@@SarcasticTofu All of those *are* CLI alternatives. I can understand how Vi/emacs is unintuitive for new folk, but nano is very simple and easy to pickup in few minutes
These Long Term Reviews are so much more useful and insightful than any short term first look videos, where half of the time it's just installation and checking background images. Most people do not have the nerves to do a proper Long Term Review with real world experience, so thank you for these.
I don't understand why your channel is so lacking in views. You give honest and practical reviews and how-tos of linux related things. Compared to most of the bigger linux channels, you give extremely consise information.
Linux cast and dj ware are really good Channels. Personally I don't like the channels that they have the most subscribers. I thing that they have really poor quality content, and their titles are click bait like worst Ubuntu in history ubuntu good again , fedora the new Ubuntu and what ever,Techhut is good though. Keep it up Linux cast you have really good content.
I think there is a promising future for immutable Linux distros, as it will tackle spaces like offices or other places where a bunch of similar computers need to be managed. I know that can be done with regular distros, but this can be a step forward in manageability and security
i think this is solution for non tech or office users, so they can't break system and they have access to IT guy that can help them. Update on reboot? For me it's not a problem, I always update my system before shutdown
Yes, a government approved version that phones home each time you login 😈 I think NixOS is better as it allows you to tailor it to your needs and then act as an immutable OS. But still tweakable when needed.
@@alexeiboukirev8357 as governments need to have a tight control over the software their computers must run, this can be a good stack for government offices.
@@alexeiboukirev8357 not only government version, company where I work is delivering to our office customers computers with preinstalled bunch of applications and provide tech support, in most cases changes in configuration is only install/remove printers or ms office (libree is preinstalled). And yes there are calling home(need only internet connection, we can see some system info and run remote scripts) , and yes we can remote to it without user permission(but we don't) - even without admin privileges users can(and they do...) lock off their computers or software. Immutable OS is good, you will only need to focus fixing user account
@@alexeiboukirev8357 silvrblue does allow overrides and package layering so you can definitely make quite a lot underthehood changes if need be (just as long as it isn't adding additional folders to root)
I would say its more a KDE interaction with immutable operating systems and KDE itself. Silverblue works way better but Kinoite is also barely 1 year old. Think the first KDE was Fedora 35 and it definitely has rough edges. Fedora is really a gnome first distro, im sure whomever develops for the KDE spins and Kinoite might still be working on the rough edges. Example KDE theming. Not sure where KDE themes go to if its a /usr directory or /home/.local or something but even if you dig deep down in the filestructure of an immutable system. Even home isnt in /home. Its actually located in /var/home. Personally i dont think immutable will be the main focus except in use cases like businesses where the IT manager wants to be able to deploy systems and ensure they are all similar. Or devs developing for containers and not having to worry about. Maybe 5 10 years down the road Kinoite will be good, even fedora devs have stated this isnt ready for prime time
Well said, John. GNOME devs sit so closely to RedHat/IBM that I think they will forever be the default on RHEL/Fedora. Especially for business and enterprise fields. 🙏
Yes. First thing I thought was MicroOS - OpenSUSE is historically a KDE first distro, but for MicroOS (their immutable release) they say GNOME is in beta and KDE in alpha, and state multiple times very clearly that KDE will not work, or at least will not work well.
@@ArniesTech it's also a matter of practicality and convenience. I'm copying from a Reddit post from someone else: There are two major problems with KDE Plasma today: * The lifecycle: KDE Plasma does not have a homogeneous release cadence and life cycle like GNOME does. KDE Frameworks are released monthly, KDE Gear and KDE Plasma are released every 4 months, but at different times. There's basically no harmony across these critical parts of the KDE Plasma stack. This is also compounded by the mess that is KDE Plasma LTS. KDE Plasma LTS ***only covers*** KDE Plasma. The Frameworks and Gear are not included. This is a nightmare to collect and release. Actually, Fedora doesn't even ship Plasma LTS for RHEL/CentOS users anymore because it's just not viable for a good long-term experience. [We upgrade KDE Plasma for RHEL/CentOS users regularly now](fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE/EPEL#Update_Schedule). For comparison, ***everything*** for GNOME is released together, and GNOME releases every six months. This consistency also makes it easier for Enterprise Linux distributions (Red Hat Enterprise Linux [RHEL] and SUSE Linux Enterprise [SLE]) to consider upgrading GNOME on a regular basis (SLE does it every two years, for example). * The sprawl: The KDE ecosystem is more than double the size of GNOME. A fully featured KDE Plasma setup is almost 600 components. As someone who works to offer KDE Plasma (for Fedora), I can say it's ***really*** hard. The size of the dependency chain for KDE Plasma blew up with the transition from KDE SC 4 to KDE Plasma 5, and keeping everything working is a challenge. Red Hat was the last Linux distribution vendor to ship KDE and support it. That ended with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 because they couldn't take on the workload of KDE Plasma 5 ***and*** work on everything else they're doing in the desktop. So RHEL 8 became GNOME only. SUSE dropped KDE Plasma with SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 for similar reasons, but they'd been pushed harder into the GNOME fold by Novell acquiring Ximian and merging it into SUSE decades ago. Mandriva went belly-up in 2015, but had laid off their staff in 2010 (in the KDE 4 days). Canonical never embraced KDE technologies, as they followed using GNOME from Debian, and later developed Unity, and now switched back to GNOME. The only problem with GNOME is their people (specifically their attitude and inability to handle criticism). And when Linux companies are paying employees to work in GNOME, it's a lot easier to ignore that. That's a big part of why GNOME has never course-corrected on their attitude as a project, nor has the Foundation ensured that new folks get a friendly experience with GNOME. As long as they're funded and they're the default for all the commercially successful distributions, they really don't have to change. The KDE community is awesome to work with, but the difficulty of keeping up with their stack makes things too hard from a commercial standpoint. I personally hope that KDE Plasma 6 will be an opportunity to fix some of this mess, because some simplification here could vastly improve the commercial viability of the desktop. _Source: Works on Fedora KDE as a member of the [Fedora KDE SIG](fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE)_
I've been daily driving Fedora 36 Silverblue for a while and I can say you'll have an awesome experience in comparison to what you're saying about Kinoite. I've reached the point of being so accustomed to immutable that I'll try out daily driving the Fedora KDE Spin, since I want to switch to KDE and dip into DE customization.
