Updated: December 4, 2024
A few days ago, I wrote a review of Ubuntu 24.10, my first proper Ubuntu article in some six years. As you know, I have significantly reduced my distro testing efforts in the past couple of years. The nonstop emotional rollercoaster between excellence and total nonsense, the pro-am seesaw, the regressions, the lack of focus, the so-called dev-centric approach that has nothing to do with ordinary people, and the general mediocrity of the vast majority of systems I tried, all of these made me stop trying. Why would I waste my energy with software that's simply going nowhere? Here and there, I make an exception. Ubuntu last week, Fedora this.
Ah, you see, I am an eternal optimist, and I still use Linux heavily, like on my Slimbook Executive and Titan laptops, with focus on thorough, everyday use. Occasionally, the results are good, fun, promising, I get excited and swept away, thinking, this is it, this is the year of ... and then I get disappointed. I have become quite jaded and very reserved in what I choose to test and review. MX Linux was a nice gem, recently. Ubuntu was pretty much what I expected. So how about Fedora then? Well, let's commence.
Live session, installation
I chose the KDE edition rather than the "default" Gnome one. After my Ubuntu's test, I didn't feel like trying another minimalistic, ergonomically deficient system. There's no value for me trying a desktop I know I won't like, spending hours trying to make it usable - when even the upstream team refuses to do so. But at the very least, the Gnome folks are consistent in what they do, and true to their own ideas, and you don't have to like that, but you can at least grudgingly accept that. So be it. Gnome ain't usable for me, let's do Plasma then, which I believe is the best desktop out there.
I never had any problems with Fedora, per se. I liked its state-of-art approach, and you get a lot of new things, for better or worse. Short version support is a big problem for long-term, serious, low-maintenance use, but maybe, with Plasma, there's great merit here? 'Tis another opportunity to sample Plasma 6, which I tested multiple times over the past months, with sort of average results.
Well, the distro booted fine. No text messages, no flickering. Good. Fedora booted into a Wayland session, and there ain't no other. This is a horrible decision, because Wayland is still beta-quality, still deficient in what it can or cannot do, but hey, if there's one distro that's always pushed the envelope, that's Fedora. That choice makes more sense here than anywhere else. It's still a bad choice, because Wayland still cannot do many useful things that X11 can. On this particular laptop, for example, with its somewhat wonky screen, you need to change the display gamma to make it usable. Nope, you don't get that.
The live session is okay. I don't like the floating task manager. It's a pointless idea, and indeed, once you launch the installer, it PUSHES the task manager to be flush with the bottom and side corners of the screen. So, minimize the installer, the task manager floats up, maximize it, the task manager settles down. At the very least, this is pure nonsense. Apart from that, the display was auto-scaled to 125% in the Wayland session.
Now, the installer is absolutely horrible. First introduced in Fedora 18, it's the least intuitive, logical thing, with a go down, right, then go back up, top left flow, just to confirm choices, contrary to any reading, writing or workflow logic with any sane (left-to-right) UI.
Take a look at the partitioner - and this is the MOST usable of the three options, this Blivet GUI. 80% empty, unused white space and tiny entries. No buttons, whatsoever. You need to right-click to see what you can actually do, like say format or assign a mountpoint. Speaking of format, there is NO indicator that you selected any one partition for formatting. That's right, this glorious partitioning wizard does not show whether you chose a destructive action for your devices. I don't know if I accidentally chose to kill the /boot/efi partition or not, for instance. You see that only when you confirm the choices - after clicking the pointless Done button in the top-left corner, the worst choice in the universe, but not before.
Then, once you begin the installation, it's boring and pointless. A tiny progress bar and nothing else. A total waste of space. Not just that, the 0-100% installation progress bar will only be shown in the first 1/5th of the overall bar, because each step is given equi-distant portion of the horizontal length, so stuff like bootloader installation, initramfs (as if that makes any sense to anyone staring at the screen), and a few other options all get their fair share of the progress bar, without any regard to time. Awful.
Anyway, the whole thing took about 10 minutes. Not too long, but MX Linux did it in four minutes, on this very laptop, just a few weeks ago. And recently, Ubuntu needed about 25 minutes to complete its sequence.
Trying to enjoy the Fedora KDE flavor ...
