Hello, I have been using Fedora KDE for almost 2 years now. One thing I can say for sure is that I am not really a power user: I do relatively common things on my device: Browsing, editing files, entertainment etc. If I check any Fedora-related source, there is always supposed to be something new, some fix, etc.
What is confusing me, though, is how there are many issues that do not just remain unfixed, but they are not even remotely acknowledged whatsoever. From my standpoint, it just doesn’t make sense why such issues would stay for years or even decades. Please do not misunderstand the purpose of this post. I still love Fedora KDE and I wanna keep using it. I just want to know if these are things that other people care about or not:
I still cannot believe that KDE Discover is actually maintained. You launch it, half the time it keeps telling you you are offline, even though I have 100+ Mbps internet that works without any issues. This is rather minor. I can live with this one.
Every time you “refresh” to see how many updates you have, the number you are given is worthless — If it says 10 GiB, for example, it might increase to double that amount during the update. Why can’t you actually tell me how much I am supposed to download? Also, if I just close “cancel” while an update is running, there is no feedback whatsoever. Will it take an hour? A minute?
Half the time you close “Discover”, it doesn’t close properly — You can still see it in “Processes”. Therefore, if you try to launch it again, you get that annoying bouncy discover icon for a few seconds, and then nothing happens. The solution is to terminate “Discover” and relaunch it again. Why is launching/closing a fundamental app still problemantic?
When you type something on Launcher, you will get a lot of terminal commands. Clicking on them will do nothing. However, if you launch terminal and run that command manually, it will work. If this feature isn’t planned for the near feature, why even include it?
I have disabled Baloo File indexing (too many unnecessary disk writes). However, if I go to “File search” menu, I see my home directory twice in the list of locations (both say "Not indexed). No matter what you do, you will always see two of them. Even if you choose to index one of them, the other one will remain.
I once wanted to copy some fonts to the system fonts directory, using Dolphin. For some reason, if you deal with any location requiring administrator privileges, your copying speed will be significantly reduced — You may have to wait up to 2 hours just to copy 10 GiB worth of data on a modern SSD. I think this has to do with something related to virtualization, but how long is this issue gonna stay?
Half the apps you have will punish you with an error log just because you closed them: Even a blank LibreOffice Writer might give you an error if you close and choose not to save anything. You can report it to bugzilla, but nothing happens to that report. The apps that are working now might just decide to crash on launch after an update — Couple months ago, I was using a played called SMPlayer because VLC performs so horribly with hi-res videos. I decided to launch it, and it crashes on launch, even on a fresh re-install. Even many KDE apps behave this way (KDE Marble, for example). Sometimes, you can’t even report these issues because the generated backtrace has “low informational value”…
These are just the issues I can remember off the top of my head. I am genuinely curious as to which bugs are considered priority for Fedora KDE developers, as I do not really see these issues acknowledged anywhere. I understand relatively complicated issues, but why are closing and opening programs, copying files, updating your system, knowing how much you have to download, etc. considered issues in 2026?
I apologize if I come off a little bit annoyed, but I can’t take how I have to deal with these annoyances every time I need to do what I thought were simple tasks.
Thanks in advance.
Your input is highly appreciated.
Personally I do not use Discover. I use dnf from the command line.
It does not suffer from the issues you describe.
Apparently a lot of the issue with discover are becuase it uses PackageKit that does not share errors nicely with it’s user app, Discover in this case.
I’ve never seen this. Do you have an example that I try to can reproduce?
I just tried opening libreoffice write and then closing the window it open.
No errors reported.
Are you running Fedora in a VM? If not then there is not virtualisation getting in your way.
It might be an issue with Dolphin that was recently worked on to improve the I/O performance by the KDE folks. Copying many small files was very inefficient.
I’m not sure when that work will land in Fedora.
I just installed this and smplayer starts up with on issue.
Maybe the issues you are seeing are specific to your hardware?
Can you post the output of inxi -ezxx?
When the system shows many “odd” crashes I tend to suspect a hardware issue.
Top of the list is a memory issue. Have you tested your memory to check it’s okay?
As Barry implied, get rid of Discover. Dont open it. Dont use it. Simply type sudo dnf upgrade from the console instead.
Regarding point 6, are you using virtualization or running in a VM? You can also copy using the console, or you can download another file manager for example Thunar and see if these fix that problem.
If you have more comments of KDE or actualy want them fixed, the KDE forums might be a better fit, as we only package KDE and dont author it. If you post there, I suggest making one issue per topic. You can also submit bugs per component.
I think there might actually be a software issue here. I’ve seen similar things myself - apps (especially Flatpaks) often pop up a crash notification after being shutdown normally. It doesn’t seem to affect actual functioning (the app is fine until you choose to shut it down!) but it is a bit of an irritation.
No, I am not running Fedora in a VM. I think I misworded myself when I said “virtualization”. Maybe it was something related to kio-admin protocol or something that was causing copy speeds to be much more slowly if you were in admin mode. If I copy something without administrator privileges, 20 GiB of Data would barely take a few minutes. Unfortunately, I am not knowledgeable enough to diagnose this issue…
This is the thing that confuses me: Why does Discover have such a fundamental issue that makes it unusable? Can’t it be replaced with something that actually works?
I fully realize it works fine for most people, and there will be bugs in some edge cases. That’s why I try to report any bugs I encounter.
What I don’t get is why I am having problems when I use “regular” hardware — I have an AMD CPU with an Nvidia GPU from a well-known brand (Lenovo). So, when I am getting errors, I’d like to know why its happening. If it is related to hardware, then it must be happening with many other people as well. That’s why I think these issues are probably software-related
Yes, I’d be surprised if the Discover issues were at all hardware-related.
I interpreted @barryascott 's question about hardware as specific to your video player issues (and perhaps the file copying, but that’s a known issue) - rather than about your entire list.
SMPlayer was working perfectly fine until the last couple months. Whatever happened must be because of some update after which it instantly crashes upon launch.