Something I'd like to point out to anyone coming to this video now. Most of these issues have been resolved cleanly, and the ones that haven't can be easily worked around if you are a real superuser. Manually installing KDE themes and portions of themes has been an option for a long time now, for example. But most importantly: You can make the system mutable, and make any changes you want that you could make on Fedora Workstation, and then convert back to an immutable system. These issues mostly only exist for people who want to keep the system entirely clean and immutable, and aren't okay with making even small system changes.
Huh, interesting. I've been using silverblue for 2 years and recently I distrohopped to coreOS (another rpm-ostree based fedora distro) on my home server. The biggest issue I had with it was the recent grub fiasco, and even that I count more as a grub failure than silverblue failure. There's some annoyances like gnome-software being slow or having to reboot each time I use rpm-ostree (though it's largely helped by the -A switch), but overall my experience has been very positive for both silverblue and coreOS. I think most of your issues with kinoite come down simply to KDE not being suited to be immutable, at least currently. It's very open and encouraging towards modifying the system, and kinoite just doesn't allow that.
I really like long term use reviews. Too many are just 5 minutes after installed reviews or I used this distro for a day type videos on RUclips. I look forward to a future discussion about Silverblue.
I also recently tried Kinoite for a few days and my issue was that the app selection is still oddly limited, for example the full catalog of KDE games is not available, so no KShisen, which I happen to like. Also I can't install the Mulvad VPN app since it's an RPM that you download from Mullvad directly. There's a way to go before the immutable OS is ready for everyday use.
The reason why your global theme installation gave errors is because the SDDM (Login Manager) theme should be copied to /usr (I think...) directory for that theme to be usable befora user login. Downloading just plasma themes or fonts and stuff individually doesnt give errors because its obviously user specific and is stored in `~/.themes` or `~/.icons`.
Exactly this. Also Kvantum manager is missing so it has to be layered with rpm-ostree. Plus I want to suggest installing Microsoft Edge (also with rpm-ostree) for those who want Global Menu for browser and great web apps integration with OS.
Fedora is an an user friendly distribution. Things should work out of the box, there shouldn't be a need for tinkering or searching through forums for solutions.
Those issues with themes you had are caused by SDDM themes included in those global themes. SDDM is customized via root as every other DM, and you don't really have root access here. Also a lot of issues may be caused by actually modifying root files - you are not really supposed to do that. RPM-ostree is just in case but If you want access to apps from Fedora repos, there is Toolbox for that which installs it in home partition instance of Fedora. It's not only safer, but also doesn't require reboot after installation. You may also install distrobox and APX which will give you even access to AUR
What a great review, thank you. Very reasonable points, stated clearly, and without drama. I appreciate an in-depth review where you've actually been using it for a while, isntead of other channels that post reviews after trying something out for only a couple hours.
Yes, please do a video (or multiple videos) on Silverblue, openSUSE MicroOS, SteamOS, and/or other immutable distros - it’s a really interesting development in the evolution of Linux.
I get your frustration with the KDE issues, but I think you missed that you're supposed to use toolbx for installing things like btop that are not available as a flatpak. toolbx also works for graphical applications: "Toolbox environments have seamless access to the user’s home directory, the Wayland and X11 sockets, networking (including Avahi), removable devices (like USB sticks), systemd journal, SSH agent, D-Bus, ulimits, /dev and the udev database, etc.."
Have you tried giving openSUSE's Micro OS a try? I gave its Kalpa variant a try even though it's in the alpha stage, however, I have stayed with it for more than 6 months, based upon my experience, it's less pain in the arse compared to Fedora Kinoite
If I may, it sounds like both kinoite and silverblue need time to be perfected. What's your hope if they are properly perfected and ready for general use?
