Well, yes, but Wayland is “default” on Fedora Gnome since v. 25 in 2016.
Mint is often named as one of the most used and stable and userfriendly distro’s.
Stable yes, it is based off Ubuntu LTS, currently 22.04 (while the drastically improved 24.04 is already out, they will take time to catch up).
User friendly? Hell no. Plasma with Discover, GNOME with their software store are way better.
Cinnamon runs well on old hardware, but their Wayland session is incomplete and has random issues (like completely wrong keyboard layout).
I used it at the beginning and Plasma is way better. But also bigger, and with more moving parts. Cinnamon literally didnt change a bit between version 21 and 22
1 Like
I think the linux Mint Team got aware of the gap they have being up to date … they now also offer for Cinnamon a Cinnamon (Edge ISO) where uses newer kernels than LTS does.
As mentioned below … in Linux everything is in movement and changes are made constantly just sometimes not so fast as resources/manpower are/is missing.
I guess the reason behind Cinnamon is not about being “user friendly” but to keep the “traditional desktop” layout while using Gnome technologies.
IMO the “traditional desktop” is friendly only because people are used to it but nowadays people are also used to smartphones and touchscreens and those are closer to Gnome.
The “software store” is just one of the features that can help new users but again IMO there are more critical features like setting the Internet and networking, audio and video (Fedora requires RPM Fusion which is a very serious issue), printing and so on.
I don’t use Gnome Software because I think DNF is more practical. But if I have to reccomend a Desktop Environment to somebody who isn’t “advanced user”, I would say Gnome because, despite being “different”, it is actually much simpler, since it doesn’t have any “option” and “setting” the user can shoot his/her foot with.
When you go on KDE settings it is a bit intimidating and who knows how many people made the mistake of playing with “panels”. Having many options and settings is good for two kinds of people, the “advanced users” who want things their own way and those who like to play with technology. Most people don’t want to spend time in making mistakes and learning new things, so by definition, providing lots of options is NOT “user friendly”:
1 Like
Not exactly. It depends on your needs. If you’re talking about the most ubiquitous video codec in the world, H.264 (used in the .mp4 container), Fedora provides the OpenH264 packages; you just need to install them. The only other codec you’re missing out on is H.265/HEVC, which is rarely used and almost always has a fallback to H.264.
OpenH264 is not as fully-featured as x264, but it does the job for web video. If you have High Profile 10-bit video, it won’t work, though.
The absence of hardware decoding for H.264, however, can be felt, and you need RPM Fusion for that. Note that you can install Celluloid from Flathub’s flatpak package, however, which enables hardware decoding for H.264 and H.265; no RPM Fusion required.
Yes, it’s a big issue. Give it a few more years, and hopefully H.264 will be patent-free and Fedora can just build ffmpeg with support for it. I think Fedora will ship OpenH264 by default before that happens, though, assuming they can ascertain Cisco’s royalty-free license for OpenH264 is no longer needed, so they don’t need to ship the binary and can build it from source.
For audio, what’s missing? AAC is provided. Fedora only builds FFmpeg without H.264, H.265, and VC-1 support. Those are all video codecs.
There are really 2 options in that respect.
- Lock everything down like MS does and not allow the user to make changes. In that case the distro is making the decisions of what works best for everyone. Letting someone else decide what works best for you is NOT “people friendly”
- Allow users to make changes and configure things to their preference. This is “people friendly” but does allow users to potentially make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes and that leads to learning what works and what does not work.
Which would you prefer –
Being locked into a specific narrow ecosystem such as windows and apple, or the freedom to make adjustments to suit your own preferences?
Each user gets to choose what works best for them.
It does not seem to matter what Firefox uses as a tool kit. It working very well for me on KDE.
The visual gliches are not my experience. Guess I have been lucky with the GTK apps that I’ve run under KDE.
1 Like
Hi, and welcome. I saw this part of your initial message and I was thinking about a not properly working/installed videodriver. I see you have a very new Intel processor with Mesa Intel graphics.
Now I am absolutely no expert, not even a novice, on drivers, but here are some commands you use to get more info about what is installed in your setup:
lspci | grep VGA
sudo /usr/sbin/lshw -c video
glxinfo|grep -E “OpenGL vendor|OpenGL renderer”
Use these commands one at a time and copy paste the command plus the output in your answer. Copying from a terminal requires ctrl-shift-c, instead of ctrl-c.
When all the output is in your answer then select all of it with your mouse and click the " sign just above the field inwhich you type. (it’s the 5th from the left)
Hopefully somebody here can tell if you have the right driver for your hardware, or not. As said, the symptoms you experience seem to point in something fishy in that department.
OpenH264 has some obvious issues when playing videos.
Unless it gets updated, in the current state it is not going to solve anything.
Hardware decoding depends also on GPU drivers, I had to install Intel restricted drivers from RPM Fusion to enable VAAPI.
