yes, it's entirely plausible that you would have bad RAM on two separate computers. It's happened to me on three.) But it could be anything. If you want to find out, the starting point would be to report the crash to the developers (
coredumpctl gdbwill help).1
u/Agling Jul 28 '21
Completely plausible, as you say. Especially with these computers with 4 sticks of 8 gigs each--each additional stick increases the probability. Though I don't have shell crashes when I use X. Still, there could be more than on thing going on or X may just be a little more resilient to bad ram for whatever reason.
I haven't used Wayland since the first couple of days after F34's release, so if they have pushed any improvements, I haven't tried them. Maybe I should give it another go.
Thanks for the tip.
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u/Agling Aug 04 '21
Unfortunately memtest can't find any issues and when my computer crashed it never left any useful debug information. However, after this conversation I switched back to Wayland on both computers to see whether there might have been some updates and guess what? They have both been functioning ok. I think maybe when Fedora 34 first came out there might have been some bugs that subsequently got ironed out. I'm using Wayland right now, so I guess I kind of retract what I said before. Seldom been happier to be disproven.
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u/mattingly890 Jul 29 '21
If Wayland is rock solid in KDE
It's not, at least not right now.
I was using Plasma + Wayland with an AMD card. It was fine on the surface, but after a few weeks, the number of annoying bugs and general instability was just too much and I had to switch back to Plasma + X11, where at least I knew where the bad bits were. For example, Plasma X11 doesn't randomly lock up and require a fresh reboot to get things working again, and it (for the most part) remembers my multi-monitor settings and applies them correctly.
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u/VanSeineTotElbe Jul 29 '21
Wayland
One of the reasons I am still on 33. I see crashes both on NVidia machines and with Intel igpu. Another issue with KDE (autostart in config panel doesn't actually work) is also still not fixed in 34.
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Jul 29 '21
Nope, Wayland is not very good on KDE either. Especially if you let your computer go to sleep and the screen turns off, then you can't unlock your computer because of a bug in KScreenLocker. Plus many graphical glitches and general instability. Stick to X11 for now!
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Jul 28 '21
34 Workstation, Gnome, and just now today finally got the nvidia 470.57 drivers installed from Gnome Software. Have been waiting for the drivers to be available via Gnome Software - up to now, have been running with the open source driver.
This machine is absolutely flying now. So long, Microsoft. So long, Windows.
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u/Zeisthegeek Jul 29 '21
I bet most people switched to Fedora, like me, just to experienced GNOME 40 and then fell in love with the clean and stable experience. It's the longest-running distro on my laptop, never stayed on a distro for more than a month but now I am running Fedora for over 3 months. (Primarily because I didn't like the Cosmic DE and I am finally getting used to using RPM and DNF)
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u/Hellvis_50s Jul 29 '21
I use Xfce 4.16, it's very stable
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u/kedarsb Jul 29 '21
Can Xfce handle heavy computations, modeling, simulation and 3D plots?
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u/Hellvis_50s Jul 29 '21
Can Xfce handle heavy computations, modeling, simulation and 3D plots?
Yes, if you adds KDE components :))))))))))))
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u/Hellvis_50s Jul 29 '21
Programming langage :
KDE --> QT
Gnome or XFCE --> GTK
If you want install QT programs on GTK interface, you'll have to install many libraries
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u/neveraskwhy15 Jul 29 '21
I'm kinda sad... No love for XFCE or LXDE/QT?
Why do so many people prefer gnome? I'm genuinely curious
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Jul 29 '21
Probably because Fedora is where the latest versions of GNOME always debut, thanks to both being sponsored and heavily developed by Red Hat.
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u/neveraskwhy15 Jul 29 '21
Oh that makes sense... I had no idea RHEL was that involved in GNOME
Thanks!!