I've been running kinoite as my main driver for about 3 months. I'm a developer and had previously run into the sort of problems flatpak and rpm-ostree/immutable operating systems are supposed to solve. Flatpak helps, but you often end up installing a new package manager/version manager that also lets you install stuff. You've got stuff installed with Snap, DNF, flatpak, some bits installed manually. It's was all well and good me having a rule to only use DNF and flatpak, but it's not difficult to end up in a situation where you have random stuff installed all over the place, heck there are even some RPM packages that expect it, even if RPM tells you off for running it with sudo! So a toolbox is the perfect way to just say fuck it, you win, but you're not touching my OS files, you can have you're own OS and break it as much as you want. Totally agree that the integration with Plasma isn't great, so I've basically been ignoring it and awkwardly working around it just living on terminal instead, but that's basically how is use gnome because it's so bare bones anyway. Might rebase to Silverblue and give that a try for a while.
@@shaunpatrick8345 I like immutability, I agree that fedora is super stable and it's why I recommend it to people who try to try Linux, but it definitely gets messy after a few version upgrades. I'm too lazy to backup my Home directory and do fresh installs regularly and rpm-ostree solves that problem for me!
I got the theme installation error in almost every distro with KDE. Sometimes it installs and sometimes it just doesn't since then I moved and liked cinnamon and gnome. Cuz these just works
I have mostly moved to flatpak myself and can say the ONLY thing I would not install as a flatpak is Steam.. I had way too many issues with the Steam flatpak and moved back to the RPM fusion package
I like the idea of immutable Linux distributions as long as the engine behind their file system structure doesn't introduce a boatload of spooky garbage down the pipeline.
The real purpose of the project is to work out the OS management stuff. The fact that KDE does not quite understand that it needs to behave and not assume it can write random junk to /user directories instead of making all changed to /etc like proper Linux software is not their problem. That will be worked on eventually by the KDE team.
Basically Kinotie has exposed that KDE is WRONG and not following good Linux standards. They should NEVER be modifing files on /usr, only packages like rpms and debs should write to /usr. Dynamic stuff like downloading and installing themes should either be written to the users /home for them, or /etc if it's for all users. Almost all your errors etc are due to this fact that KDE is wrongly trying to make changes to /usr for way too much stuff it has no business changing. The PROPER way to test Kinotie is simply to USE KDE as it comes installed and focus on testing the system managemt parts of instals, updates etc. It's not a test bed for you to rice right now.
@@milohoffman274 KDE isn't "not following good Linux standards" and is not "WRONG". The theming error when installing a "Global Theme" is caused due to SDDM theme that is downloaded along with the actual user theme to make the log-in screen (Display Manager) to have same theme as that of user theme. Obviously, you cant store the SDDM theme inside user directory and hece is being stored inside /usr. All other parts of Global Themes are indeed stored in ~/.themes or ~/.icons as is the standard. If you dont want to install SDDM theme, which causes the error, dont download Global Themes and download individual themes (under Plasma Theme, Fonts, Icons, Colour etc., individually).
@@milohoffman274 KDE was never meant to be used on an immutable filesystem. It's like compiling a Windows program on Linux that expects files on Windows system and saying its the fault of Linux that the program does not run. If anything is wrong here, then it is Kinotie that there is no virtualization of the layer, so any program like KDE can install the way it expects it to. Kinda like what WINE does with the filesystem. I think the general solution would be if immutable filesystems would have such a virtual fileystem.
My friend is using it and he loves it. He's coming off a broken Debian system that took him forever to try and debug, so that explains why he likes immutable systems. He gets access to newer software without breaking the core of his system in the process.
I might catch a little hell for saying this, but I feel the same way about OpenSUSE. I really liked it at first, but then it basically caused permanent damage to two of my computers: they would lock up after about 10-20 seconds in the desktop environment, and the only out was to power cycle the machine--and this continued even AFTER I reinstalled Ubuntu! It had never happened on any of my machines before using OpenSUSE. I know and understand that other people use OpenSUSE, love it and have no issues with, but I will never touch it again, and I am very glad I never have to.
i did run silverblue for a while and didn't experience crashes with gnome. ricing is harder but i don't care too much about ricing anyway. just let me change the wallpaper and i'm good. there is a video of someone ricing silverblue-gnome to look like ubuntu-gnome. he did it with a script full of dconf commands i think. i ultimately stopped using it because of hardware issues (with nvidia).
So, not the future, a system with less bugs because same image for all and R/O stuff to mitigate mess, that you can customize by doing your own overlays. Overlays that you can reset without reinstallng if something goes wrong, and if it goes really wrong, rollback by selecting a line at the start of the machine? And if you're still not happy, being able to do your own image and rebase to it easily? I don't know what's your future's name, but mine's named Fedora Kinoite since some months
I have Kinoite, ARTIX, and Sparky on my system- all working GREAT... I have sparky and artix on one drive and Kinoite on another-- the only issue I have is I can NOT get a DOCK to work- not plank or latte or cairo- none are even availble to install on it.. Everything else is GREAT... BUT it IS the most recent one on the KINOITE...
I use it after the official release version came out and it is great. It just works, everything does. No idea what your complaints are cause I did not watch the whole video because of the beginning in which you said: it is just a beta. Didn't fancy watching any longer.
