A Linux noob (*) live-toots their Linux PC setup experience!
(*) I have used Linux as my primary OS in... the previous millennium. It was 1998-2000 I think, and was Debian 2.x, on a 486 with 4MB RAM and 80MB hard drive. But I have used Windows since 2001, and also Mac since 2006.
So! Let's try Fedora now, and see what has changed in all these years.
Okay: Fedora site as a downloadable ISO and utility to write this into a USB stick. Then you can boot into actually working Fedora from that, that also functions as an installer. I like! I picked the KDE flavor of Fedora by the way. 1/
Uhh: From the booted USB, I start the installer. Since my Windows partition takes up all the disk space, it seems to only suggest to format it? I was expecting some sort of “ an we shrink your windows partition” option. 2/
Uhh: However! The same live OS I just booted into has a KDE Partition Manager app, so I’m going to use that to resize the windows partition.
That… just took four hours with no progress bar. Disk (fast SSD) was chugging at 20MB/s while resizing 2TB partition down to 1.2TB.
It worked! But four hours with no progress indicator. Not nice. 3/
Nice: the rest of actual install was really fast, several minutes perhaps. Booting into actual installed OS just works, internet (wired) just works. I did not check audio yet lol :) 4/
Very nice: the "search" that happens when you press Start button equivalent (or windows key) feels nicer than on Windows! I did not know how "terminal" is called (turns out: "Konsole"), but typing either "terminal" or "command" or "console" all work and show it as a result.
Windows search most of the time works if you type things exactly, but *sometimes* even when you type app name exactly it goes "nope, never heard of it, want to search the internet?" 5/
Nice: Installing apps via "download" route: 1password works, sourcegit (feels like closest alternative to @fork_dev on Linux - https://github.com/sourcegit-scm/sourcegit) works. So far so good! 6/
Shit: putting computer (this is PC, not a laptop) to sleep then does not wake it up. Had to reboot. After reboot, a dialog pops up asking if I want to report a problem; speaks of "noveau" which I assume is (nvidia) GPU driver something something. Did not test yet if this was one-off or would happen on every sleep; that would suck. Bug report experience next! 7/
Confusing: initial bug report dialog nice, I can see various info. Then it asks me for bugzilla API key (?). Then starts some KDE Wallter Service, which then says "error", and also then error about "DBus Secret Service". Hey maybe no need to call secret service just yet, mkay?
I don't think anyone who's not a coder would get past all that. I'm not sure I did, TBH. 8/
@aras as a long time fedora user, my interpretation of the bugzilla API key thing is they don't actually want bug reports
Yeah this is a place where Ubuntu/gnome is much better out of the box, the secret store thingy and associated APIs (like keyring on Mac OS) "just works" whereas when I tried KDE on Debian, I had a similar experience. The api key thing may be new or unique to fedora, I just remember having to make an account to submit a bug report. But at least d-bus wasn't broken.
Fedora is kind of bleeding edge new, that's why I prefer Debian, its far behind and thus more polished at least imo.
KDE is kind of more flamboyant and has seemingly more bugs than gnome, but I like its developers attitudes a lot more and most of the UI feels better to me except for certain issues w/ file chooser. Nice thing about KDE is they will actually accept contributions if u wanna fix issues w/ ui design.
And I will second or third the ppl who said to install the proprietary GPU driver from nvidia.
@aeva @aras
One new KDE user I met instantly closed kwallet when it opened because they thought it was a cryptocurrency thing!! 🫣