I don’t mean for this to become a KDE vs GNOME post. I’m looking at switching to Fedora (because Arch is a pain), and it seems that GNOME is more supported. I use KDE on Arch. What features would I be losing if I were to switch? (ex: toolbar management, KRunner, etc.)
No, KDE is just as well supported on Fedora, dont worry. I use it daily.
I also highly recommend using Fedora Kinoite from https://ublue.it
It is way more reliable, you cannot imagine how much. It is the best distribution model in my experience, you never have to worry about updates breaking anything, and you can always go back to vanilla.
If you like and trust Homebrew for packages, yes.
I have to try it, am kinda suspicious but I guess it is a good distribution method?
I had never used homebrew before switching to bluefin. Honestly I still hardly use it. Most gui things I can find flatpaks and command line stuff I’ll search homebrew, but just as easy to open Ubuntu distrobox and apt install or install a .deb
I love that everything is updating constantly. That you can roll back easily if you mess something bad. That all system files are immutable so. Also super easy to rebase from to bluefin to ublue to Aurora to Bazzite to kinoite.
I just started to daily Bazzite, which is Kinoite but made for gaming. Can confirm it is so reliable it’s crazy. Best fresh install experience by a mile.
Yes for sure.
- Fedora packagers do the heavy lifting of shipping the packages
- ostree pulls in and versions the OCI images
- rpm-ostree layers RPMs onto the base image but on their side, so they can install exactly what they need. Its all CI/CD Github actions
- they include all the files needed for a perfect experience
- they have yafti and ublue-update, which fill the gaps
- on your machine, rpm-ostree just needs to update
The KDE spin of Fedora is very good,there has been rumblings about switching to KDE as the main repo DE. I’d say Gnome is more a set and forget DE, I prefer its tools like Gnome-disks is a lot better for me than KDE partition manager.
I find the tiling better on Gnome through Forge as opposed to Bismuth on KDE.
There are extensions for pretty much anything in KDE like Krunner, Arc menu has something similar to K runner. Just Perfection would handle a lot of toolbar functionality that Gnome tweaks doesn’t. Though I would say the extensions aren’t as robust as KDE’s.
GNOME extensions pick up a lot of slack if you want a dock or other UI features, extensions.gnome.org has a whole host of useful customizations. I also use a quick search/run popup launcher (ulauncher) so I don’t have to dip into the overview unless I want to see all of my open windows or drag things between workspaces.
I’m not really into the whole “which DE is better” thing. I think if you like one or the other you should just use it and get on with your life - trying to prove that one or the other is outright better is a waste of time, DE choice is entirely down to preference.
That said, I really like GNOME - it largely just gets out of the way and allows you to focus on what you’re doing. The overview and workspace handling in GNOME is top notch IMO and everything I want to launch or find can be accessed quickly with hotkeys or other shortcuts. My main beef with KDE is that it’s both too customizable and yet not quite customizable enough, when I try it every couple of years I inevitably spend a couple of days configuring settings to suit, get annoyed that I can’t quite get it to do what I want and promptly relog into a GNOME session.
Speaking of - OP, if you want to compare the two just install KDE on Arch and start a KDE session from your login manager. You don’t have to pick one or the other, you can try both and compare them before you make your distro switch.
I’m not really into the whole “which DE is better” thing. I think if you like one or the other you should just use it and get on with your life
Totally agree. They behave differently by default, but they are both so customizable that you can make either one behave almost exactly like the other if you want. I like KDE’s defaults a bit more than Gnome’s, and I like Dolphin more than Nautilus, but I could go back to Gnome and be comfortable within a day. I’d need to spend a little time finding the right extensions and then I’d be good.
It’s not like 20 years ago when there was strong motivation to commit to one ecosystem or another. Back then, running Gnome/GTK apps under KDE was kind of funky, and vice-versa. Nowadays, everything is pretty seamless.
This extension is also great https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5489/search-light/. It provides the overview search bar without moving everything around like the regular overview.
I’m also going to echo the sea of comments praising KDE support on Fedora. I just switched to Kinoite/Fedora Atomic KDE (for the Fedora 40 release) after using Fedora Workstation for about 5 years, and I’ve loved the experience. My only gripes have been from adjusting to an atomic distro, and have had nothing to do with KDE implementation. It seems that Fedora works very well with KDE, though I suppose I don’t have a whole lot of experience with other distros using KDE.
If you want to use KDE with a standard desktop experience, just use the KDE spin (the standard mutable version). If you’re interested in atomic distros (not trying to convert you, it’s very much a personal preference), then they have the atomic KDE spin as well. I don’t think you’ll be missing anything by using KDE on Fedora, and unless you wanted to experiment with GNOME, there’s no reason to really switch. Workstation and the KDE spin are both maintained at about the same level.
It is certainly helpful in preventing issues caused by packages updating, as the whole base image should remain consistent (and you could always just roll back to the previous update from grub if necessary and revert a commit that broke your system). Since you were using Arch, I made a baseless assumption that you would want the ability to modify the root filesystem for configuration, but it was a baseless assumption, so if that is not the case, then atomic distros are great for users that don’t want to tweak tiny things in root directories like /usr. Granted, you can still overlay stuff if you wanted, so it’s not as if you couldn’t tweak stuff in immutable directories, it just requires a bit more work to do on atomic distros.
If what you’re looking for is a standard desktop KDE experience with a distro that is more resistant to breakage, I’d highly recommend Kinoite. It requires a bit of learning, but not a whole lot. For instance, the typical order of priority for installing packages is flatpak (mostly GUI stuff) > toolbox (terminal-based packages like neovim that aren’t already installed) > overlay with rpm-ostree (basically the equivalent of installing through your package manager). The fewer overlays you have, the better your protection from spontaneous breakage is. Of course, there are packages you will have to overlay depending on the situation (like the proprietary Nvidia drivers), but almost everything I need was available as either a flatpak or was practical to install in toolbox (basically a containerized mutable root that lets you install stuff with dnf instead of rpm-ostree). You can add aliases to your .bashrc so you don’t have to type “toolbox run <cmd>” every time, as well. Just be aware that packages installed in toolbox live in a container, and they aren’t intended to be able to break out of the container (so if you open a terminal in neovim, which is installed in a toolbox container, it will open a shell inside the container, not on your host). Containers can access your home directory and a variety of different directories in your system, so this often isn’t an issue, it’s just something to keep in mind (for instance, you can’t enable systemd services on your host from inside a terminal).
Your web link (404) appears to be missing something. This is correct : https://getaurora.dev/
What is painful about using KDE in Arch? Fedora supports KDE as well, just look up “Fedora KDE Respin” it’s just not the default DE.
Any Linux distro that you choose will almost always support any DE that you choose, the difference between distros isn’t that much anymore.