Audio is another common issue with any distribution with any DE or WM, it is not related to Fedora. I meant people that try “linux” usually get frustrated by networking, video/audio, printer and such issues and the “store” offering applications is secondary.
About “lock everything”, it is what Gnome does. You cannot change a thing unless you install “tweaks” (which is getting less and less useful) or “extensions” (that you will quit after the next gnome update breaks them). In Gnome you can’t theme anything, you can’t minimize the app window, you don’t have any “widget” and “widget area”, nothing.
The point is you don’t give “options” to be “user friendly” that is an obvious contradiction. “User friendly” is the train you get to go from A to B, it can’t be a jet plane that can take you anywhere but has 35.000 buttons and indicators and speed and angles you must deal with.
1 Like
It is not that simple. I mean, it is good that Firefox works well for you, but I tried Fedora 40 with KDE 6 and there are several features that work differently from Gnome, for example the video/image snapshot that copy in the clipboard. I am not informed on how Mozilla tests Firefox with “linux”, what distros they use, what configuration.
For Ubuntu and derivatives you don’t even have a native deb package, you just have the “snap”, which adds other issues with sandboxing.
I think Mozilla distributes their own deb packages for “nightly” and maybe “beta”.
Fedora has its own RPM package and offers “flatpak” as alternative to “snap”. Two “flatpak”, the Fedora’s one and Flathub.
About visual glitches, I don’t know serious bugs of each application but generally it depends on theming. This is another thing that is not that simple, on one side Gnome requires all GTK applications to use “libadwaita” on the other side you need QT6 compatible icons on KDE otherwise they aren’t displayed. Now you must cross the two.
I think it is not a choice between these 2 extremes but a scale. Yes having no customization options is bad, but having too much might be worse. If a project tries to include too much it gets buggy and unmaintainable. I also think it might be useful to restrict users a little bit, having less options makes finding the options that exist easier to find.
Where to put the DE’s on this scale is subjective. For me gnome is a little too close to option 1 and kde is close to 2.
1 Like
Somebody please check if Video crashes when you check “channels” with the right button on top.
Back to “people friendly”: I guess if one likes the “traditional desktop”, the level of “customization” provided by XFCE is quite good. Or at least it has been good so far.
Problem is you need to be able to set a theme and change icons because quite often the default ones are orrible and/or look like the 90’s. So you install “arc” theme and “papirus” icons. Then the bottom panel doesn’t make much sense and so you remove it and move the top panel to the bottom, set it to “autohide” and add the needed “accelerators” linked to the applications you open more often.
Once you have done all these changes you don’t need those options any more, until you must re-install XFCE. Again, if the default settings were better, probably you did not need to change much.
Now we move to KDE. The tools to make the same changes as XFCE are 10 times more complicated. You are also presented to many options that you don’t even understand and probably that is for the better. Some do not make sense, for example I am told you do have an option to set the panel “translucent” but it doesn’t do anything with the default theme, since many options actually “inherit” from the theme. How many people tried to set “translucent” again and again while the option cannot do anything unless they change theme first? And what theme then? It is the rabbit hole.
At the end I found I am happy with Gnome and zero settings.
What do you mean with “snapshots that copy in the clipboard”?
What does this have to do with Firefox?
On KDE Plasma normally GNOME apps use Adwaita, at least for the theming. But at least the icons are messed up, I fix it (avoiding another issue) by placing a .desktop entry that runs a command to change the icons.
cat > ~/.config/autostart/gsettings-adwaita-icons.desktop <<EOF
[Desktop Entry]
Name=set adwaita icons for GNOME apps
Type=Application
Exec=gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme 'Adwaita'
EOF
So now you can use default Breeze for KDE, defautl Adwaita for GNOME. If you switch to Breeze Dark, GTK apps will automatically also use the dark theme.
Dont ask me why Fedora KDE doesnt have the Adwaita icons enabled. This is for sure a dirty workaround, but it gives vanilla GNOME apps.
Firefox uses GTK for the OS integration, but their own GUI toolkit for the rest.
If you enable the file portal (search for “portal” in about:config) then it will use the way better KDE filepicker portal at least.
I heard KaOS compiled Firefox to use Qt for the OS integration, and that for sure sounds cool.
The biggest issue I have with GTK apps is the damn “x” not being clickable in the very top corner. Why??? I dont care about the rest and use ton of them, but this is nuts.
Thanks for your input Hammerhead Corvette. I’m willing to learn new programs, but because I wasn’t sure Inkscape could deliver what I needed, I was hesitant. If you assure you it can do what is needed, it’s worth the effort. It’s a bit a big step, because I once could almost use Illustrator without any panel (because I new every shortcut). Because the workflow is quite different in Inkscape, I more or less have to start all over. (Like text-editing is completely different from Illustrator). Also, Affinity proved to be the same workflow, without the bloat of Illustrator (things I now as non-professional user don’t need anyhow).
I get you. I was already convinced (by the feedback here) to try it a little longer. I think I believe the statement that Gnome and KDE are both the most advanced and maintained DEs. I’m happy to endure some issues as a price for a free and open system.
$ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 04)
$ sudo /usr/sbin/lshw -c video
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics]
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
version: 04
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pciexpress msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
resources: iomemory:600-5ff iomemory:400-3ff irq:155 memory:605c000000-605cffffff memory:4000000000-400fffffff ioport:3000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff memory:4010000000-4016ffffff memory:4020000000-40ffffffff
lxinfo|grep -E “OpenGL vendor|OpenGL renderer”
grep: vendor: Bestand of map bestaat niet
bash: OpenGL: commando niet gevonden...
The copy-paste problem was specific to the Messages in my Browser. I’m not sure if it occurs elsewhere…
@lendenu I don’t have audio or video issues!
I agree. Not black and white 
I’m aware. It works for all H.264 video on the web, though, which is what most people need. I personally needed more than that.
It’s true for all hardware decoders, regardless of vendor, that you need to get them from RPM Fusion. Fedora is legally responsible for all hardware implementations (at least so far as their legal team has decided), and so can’t ship any of them. However, the Celluloid Flatpak at least enables NVDEC.
…though, come to think of it, I don’t know if it actually works without the driver.
Is it? I’ve got a wide range of hardware here, and I only ever had an audio issue on my newest laptop because sof-tools wasn’t installed.
Apple and Microsoft can afford and to make big efforts to refine the “user experience”, including human factors research. Much of Linux development has been done “on the cheap”. Many paid developers work on the underlying services (filesystems, networking, etc.) so the user workstation is not as refined. Where many linux users benefit is the POSIX command-line environment, which evolved from the early Unix systems. Those early systems predate GUI environments, and were built around the recognition that programming is mostly manipulating text. If you find yourself spending a lot of time doing things like processing a long list of files by pasting each filename into a command line, the POSIX command-line environment will do that with just a few lines. GUI drawing programs are nice for artwork, but other artifacts such as clothing patterns or technical illustrations require precision that you get from mathematical software.
Most Linux users can benefit from learning to use the command-line environment (and avoiding blindly pasting in commands found on the internet). You should look at Linux Command long enough to get comfortable doing simple things with the command line environment, if only to see why many of do most of our work using a terminal and a text editor.
I agree and that is the reason why I wrote the DE being “user friendly” is a sort of misunderstanding because what makes the experience difficult is not installing or uninstalling software (and flatpak - snap are a very bad idea), it is all the bugs and missing features related to hardware.
I have been using “linux” for some time now, I am not a developer, I am not a sysadmin, just a self-taught user. I can’t even count the times I tried some distro and i got errors right from the booting sequence. Sometimes I made it to the desktop but it froze. Sometimes it crashed after some minutes. Then I could not get the wifi to work for hundred different reasons. Then the sound was mute or it was on a single speaker only. Then I tried to set the printer, missing drivers or just the very basic, sometimes the subsystem crashed. Then it is difficult to set the touchpad. The list of possible issues is endless.
I have just wrote a post about “Video - Totem” crashing as soon as I try to open “channels”, I guess there is some bug with “grilo”. Besides the crash, Totem could not play h264 videos and I did not know why then I checked for installed gstreamer1 packages and guess what, “gstreamer1-vaapi” wasn’t installed, despite the RPM Fusion dance.
Not a big deal.
Part of the reason why I use “linux” is because it is fun or lets say a sort of hobby. But I don’t know anybody else who thinks that playing with computers is fun. Most people don’t like it and don’t have time for it. If one day we would want to make “linux” popular who would need to SIMPLIFY a lot, less “options”, less “settings” and what we get must work.
P.S.
All the issues I mentioned above aren’t related to exotic configurations, just very basic stuff like a Dell laptop that I bought with Ubuntu pre-installed or a generic desktop with Intel chipset. I tried to be as “compatible” as possible, still “linux” doesn’t work or I should say it works with countless quirks.
Most people tend to be content with what others configure for them (people in general are lazy). Linux seems to be for those who are searching for more flexibility, less ‘big brother’ intrusion, and more overall stability without the forced monthly updates and operating system as a service environment that is seen from microsoft.
Your comment above seems to indicate that you tend to be in the category that is satisfied with having others do for you. I prefer doing for myself.
You are free to select whatever OS suits your needs.
Yes I know.
The whole topic about “patents” is interesting but it is also a bit old.
Form the “average Joe” perspective the problem is not Fedora shipping without codecs, drivers or whatever, the problem is THERE ISN’T A CLEAR AND SIMPLE WAY TO GET THEM.
I have been using PCs since the '80s so I am not scared by RPM Fusion but I can guarantee everybody else I know cannot find the instructions to add the repos and install things. Even if they are pointed to the right manual page, they don’t know what to do.
Then I am told Fedora ships with OpenH264 and that is enough. It is not because when you play a video it stops and goes. Average Joe sees that and he just thinks “linux” sucks.