Fedora 32 Review [KDE Spin]

One other aspect of Fedora 32 that impressed me is the phenomenal -- subjectively measured -- battery life. I replaced the second hard drive on the Dell G5 with an SSD which made a noticeable improvement in battery life in all distributions, but on Fedora there is an even larger increase in battery life on the order of six to ten hours in my typical use.

Fedora 32 Has Impressive Battery Life

A battery with 74% health, 98% charge will provide six hours and 32 minutes of further use.

As I am typing this (the image above is from a previous session), with a light theme and screen brightness at slightly over 50%, Wi-Fi on, and a headless virtual machine running in the background, a battery health of 74%, and a charge level of 73%, Plasma reports 4:07 more of use time remaining.

Despite my good experience with Fedora, its may not be viewed as positively by others. The commitment to FOSS on Fedora's part -- or progress unrelated to Fedora on the part of the Nouveau developers -- which finally has resulted in a working Nouveau driver for my card, may be a cause of inconvenience for some users. For example, multimedia applications that require proprietary codecs are not fully functional out-of-the box. During installation I wanted to install SimpleScreenRecorder into the live environment to make a video of the installation, but it was not available from the default repositories. I resorted to using VokoScreen-NG, available from Fedora's repositories, but this could only encode videos in non-proprietary formats. Even the popular VirtualBox virtual machine hypervisor is not available directly from Fedora.

Fortunately, the RPM Fusion third-party repository is available to provide software that Fedora can't distribute based on its FOSS only policy. This software not only consists of multimedia software not available from Fedora, and codecs that make software available from Fedora fully functional, but VirtualBox and NVIDIA proprietary drivers. While not default, in recent versions Fedora has made it easier to at least add a subset of the RPM Fusion repository that includes the NVIDIA drivers in the flagship edition Fedora Workstation. Instructions on adding the RPM Fusion repositories -- an essential fix -- is provided in Fedora 32 Review [KDE Spin] Supplement: Fixes and Enhancements.

In addition to this inconvenience, which I myself don't mind, I did experience a few problems. The most serious of these was two incidences of a freezing of the system such that the displayed image on the screen became static and the system became unresponsive to the point that even the console terminals accessible with the Ctrl+Alt+Fn keys could not be activated. This seems to be a misconfiguration of tlp on my part where I failed to blacklist power management of the graphics cards. Since modifying the configuration I haven't experienced this issue.

Other problems:

• VirtualBox VMs running in the background will not automatically resume when the system is resumed from suspend. In some cases the VM was immediately available but with only host only networking available but not other networking to/from the VM. This requires saving the VM state and starting the VM again. This issue also occurs in some other distributions and not others, most notably openSUSE -- which provides VirtualBox directly from its own repositories -- where this is not an issue at all.
• Likely a limitation of using the Nouveau driver, 3D acceleration is not available in VirtualBox VMs in Fedora which is available in Arch, for example, whether using the Intel graphics card or the NVIDIA card -- swithched by optimus-manager.
• I experienced an issue where TeXLive/LaTeX/LuaLaTeX with fontspec couldn't find a certain font. I believe this is a conflict between one of the Google fonts added to the system fonts and a font preinstalled by default on the system. Despite the duplication this shouldn't happen, if it is in fact due to the duplicate fonts; it doesn't happen in other distributions where there are such duplicates.
• The tap to click option in the Touchpad page of the Input module of Plasma System Settings was not available on first boot. This issue did not exist on subsequent boots.

Plasma Experience

I feel that Plasma is filled with capability and flexibility throughout its extent, actually making it easier to use than other desktop environments. For those who have similar esteem for Plasma, I should describe the Fedora implementation of the Plasma desktop environment. Fedora's KDE Special Interest Group (SIG) provides a good implementation of Plasma, with minimal modification of the stock character. The significant changes apparent to me is a modification of Plasma behavior that users might find annoying, disabling Baloo indexing of the user's home folder and no KWallet manager prompt for passwords. I actually find the modification of Baloo behavior to not be such a good idea because it disables one of Plasma many excellent features, very impressive instant search results in KRunner. The change regarding KWallet is probably what most people would like, but again I would rather have it. In fact I actually prefer what openSUSE does which is to require users to create a GPG key that, I believe is used to lock the wallet.

The modification that the Fedora SIG should have made is one that would have enhanced the Plasma experience, namely GTK apps and their integration with the desktop in areas such as file open/save dialogs. For example, Firefox, a GTK app, uses GTK to create a file dialog that is more appropriate on GTK based desktops. It is possible to modify the behavior of Firefox so that it, and other GTK based programs, use the native Qt/KDE Frameworks file dialog, as I describe in Enabling a Native File Dialog for Firefox on Plasma Desktop. However the spin does not do this, a relatively simple modification that will replace native GTK behavior with native Qt/KF behavior, essential for a spin that focuses on KDE's desktop environment and applications.

The only other change made by the SIG to stock Plasma, besides the previously mentioned Baloo behavior, is the inclusion of a Global Theme that slightly changes the Breeze color scheme to change window tiitlebars and other elements to better match the Fedora brand colors.

Incidentally, regarding themes, the default GTK Application Style is not specified in Plasma Settings. Most other distributions specify the Breeze GTK theme in these dropdowns which aren't even available in Fedora KDE Spin. Even better than making these available would be to include several themes that have the complete set of Plasma style components (Color Scheme, Window Decorations, Plasmashell theme, etc) including a Global Theme and a corresponding GTK theme so that there is a cohesive look to the desktop and applications whether they use GTK or Qt/KDE Frameworks widget resources. One good option is the Aritim theme, which not only has all of the Plasma theme components and both light and dark versions, but a GTK version as well, and it matches Fedora colors.

Although the Fedora KDE Spin will please users that prefer Plasma at this point in time, a few weeks after its release, it may not continue to please such users as the release gets older. This is due to the fact that Fedora may not make new versions of Plasma available as KDE releases them. This was the case in Fedora 31 when the distribution never made Plasma 5.18 available. Some may assume that this makes Plasma a second class citizen on Fedora, especially since the Plasma desktop was deprecated in a recent version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A likely explanation for this status could be what was pointed out on a Reddit discussion on whether Plasma 5.18 would be available on Fedora 31, where a commenter speculated Plasma's status as an "also-ran" on Fedora is because of its use of the Qt framework, a product to which multiple licensing schemes have been applied by the Qt Company. One of the licenses is not consistent with Fedora principles, while GTK, a project that is not tied to a commercial entity, uses a license which is completely consistent with Fedora's principles on open source software.

Whatever the reason Fedora didn't keep current with KDE releases during the life of Fedora 31, maybe in the future, the KDE SIG will maintain a somewhat official Copr repository to distribute Plasma updates that the distribution does not want to place in the official repositories, similar to what Kubunut does with its PPAs for (K)Ubuntu.