I've been a Linux user since almost 10 years. Over the years I've used Ubuntu with the Unity environment, Kubuntu and KDE Neon with Plasma, Debian with Gnome and Raspbian with XFCE. Since Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, made a few decisions which I really didn't like (most importantly, forcing the use of snaps), I've decided to jump ship. Debian had problems with GPU drivers, so I was looking for something entirely new. Since Fedora has been gaining in popularity and I was curious to try out vanilla Gnome in version 40+, I went for it. I installed Fedora around three months ago and used it as my main OS. I wrote down a few notes about positive and negative experiences, which eventually became enough for an entire blog post. I really liked Gnome and Fedora! Below is a collection of papercuts, which might make it seem as if I didn't enjoy it, but the opposite is the case. If the issues mentioned below are fixed (which I'm sure they will be soon), I would consider it a perfect OS!

Installation

  • Why is tap to click disabled by default?
  • In order to install Fedora, my existing ubuntu install had to be overwritten. Fedora didn't do this by default and instead wanted to install into the 10 MB empty space on the drive. Making Fedora overwrite the ubuntu partition(s) was an awkward process.

Gnome Tour

  • The last slide wasn't openable by clicking on the right arrow, had to use keyboard right button
  • Three-finger-swipe gestures work very well and are intuitive

Time and date

The displayed time is off (by 7 hours). Clicking on the time to change it is not possible (left/right click and the dropdown menu have nothing). Need to go to system settings to do it. (by the way, why do left and right clicking on the time in the panel do the same action? Why doesn't one open the calendar (left click) and the other (right click) opens time and date settings?)

  • in the system settings there even is a setting to set the time zone automatically, but it's off by default. Why? When I enabled it, it worked perfectly, even giving me a nice notifier that the time zone was updated.
  • one evening, the time zone updated incorrectly and the system showed a wrong time for some hours
  • update: the automatic time zone issues persist and I had to resort to not doing automatic time zone detection

Software: Install and update

First package install

The first program I installed was Alacritty. When I installed it, tons of other stuff was installed/updated first. I remember seeing something with "PyCharm copr repo owned by phracek" in it. When I searched the web for this later, it turned out that this repo is there on purpose.

Flathub

Why is flathub not enabled by default? I tried to install spotify from the Software center; no results. One may say that flathub is third-party software from Fedora's perspective, but during the installation I enabled third-party software so that shouldn't be an issue.

dnf tab completion slow and incomplete

Tab completing package names takes forever (up to 10 seconds) Sometimes tab completion is not available at all. This happened for

sudo dnf install libsodium-static-1.0.18-9.fc36

after which we still need completion to end in either ".x86_64" or ".i686". But the options do not appear on (multiple) tab presses. Which brings us to the next issue: why do I have to select x86_64 myself? Wouldn't i686 just not work on an x86_64 system, therefore leaving the other one as the only viable option?

Another thing is that tab completion doesn't find all packages. Exmaple:

sudo dnf install certbot-

If you hit tab now, it autocompletes to sudo dnf install certbot-1.19.0-1.fc35.noarch. However, you can manually type sudo dnf install certbot-nginx to install the nginx plugin for certbot, and it works as well. So why is this option not shown?

After 2 weeks I got the first 404 errors when doing sudo dnf upgrade, for the packages nfs-utils and libnfsidmap. Two different mirrors returned 404. From the log messages I couldn't tell whether these packages were properly installed in the end.

Software

  • The Software app stopped checking for updates soon after I set up the system. When going to the "updates" tab, I'm currently seeing "Last checked: 14 days ago". I'm also not getting prompted for installing updates anymore. In the settings, I disabled "automatic updates", but I left "update notifications" enabled, so it should still check for updates and notify me, or so I thought.
  • There's no indicator telling me that I need to restart the computer after installing updates. I don't understand enough about how Fedora handles this, but shouldn't one reboot as soon as possible after updating packages, since the system is in an unexpected state with new and old packages loaded and new packages installed?
  • In general, the Software app seemed too unreliable. Sometimes, packages that I search for are not found (but I know they exist), sometimes after a package has been found, further information can not be loaded (loading indicator spins indefinitely)

Video codecs

Videos on some websites didn't work properly. The only one I can remember now is reddit, but that's obviously an important one. Possibly vimeo was a problem as well. After going through a 5-step process of setting up video codecs at this link, everything worked. But as stated beofore, I had enabled third-party software at some point during installation so I don't understand why this is not set up by default. This is something that worked out of the box on ubuntu/kde neon.