The first-boot was extra long, but that's because Fedora comes with its two-step installation setup. Even so, the boot takes a long time, roughly 18-19 seconds, LONGER than what the init-enabled MX Linux does. The whole parallelized "modern" boot management thing is absolutely bollocks. My old crusty HDDs did sub-10-second boots in the init era, whereas these wonderful new SSD-equipped machines take ages to load their new and fancy stuff.
Wayland woes
Let's start with the worst thing - Wayland. Pointless, pointless. I wrote an article on this not that long ago, and my impression still stands. After an eternity of development, Wayland is still inferior to the old X11. The problems are evident even in Fedora 41. To wit:
- Icon re-shuffle on the task manager - it is still clunky. If you drag your icons, they may randomly rearrange themselves - no such problem with X11. The solution is, drag an icon, drop it, click on the desktop, repeat. For icons to be reshuffled without the wrong ones going left or right, in Wayland, you need an extra desktop click per icon to do this error free. Also, the actual move is slow and laggy, as if something is counting icon space increments somewhere.
- Furthermore, the Wayland session is slower than the equivalent X11 session, pure and simple. Grab a window, minimize, maximize. Minimize, maximize. The transition effect isn't smooth or fast. Then, on this exact same machine, with MX Linux, which also uses Plasma (albeit 5.27), the exact same operation is smooth. There's no tearing, no lag. It's not a huge difference, but it exists, and as such, it's one of the many reasons why Wayland should not be a default anything anywhere.
- I thought I could disable compositing to improve performance, but Wayland requires it. Fail.
- There's no gamma calibration for the screen, so I must suffer. Fail.
- I tried to make my system menu taller, the entire desktop hanged. I reported this in my Plasma reviews before, and it's still there, including this Fedora system. Can you kwin it under Wayland? Prolly not. Can you Ctrl + Alt + Backspace it? Prolly not. Don't know.
No graceful recovery, the whole desktop goes down.
In the end, 125% scaling, font increase by 1pt, RGB subpixel rendering, and brightness down to 80% seems to make the display borderline okay. The ideal solution would be to reduce the gamma for all three channels to 0.85, and use the brightness at 85-90% level, for this particular laptop and its sucky screen. It just highlights a major ergonomic deficiency in the "replacement" tool, but then, that's modern software for you. Never ready, always rolling beta, always only 85% capable as the old tool, never finished, forever alone.
And there you go. Do I need to go any further? Yes, Wayland works better than before, and it's "almost" usable. But that's such a low, defeatist thing to say. I don't want something that barely scrapes the bottom of the usability charts. I want amazing, and nope. The Linux world just keeps regressing. Why do people use Windows, it's such a mystery.
Desktop customization, plus more bugs, meh scaling
The one bright light in the fog is the Plasma's amazing flexibility. I changed the font color to pure black, as they should be. That said, Fedora's text legibility wasn't as good as it could be, even after I played with brightness and font size. Turns out, I also had to select RGB for subpixel rendering - it was set to none. But there's something in Fedora's font engine that makes the display meh. Could be Wayland, also. Now, this also isn't a new topic, and I've discussed fonts at great, great length in my reviews and distro comparisons over the years. Fast forward a decade, and the fonts still remain a huge problem. We don't want people to have a good experience, now do we.
But then, in a sudden twist of fortune, take a look at the screenshot below:
There's a bit of fuzziness here, notice the word Keyboard for instance. Sub-ideal desktop scaling, which has been significantly improved in Plasma 5.24. Why? Well, Wayland, right? I didn't have such issues when I recently tested MX Linux, or when I did a series of Plasma 6.X reviews. Now, there, the X11 session does 6.25% increments for scaling, to avoid artifacts. Wayland does 5%. Could this be the source of the fuzziness? Maybe. Not sure. But it definitely shows there are problems and regressions, and this whole modern thingie is so overrated.
Furthermore, I couldn't set up auto-login, as it happens ...
Wi-Fi credentials are stored using KDE Wallet; this then prevents auto-login. Also, notice the window borders. This has been a long-standing Plasma 6 problem, I reported this a bunch of times, and it still remains.
I added a few extra wallpapers, and for some reason, the system auto-switched to a light Plasma theme for my task manager. I don't like that. Light theme for apps, of course, but for menus, best if they are darker and out of the way. Had to manually switch back.