Yeah, i tried it for a day, and then noped out. It just felt like too much hassle for me. Distrobox did helped but I rather it not be a necessity and it doesn't work for everything. Flatpak is still not perfect, and my experience with it has made me decide to just use aur via distrobox because I just don't want to deal with the weird sandboxing things. I personally would prefer a mix of SteamOS and NixOS approach where you have an immutable system you can unlock and have stuff installed in layers.
It doesn't really matter, you can have 900 packages on arch and 2000 in fedora and actually fedora can take fewer space on your disk. Fedora,Debian,Ubuntu splits the packages. On arch you have fewer installed but they are a lot bigger. At the end of the day is almost the same. Maybe someone can say that the way that arch make its packages is more bloated than Ubuntu.
@@linkdesink I'm not so concerned about disk space. There's obviously a lot of variation across distros and the package number isn't 1:1 either, was just asking out of curiosity and not for any practical reason. Last time I ran Ubuntu I wanna say I had somewhere near 2200 on first boot, before installing anything myself; my laptop running Arch for the past 2yrs has about 750. Yes sure, it's a rough and crude comparison, but one nontheless
@@tuttiepadh7556 On arch KDE i have around 850 and in Fedora KDE 1886. On Arch gnome i had around 720 and in fedora around 1900 ,Is big difference for sure but they are packaging different. Between ubuntu and fedora i can say that maybe fedora comes with more installed packages i had 1900 vs 1820 but fedora installation is smaller around 2 Gb. If you install fedora with everything iso for exmaple and you made minimal installation and after that ,you install only the gnome packages that you want you can be around 1000 pacakges with gnome. Imagine that fedora comes with gnome boxes installed this, gnome boxes with dependencies are around 220 packages.
When you mentioned that once you install something you have to do a reboot kind of like a Windows machine, a part of me just cringed at the thought (i'm someone else did the same, I can't be the only one lol)
Not gonna lie, this is why opensuse micro OS desktop is superior and in my experience less buggy as a beta and release candidate than prod silver blue...... You should check it out. The gnome version. I would say the alpha of microOS Desktop is better than kino
Honestly, this distro isn't for you/us. it;'s not for tinkerers. It's for people who are going to use the desktop, and when something breaks, hand it to someone like us to fix.
Same here... Thought that it would be a perfect distro for just a normal everyday browser usage, but it wasn't. It's so unpolished that you can get tetanus from using it.
Linux is very vulnerable to being hacked by skilled operators. They turn it into a virtual machine, swap the kernel, reconfigure parts of the os. Kinoite maintains a read only version of the main os Ostree allows you to add bits to the main os. It creates a new version of the os which can be rolled back to an earlier version. I want to know if it is safe from being virtualised? There are also too few KDE flatpacks available to make it a full kde experience. I also think Disks is a far better disk manager the ode partition manager.
No, Kinoite doesn't feel different from the regular KDE spin Fedora has. Once you have it installed, and yes I have to agree with you, the installation process is different, but once it is installed it is a super reliable and stable distro on which you can install thousands of packages through Flatpak so you can do whatever you want. Trying to find things which don't work is nitpicking. Sure there will be, but why should you want to install a different DE on a KDE version of an OS? That's just searching for the search, in your case it is just so you have something to complain about in your daily videos. Can't you make them without your negativity? I have seen too many of your videos already, I place you on the "non interested channel" list.
Nix / NixOS has to be the King here. Very interesting concept. I am just wondering if an SSD is no wearing out quickly and if it is possible to "turn off" these multiple version of one peogram.
After 3 months with a buggy Fedora experience, doesn't make a video about how bad and buggy it is. You didn't give Ubuntu the same treatment. You immediately complained about all the bugs you experienced in Ubuntu after you finished testing it, even though it was mostly a stable experience
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Excellent content man! Can you review the Micro editor as a more user friendly CLI alternative to Nano, Vi, emacs and VIM ??
@@SarcasticTofu All of those *are* CLI alternatives. I can understand how Vi/emacs is unintuitive for new folk, but nano is very simple and easy to pickup in few minutes
These Long Term Reviews are so much more useful and insightful than any short term first look videos, where half of the time it's just installation and checking background images. Most people do not have the nerves to do a proper Long Term Review with real world experience, so thank you for these.
I don't understand why your channel is so lacking in views. You give honest and practical reviews and how-tos of linux related things. Compared to most of the bigger linux channels, you give extremely consise information.
@@hallwayraptor2036 unfortunate truth 🙏
DJ Ware is the best example.
100% I've never agreed with someone's opinion more than I agree with his
Linux cast and dj ware are really good Channels.
Personally I don't like the channels that they have the most subscribers.
I thing that they have really poor quality content, and their titles are click bait like worst Ubuntu in history ubuntu good again , fedora the new Ubuntu and what ever,Techhut is good though.
Keep it up Linux cast you have really good content.