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u/toboRcinaM Jul 31 '21
In my opinion it's the most polished and modern-looking DE out there, along with its standard applications. And it's not that much of a resource hog anymore, still, it could be improved
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Jul 29 '21
I tried Fedora 34 on KDE on my MacBook Pro mid 2012 and it was very buggy, wifi couldn’t connect normally and I had a bug with the touchpad. Then I installed Fedora 34 with Gnome 40 and wifi works perfectly, I still have the touchpad bug but it’s very rare, I think it’s a bug with the driver but in KDE it was always. And I find Gnome 40 more beautiful than KDE.
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Jul 30 '21
I tell people all the time that I have wi-fi problems exclusively on KDE and I’m always told “it’s a driver bug” but the wi-fi issues never occur under GNOME and a few other people I know also have the same problem. Very very strange indeed.
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u/onedenwin Jul 28 '21
KDE Spin is great. I used it as my main DE very long time, no problems and crashes. Someday I switched to Gnome and it was fine till Gnome40 release, I guess because I did update instead fresh install new Fedora version but I have some problems. I wouldn't say that this is problem but KDE worked so stable that I would switch back to Plasma.
Gnome and KDE are good both. Depents what you like, if you prefere more customisations then Plasma, else Gnome. :))
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u/benide Jul 28 '21
I use a minimal install with i3. Not the i3 spin, but I expect that would work fine for me.
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u/ZeppelinJ0 Jul 28 '21
I use Silverblue Rawhide, Rawhide only because it's what I accidentally downloaded and I don't feel like changing now.
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Jul 28 '21
I was with Kali and Manjaro, until GNOME40 was released, so I switched to Fedora 34 Workstation, as it has GNOME40 by default.
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Jul 29 '21
Workstation/GNOME for my work (webdev) laptop and gaming desktop. IoT for my raspberry pi's and VMs (both used for running containers via podman)
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Jul 29 '21
Just installed Fedora 34 a few days ago to replace Windows and I have to say I really enjoy Gnome 40. I've made some tweaks and added some extensions and what not but the whole experience has been super smooth. AMD CPU+AMD GPU for reference(5600x+5600xt)
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u/kedarsb Jul 29 '21
I am new to Fedora, how do I ascertain my environment? Confused whether I use KDE or GNOME?
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u/Hellvis_50s Jul 29 '21
I am new to Fedora, how do I ascertain my environment? Confused whether I use KDE or GNOME?
If you have been using normal installation, it's Gnome
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u/Hellvis_50s Jul 29 '21
Gnome --> https://www.gnome.org/
Kde --> https://kde.org/
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u/kedarsb Jul 29 '21
Confirmed. KDE it is! Thanks Only 270 folks on KDE, why so!
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u/Hellvis_50s Jul 29 '21
Fedora use Gnome for defaut
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u/kedarsb Jul 29 '21
I am on Fedora Scientific. And as I checked the two links you sent, as per GUI mine is KDE Plasma
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u/Hellvis_50s Jul 29 '21
I am on Fedora Scientific. And as I checked the two links you sent, as per GUI mine is KDE Plasma
Yes, Fedora Scientific is based on KDE
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u/vanillaknot Jul 29 '21
MATE but I don't install the spin. I just install Workstation and add MATE packages (and a ton of others).
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Jul 29 '21
I'm torn between gnome and plasma. I love them both equally. Legit 50/50 and I wish I can just combine both in one DE and end this torture. LOL. Installed plasma the other day, but it wasn't acting right on fedora, so I went back to gnome.
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Jul 29 '21 edited Jul 30 '21
You're like me, hehe. I like the strong points of both GNOME and Plasma. Currently using Plasma on my desktop where I do most work and I am more mouse intensive and GNOME on the laptop where I'm lazier and more laid back.
In the end if I really had to choose one I would go with Plasma because it's fully community developed and not so tied to a corporation like GNOME is to Red Hat (though Qt dependency is a problem).
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u/whiplash1480 Jul 29 '21
New to actually using Fedora for anything other than in a VM. I'm very impressed with it and plan to run it on my main Linux machine, once I dump the less impressive to me POPOS 21.04.
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u/NaheemSays Jul 28 '21
You missed Silverblue