Dolphin, in its default guise is horrible-looking. Empty sidebar, almost, no shortcuts to common folders, no menu visible, no icons/buttons for common operations. I spent a whole of eight minutes customizing it, and made it nicer. How hard it is to think about giving the user a beautiful file manager, one of the everyday utilities everyone will be indeed utilizing?
Some cool wallpapers, pretty looks. In the end, you get a lovely, clean Plasma desktop:
However, the "hidden power & session icons until widened enough" issue I mentioned multiple times, including as recently as my MX Linux review, plus the Plasma 6.X articles, remains. If only the Plasma team could focus on making their version 6.X work great instead of wasting time on Wayland. Alas.
Package management
Very good. Surprising, positive. First, if you use dnf on the command line, it's lightning fast. Second, Discover behaves well, but more importantly, it offers a wealth of third-party sources for your varying needs, out of the box. As Fedora ships with non-proprietary software only, you probably want to enable a few extra repositories to get the right stuff. I found entries for Steam, Nvidia drivers, Google Chrome, and then, you can also add the snap backend, if you like. Flatpaks are enabled by default, but they aren't set to default.
This gave me enough flexibility to grab some extras. Now, you will still need to approve the repo signing keys once you actually try to install programs from these additional sources (RPM Fusion nonfree). The workflow around this could be a bit better and more elegant. Nevertheless, the results are solid.
Applications, everyday stuff
I got me VLC, Steam, GIMP. Stuff worked fine. Steam launched without any problems under Wayland, so that's something. My MP3 songs played fine, without issues. Overall, the usability ain't bad, but there's a non-trivial amount of unnecessary effort needed to get there, which is not how home desktop computing ought to be in 2024. This was perhaps okay in 2004, but not today. Why distros still insist of giving the users a half-baked potato, when the recipe is so simple, beats me.
Funnily, Fedora does not ship with too many programs by default, but it does give you Kamoso the
webcam tool, go figure. Except, it's a bit broken, because all of the effects show up completely empty.
Samba speed is good, with very low latency. Basically, toss a cube (the 20-sided DnD one, of course),
and hope you land on a well-designed feature. Linux in a nutshell.
Hardware compatibility, battery life
No complaints that I could observe. As far as juice drainage goes, with the brightness set to 90%, balanced power profile (not that it makes much sense in Linux anyway, as I've tested many times over), light usage, and a battery cell that only holds 4/5ths of its original charge, the system predicted about 3-3.5 hours of battery time, which translates to 4-4.5 hours for a new cell. That's not great, considering Fedora 33, on this very machine, when it was new, gave an estimated 6-7 hours for light usage. Even if you take into account screen brightness (an extra 30 min on average for a drop from 100% to 50% for a full battery), and a few other factors, it's still meh.
Conclusion
Overall, Fedora 41 KDE ain't bad. But it could be so much more, relatively easily - well, like so many other distros out there, which all seem to subconsciously refuse or reject the concept of mainstream good user experience. But then, of all the distros out there, Fedora has always been the one to push the boundaries, to be the pioneer of new tech, new kernels, new features, and experimental stuff. For that reason, I can't really say they're wrong with testing Wayland, but they are wrong in not giving the superior X11 option. By giving users no choice but to use an inferior solution, that's a rather defeatist approach to development. Also, that's something "big tech" does often, and the Linux and FOSS crowds go wild over - Microsoft forces BING and Edge, you can't use a different browser engine on iOS, Google this or that, blah blah. And then what, Wayland, take it or leave it. Much choice, such wow.
The installer is simply ridiculous. Awful. And it hasn't improved one bit in a decade, which is quite sad. The fonts aren't amazing, again, and HD scaling isn't as good as it should be, a regression or a direct artifact of the Wayland choice, I don't know. The Plasma System Monitor with its pointless stacked CPU graphs remains a joke. All of these mar the experience, and make the nice, slick Plasma behave in a rather mediocre fashion. There's really no reason for that. No reason whatsoever.
On the plus side, the boot sequence is clean and smooth (if not ultra-fast), the desktop works well, Wayland works well enough (if you're good with a B- grade), and you get the colorful and flexible repertoire of visuals and software, the way only Plasma does. I do have to highlight dnf and Discover in a very positive way. In this release, the package management is excellent, and the integration quite good. So there are nice things around, but overall, they're not enough to make Fedora a must-have choice. As always, it's a cool testbed, too stable for what it stands for, but that's as far as I am wiling to embrace it. Not great, not terrible. And we're done.
Cheers.