I think there is a promising future for immutable Linux distros, as it will tackle spaces like offices or other places where a bunch of similar computers need to be managed. I know that can be done with regular distros, but this can be a step forward in manageability and security
i think this is solution for non tech or office users, so they can't break system and they have access to IT guy that can help them. Update on reboot? For me it's not a problem, I always update my system before shutdown
Yes, a government approved version that phones home each time you login 😈
I think NixOS is better as it allows you to tailor it to your needs and then act as an immutable OS. But still tweakable when needed.
@@alexeiboukirev8357 as governments need to have a tight control over the software their computers must run, this can be a good stack for government offices.
@@alexeiboukirev8357 not only government version, company where I work is delivering to our office customers computers with preinstalled bunch of applications and provide tech support, in most cases changes in configuration is only install/remove printers or ms office (libree is preinstalled). And yes there are calling home(need only internet connection, we can see some system info and run remote scripts) , and yes we can remote to it without user permission(but we don't) - even without admin privileges users can(and they do...) lock off their computers or software. Immutable OS is good, you will only need to focus fixing user account
@@alexeiboukirev8357 silvrblue does allow overrides and package layering so you can definitely make quite a lot underthehood changes if need be (just as long as it isn't adding additional folders to root)
I would say its more a KDE interaction with immutable operating systems and KDE itself. Silverblue works way better but Kinoite is also barely 1 year old. Think the first KDE was Fedora 35 and it definitely has rough edges. Fedora is really a gnome first distro, im sure whomever develops for the KDE spins and Kinoite might still be working on the rough edges. Example KDE theming. Not sure where KDE themes go to if its a /usr directory or /home/.local or something but even if you dig deep down in the filestructure of an immutable system. Even home isnt in /home. Its actually located in /var/home. Personally i dont think immutable will be the main focus except in use cases like businesses where the IT manager wants to be able to deploy systems and ensure they are all similar. Or devs developing for containers and not having to worry about. Maybe 5 10 years down the road Kinoite will be good, even fedora devs have stated this isnt ready for prime time
Well said, John. GNOME devs sit so closely to RedHat/IBM that I think they will forever be the default on RHEL/Fedora. Especially for business and enterprise fields. 🙏
Yes. First thing I thought was MicroOS - OpenSUSE is historically a KDE first distro, but for MicroOS (their immutable release) they say GNOME is in beta and KDE in alpha, and state multiple times very clearly that KDE will not work, or at least will not work well.
openSUSE Micro OS also has problems with Kde. So its a general kde bug. and openSUSE and KDE have a good relationship.
@@ArniesTech it's also a matter of practicality and convenience. I'm copying from a Reddit post from someone else:
There are two major problems with KDE Plasma today:
* The lifecycle: KDE Plasma does not have a homogeneous release cadence and life cycle like GNOME does. KDE Frameworks are released monthly, KDE Gear and KDE Plasma are released every 4 months, but at different times. There's basically no harmony across these critical parts of the KDE Plasma stack. This is also compounded by the mess that is KDE Plasma LTS. KDE Plasma LTS ***only covers*** KDE Plasma. The Frameworks and Gear are not included. This is a nightmare to collect and release. Actually, Fedora doesn't even ship Plasma LTS for RHEL/CentOS users anymore because it's just not viable for a good long-term experience. [We upgrade KDE Plasma for RHEL/CentOS users regularly now](fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE/EPEL#Update_Schedule). For comparison, ***everything*** for GNOME is released together, and GNOME releases every six months. This consistency also makes it easier for Enterprise Linux distributions (Red Hat Enterprise Linux [RHEL] and SUSE Linux Enterprise [SLE]) to consider upgrading GNOME on a regular basis (SLE does it every two years, for example).
* The sprawl: The KDE ecosystem is more than double the size of GNOME. A fully featured KDE Plasma setup is almost 600 components.
As someone who works to offer KDE Plasma (for Fedora), I can say it's ***really*** hard. The size of the dependency chain for KDE Plasma blew up with the transition from KDE SC 4 to KDE Plasma 5, and keeping everything working is a challenge.
Red Hat was the last Linux distribution vendor to ship KDE and support it. That ended with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 because they couldn't take on the workload of KDE Plasma 5 ***and*** work on everything else they're doing in the desktop. So RHEL 8 became GNOME only. SUSE dropped KDE Plasma with SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 for similar reasons, but they'd been pushed harder into the GNOME fold by Novell acquiring Ximian and merging it into SUSE decades ago. Mandriva went belly-up in 2015, but had laid off their staff in 2010 (in the KDE 4 days). Canonical never embraced KDE technologies, as they followed using GNOME from Debian, and later developed Unity, and now switched back to GNOME.
The only problem with GNOME is their people (specifically their attitude and inability to handle criticism). And when Linux companies are paying employees to work in GNOME, it's a lot easier to ignore that. That's a big part of why GNOME has never course-corrected on their attitude as a project, nor has the Foundation ensured that new folks get a friendly experience with GNOME. As long as they're funded and they're the default for all the commercially successful distributions, they really don't have to change.
The KDE community is awesome to work with, but the difficulty of keeping up with their stack makes things too hard from a commercial standpoint. I personally hope that KDE Plasma 6 will be an opportunity to fix some of this mess, because some simplification here could vastly improve the commercial viability of the desktop.