Nautilus: default folders

Why are there default folders that can't be changed? These folders, like Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music and Videos always appear in the left panel for easy access. But I have my own folder structure and don't use any of these (not even Downloads). I find Music and Videos folders as default especially weird. Nowadays, almost everyone uses streaming services, so the need to open these folders is much less than it used to. More importantly, if you listen to music offline, you typically use a Music player that indexes your music library, so you still wouldn't need to navigate to your Music folder very often.

Gnome Boxes

Gnome boxes fails to run any operating system. Tested:

  • GNOME OS nightly
  • Fedora Workstation 36
  • Debian 11

The error message is e.g. "Failed to start Fedora Workstation 36" and I can get a troubleshooting log with one click (which is very nice!). I can attach the log if someone is interested.

Font size

Font/icon sizes sometimes seem all over the place.

  • Worst offender: System monitor. In the resources tab, the axis labels are barely visible. The graphs themselves are much too thin as well.
  • nextcloud: not a gnome app but it does look fine on KDE. Font is almost unreadably small in places
  • Gnome Software: subtitles of apps in "Explore" tab unreadable. Update: this seems to have been fixed at some point

Changing the font size: in the settings app, I expected to be able to change the font size in the "Appearance" tab. But somehow the only thing in the appearance tab is light/dark mode and wallpapers. After quite a bit of searching, I found the font size in the "Accesibility" tab, which was surprising to me. Even there, one can just enable the option "large text", one can not configure how large.

Screenshot tool

I must have pressed some key combination to activate this, but at some point whenever I hit the "s" key, the (awesome) screenshot tool was started.

Notifications

When a notification is too long for the "toast" notification indicator, the text is interrupted and ends with "…". When clicking on the toast, nothing happens, i.e. the full text can never be read. The particular notification that I clicked on also didn't appear in the notifications overview (the one that appears when one clicks on the time in the middle of the top panel)

Bluetooth GUI

  • It would be nice to be able to connect to a bluetooth device directly from the dropdown menu in the upper right corner of screen instead of having to go via the settings app.
  • I first tried to connect to the wrong bluetooth device. The spinning wheel indicating that it tried to connect stoppped spinning after a while. When I detected the correct bluetooth device and clicked on it, nothing happened. When nothing happened, I disabled and re-enabled bluetooth. Now it didn't find any devices anymore (before, it found plenty).

Window decorations, dark mode, wayland

  • Thunderbird: when the "save file" dialog is open, and you try to pull the dialog window with the mouse, the Thunderbird window becomes smaller and "hides" behind the save file dialog. Only some small borders of the Thunderbird window remain visible
  • Alacritty: Alacritty doesn't have a proper window decoration, it just has a white box around it. This white box doesn't even respect my dark mode preference. One might say it's alacritty's fault for not integrating with GTK, but on KDE Plasma it works fine and I think alacritty probably doesn't use Qt either (?).

  • Apps that don't follow dark theme

    • Thunderbird
    • LibreOffice
    • Microsoft Teams
    • Foliate
    • Signal (installed as flatpak): even when manually selecting the dark mode preference, Signal's window decorations are light themed. Again, this is something that works in KDE so I'm guessing it's not a Signal issue.

Printer and Scanner

I have a printer+scanner device which never worked well under different Linux distributions/versions. With Fedora everything worked out of the box.

Miscellaneous

  • The area on which to position the mouse pointer to drag windows bigger and smaller is so thin that one can barely ever reach it
  • It's unclear to me without searching the web how to make programs run on boot. Searching in the activities panel for "startup" "boot" "autostart" doesn't yield much. Also in the settings app I didn't find anything.
  • Why is wl-clipboard not installed by default? If I remember correctly, even git was installed by default? wl-copy/wl-paste seems to be much smaller and more important
  • The "Fonts" application doesn't support ctrl-f for searching