_Source: Works on Fedora KDE as a member of the [Fedora KDE SIG](fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE)_
first
I didn't talk about Toolbox in this video, I will do that at a later date.
Nice podcast with Brodie. Keep up the content
I've been daily driving Fedora 36 Silverblue for a while and I can say you'll have an awesome experience in comparison to what you're saying about Kinoite.
I've reached the point of being so accustomed to immutable that I'll try out daily driving the Fedora KDE Spin, since I want to switch to KDE and dip into DE customization.
I need to give silverblue a try. I kinda got scared away by Kinoite.
Something I'd like to point out to anyone coming to this video now.
Most of these issues have been resolved cleanly, and the ones that haven't can be easily worked around if you are a real superuser. Manually installing KDE themes and portions of themes has been an option for a long time now, for example.
But most importantly: You can make the system mutable, and make any changes you want that you could make on Fedora Workstation, and then convert back to an immutable system. These issues mostly only exist for people who want to keep the system entirely clean and immutable, and aren't okay with making even small system changes.
Huh, interesting.
I've been using silverblue for 2 years and recently I distrohopped to coreOS (another rpm-ostree based fedora distro) on my home server.
The biggest issue I had with it was the recent grub fiasco, and even that I count more as a grub failure than silverblue failure. There's some annoyances like gnome-software being slow or having to reboot each time I use rpm-ostree (though it's largely helped by the -A switch), but overall my experience has been very positive for both silverblue and coreOS.
I think most of your issues with kinoite come down simply to KDE not being suited to be immutable, at least currently. It's very open and encouraging towards modifying the system, and kinoite just doesn't allow that.
I really like long term use reviews. Too many are just 5 minutes after installed reviews or I used this distro for a day type videos on RUclips. I look forward to a future discussion about Silverblue.
I really appreciate your objectivity and doing a good job to stay rational in your reviews.
I also recently tried Kinoite for a few days and my issue was that the app selection is still oddly limited, for example the full catalog of KDE games is not available, so no KShisen, which I happen to like. Also I can't install the Mulvad VPN app since it's an RPM that you download from Mullvad directly. There's a way to go before the immutable OS is ready for everyday use.
I prefer rpm, but flatpak is pretty much on by default in fc37
The reason why your global theme installation gave errors is because the SDDM (Login Manager) theme should be copied to /usr (I think...) directory for that theme to be usable befora user login. Downloading just plasma themes or fonts and stuff individually doesnt give errors because its obviously user specific and is stored in `~/.themes` or `~/.icons`.
Exactly this. Also Kvantum manager is missing so it has to be layered with rpm-ostree. Plus I want to suggest installing Microsoft Edge (also with rpm-ostree) for those who want Global Menu for browser and great web apps integration with OS.
Fedora is an an user friendly distribution.
Things should work out of the box, there shouldn't be a need for tinkering or searching through forums for solutions.
Those issues with themes you had are caused by SDDM themes included in those global themes. SDDM is customized via root as every other DM, and you don't really have root access here. Also a lot of issues may be caused by actually modifying root files - you are not really supposed to do that. RPM-ostree is just in case but If you want access to apps from Fedora repos, there is Toolbox for that which installs it in home partition instance of Fedora. It's not only safer, but also doesn't require reboot after installation. You may also install distrobox and APX which will give you even access to AUR
What a great review, thank you. Very reasonable points, stated clearly, and without drama. I appreciate an in-depth review where you've actually been using it for a while, isntead of other channels that post reviews after trying something out for only a couple hours.
Yes, please do a video (or multiple videos) on Silverblue, openSUSE MicroOS, SteamOS, and/or other immutable distros - it’s a really interesting development in the evolution of Linux.
I get your frustration with the KDE issues, but I think you missed that you're supposed to use toolbx for installing things like btop that are not available as a flatpak. toolbx also works for graphical applications:
"Toolbox environments have seamless access to the user’s home directory, the Wayland and X11 sockets, networking (including Avahi), removable devices (like USB sticks), systemd journal, SSH agent, D-Bus, ulimits, /dev and the udev database, etc.."
Have you tried giving openSUSE's Micro OS a try? I gave its Kalpa variant a try even though it's in the alpha stage, however, I have stayed with it for more than 6 months, based upon my experience, it's less pain in the arse compared to Fedora Kinoite
If I may, it sounds like both kinoite and silverblue need time to be perfected. What's your hope if they are properly perfected and ready for general use?
I've been running kinoite as my main driver for about 3 months. I'm a developer and had previously run into the sort of problems flatpak and rpm-ostree/immutable operating systems are supposed to solve. Flatpak helps, but you often end up installing a new package manager/version manager that also lets you install stuff. You've got stuff installed with Snap, DNF, flatpak, some bits installed manually. It's was all well and good me having a rule to only use DNF and flatpak, but it's not difficult to end up in a situation where you have random stuff installed all over the place, heck there are even some RPM packages that expect it, even if RPM tells you off for running it with sudo! So a toolbox is the perfect way to just say fuck it, you win, but you're not touching my OS files, you can have you're own OS and break it as much as you want. Totally agree that the integration with Plasma isn't great, so I've basically been ignoring it and awkwardly working around it just living on terminal instead, but that's basically how is use gnome because it's so bare bones anyway. Might rebase to Silverblue and give that a try for a while.
@@shaunpatrick8345 I like immutability, I agree that fedora is super stable and it's why I recommend it to people who try to try Linux, but it definitely gets messy after a few version upgrades. I'm too lazy to backup my Home directory and do fresh installs regularly and rpm-ostree solves that problem for me!
Little by little KDE is solving their bugs and creating new ones with the incoming features in plasma :)
Haha this comment made me laugh because it's true
I got the theme installation error in almost every distro with KDE.
Sometimes it installs and sometimes it just doesn't since then I moved and liked cinnamon and gnome. Cuz these just works
I have mostly moved to flatpak myself and can say the ONLY thing I would not install as a flatpak is Steam.. I had way too many issues with the Steam flatpak and moved back to the RPM fusion package
I like the idea of immutable Linux distributions as long as the engine behind their file system structure doesn't introduce a boatload of spooky garbage down the pipeline.
The real purpose of the project is to work out the OS management stuff. The fact that KDE does not quite understand that it needs to behave and not assume it can write random junk to /user directories instead of making all changed to /etc like proper Linux software is not their problem. That will be worked on eventually by the KDE team.
Basically Kinotie has exposed that KDE is WRONG and not following good Linux standards. They should NEVER be modifing files on /usr, only packages like rpms and debs should write to /usr. Dynamic stuff like downloading and installing themes should either be written to the users /home for them, or /etc if it's for all users. Almost all your errors etc are due to this fact that KDE is wrongly trying to make changes to /usr for way too much stuff it has no business changing. The PROPER way to test Kinotie is simply to USE KDE as it comes installed and focus on testing the system managemt parts of instals, updates etc. It's not a test bed for you to rice right now.
@@milohoffman274 KDE isn't "not following good Linux standards" and is not "WRONG". The theming error when installing a "Global Theme" is caused due to SDDM theme that is downloaded along with the actual user theme to make the log-in screen (Display Manager) to have same theme as that of user theme. Obviously, you cant store the SDDM theme inside user directory and hece is being stored inside /usr. All other parts of Global Themes are indeed stored in ~/.themes or ~/.icons as is the standard.
If you dont want to install SDDM theme, which causes the error, dont download Global Themes and download individual themes (under Plasma Theme, Fonts, Icons, Colour etc., individually).
@@milohoffman274 KDE was never meant to be used on an immutable filesystem. It's like compiling a Windows program on Linux that expects files on Windows system and saying its the fault of Linux that the program does not run. If anything is wrong here, then it is Kinotie that there is no virtualization of the layer, so any program like KDE can install the way it expects it to. Kinda like what WINE does with the filesystem. I think the general solution would be if immutable filesystems would have such a virtual fileystem.
Are there any updates to this 5+ months later? I'm keen on trying it out but sad to hear about these issues.
My friend is using it and he loves it. He's coming off a broken Debian system that took him forever to try and debug, so that explains why he likes immutable systems. He gets access to newer software without breaking the core of his system in the process.
I yet have to test Silverblue, I am very curious. 🙏 Btw, nice red shirt, such a powerful and vibrant colour 💪
I might catch a little hell for saying this, but I feel the same way about OpenSUSE. I really liked it at first, but then it basically caused permanent damage to two of my computers: they would lock up after about 10-20 seconds in the desktop environment, and the only out was to power cycle the machine--and this continued even AFTER I reinstalled Ubuntu! It had never happened on any of my machines before using OpenSUSE. I know and understand that other people use OpenSUSE, love it and have no issues with, but I will never touch it again, and I am very glad I never have to.
This sounds like a typical linux growing pain. Soon it will work flawlessly ... Sometimes.
Thanks Matt
Great video, thanks for the information! Keep it up.
i did run silverblue for a while and didn't experience crashes with gnome. ricing is harder but i don't care too much about ricing anyway. just let me change the wallpaper and i'm good.
there is a video of someone ricing silverblue-gnome to look like ubuntu-gnome. he did it with a script full of dconf commands i think. i ultimately stopped using it because of hardware issues (with nvidia).
So, not the future, a system with less bugs because same image for all and R/O stuff to mitigate mess, that you can customize by doing your own overlays. Overlays that you can reset without reinstallng if something goes wrong, and if it goes really wrong, rollback by selecting a line at the start of the machine?
And if you're still not happy, being able to do your own image and rebase to it easily?
I don't know what's your future's name, but mine's named Fedora Kinoite since some months
I have Kinoite, ARTIX, and Sparky on my system- all working GREAT... I have sparky and artix on one drive and Kinoite on another-- the only issue I have is I can NOT get a DOCK to work- not plank or latte or cairo- none are even availble to install on it.. Everything else is GREAT... BUT it IS the most recent one on the KINOITE...
I don’t have any of the problems you’ve described here but I also haven’t attempted to theme it.
I use it after the official release version came out and it is great. It just works, everything does. No idea what your complaints are cause I did not watch the whole video because of the beginning in which you said: it is just a beta. Didn't fancy watching any longer.
Yeah, i tried it for a day, and then noped out. It just felt like too much hassle for me. Distrobox did helped but I rather it not be a necessity and it doesn't work for everything. Flatpak is still not perfect, and my experience with it has made me decide to just use aur via distrobox because I just don't want to deal with the weird sandboxing things. I personally would prefer a mix of SteamOS and NixOS approach where you have an immutable system you can unlock and have stuff installed in layers.
Just wondering, how many total installed packages approx do you have on Fedora? And how about compared to Arch?
It doesn't really matter, you can have 900 packages on arch and 2000 in fedora and actually fedora can take fewer space on your disk. Fedora,Debian,Ubuntu splits the packages. On arch you have fewer installed but they are a lot bigger. At the end of the day is almost the same.
Maybe someone can say that the way that arch make its packages is more bloated than Ubuntu.
@@linkdesink I'm not so concerned about disk space. There's obviously a lot of variation across distros and the package number isn't 1:1 either, was just asking out of curiosity and not for any practical reason. Last time I ran Ubuntu I wanna say I had somewhere near 2200 on first boot, before installing anything myself; my laptop running Arch for the past 2yrs has about 750. Yes sure, it's a rough and crude comparison, but one nontheless
@@tuttiepadh7556 On arch KDE i have around 850 and in Fedora KDE 1886. On Arch gnome i had around 720 and in fedora around 1900 ,Is big difference for sure but they are packaging different.
Between ubuntu and fedora i can say that maybe fedora comes with more installed packages i had 1900 vs 1820 but fedora installation is smaller around 2 Gb.
If you install fedora with everything iso for exmaple and you made minimal installation and after that ,you install only the gnome packages that you want you can be around 1000 pacakges with gnome.
Imagine that fedora comes with gnome boxes installed this, gnome boxes with dependencies are around 220 packages.
this kind of OS is for enterprise, not home users
Completely the opposite experience for me. I love it and it's my daily driver now.
When you mentioned that once you install something you have to do a reboot kind of like a Windows machine, a part of me just cringed at the thought (i'm someone else did the same, I can't be the only one lol)
7:06 KDE is always buggy. It has been persistently buggy since KDE 4.0.0.
Not gonna lie, this is why opensuse micro OS desktop is superior and in my experience less buggy as a beta and release candidate than prod silver blue...... You should check it out. The gnome version.
I would say the alpha of microOS Desktop is better than kino
NixOS is better 😬
@@msor6108 NixOS sucks, not even close
I think MATE desktop is the perfect match for something like that!
Honestly, this distro isn't for you/us. it;'s not for tinkerers. It's for people who are going to use the desktop, and when something breaks, hand it to someone like us to fix.
Or if he/she rollback to previous image and do his/her usual job.
Nice 👍🙂
Same here... Thought that it would be a perfect distro for just a normal everyday browser usage, but it wasn't.
It's so unpolished that you can get tetanus from using it.
Linux is very vulnerable to being hacked by skilled operators. They turn it into a virtual machine, swap the kernel, reconfigure parts of the os. Kinoite maintains a read only version of the main os Ostree allows you to add bits to the main os. It creates a new version of the os which can be rolled back to an earlier version. I want to know if it is safe from being virtualised? There are also too few KDE flatpacks available to make it a full kde experience. I also think Disks is a far better disk manager the ode partition manager.
In a corporate setting ok but @ home for a tweaker no lol way lol lol...
No, Kinoite doesn't feel different from the regular KDE spin Fedora has. Once you have it installed, and yes I have to agree with you, the installation process is different, but once it is installed it is a super reliable and stable distro on which you can install thousands of packages through Flatpak so you can do whatever you want. Trying to find things which don't work is nitpicking. Sure there will be, but why should you want to install a different DE on a KDE version of an OS? That's just searching for the search, in your case it is just so you have something to complain about in your daily videos. Can't you make them without your negativity? I have seen too many of your videos already, I place you on the "non interested channel" list.
Nix / NixOS has to be the King here. Very interesting concept.
I am just wondering if an SSD is no wearing out quickly and if it is possible to "turn off" these multiple version of one peogram.
Why people insist on the lesser (KDE) variants of Fedora? They are second class compared to the polished default (gnome) variant.
After 3 months with a buggy Fedora experience, doesn't make a video about how bad and buggy it is. You didn't give Ubuntu the same treatment. You immediately complained about all the bugs you experienced in Ubuntu after you finished testing it, even though it was mostly a stable experience
Is this similar to NixOS?
Silverblue with the KDE desktop is probably amazing
That's unfortunately not what this is yet.
Yeah, I still haven't tried Silverblue. Kinoite kind of scared me away, tbh.
Your problem is using KDE and kinoite is alpha level. KDE is generally more buggy than Gnome.
So, it's android!
Holy poop. Rebooting every time you install a 'toolbox' package sounds unbearable.
Matt try nix packages . GVM