Setting up Fedora Silverblue with some KDE Apps

Ask Fedora
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1

Hi, lately even after a fresh install Fedora Kinoite was so buggy its nearly unusable.

So my idea is to give GNOME another try, and I found out it is very nice!

Poorly there is a lot of GUI lacking, but with some experience that is not that hard.

My problems

I have lots of Icon problems. I installed dolphin kate konsole lxqt-config thats it. The icons are now a mix between Breeze and Adwaita, which looks pretty bad.

I want to use Adwaita Icons everywhere, and I am unsure how to do that.

I may have rebased from Kinoite to Silverblue, thats why the icons are all messed up. Deleting some directories and re-logging in should fix that, right?

What I did

I based off ublues Silverblue, specifically Secureblue.

Extensions (Flatpak Extensionmanager)

  • dash to dock
  • blur my shell
  • click to close overview
  • clipboard indicator
  • hide universal access (remove Accessibility Menu after increasing font size, fractional scaling made everything blurry)
  • appindicator support (preinstalled)

Settings

  • fix Meta+PgUp to toggle full size
  • fix Meta+Left/Right for “split”
  • increased font size to “large” to make it usable on a HiDPI 14in laptop
  • dash to panel
    • slight hovering animation
    • systray icons: reduced padding
    • 30% opacity
  • kgx --set-shell=/bin/fish

Removing some desktop entry spam (this is all CLI thanks GNOME)

cd ~/.local/share/applications/
touch fish.desktop
touch nautilus-autorun-software.desktop
touch org.gnome.TextEditor.desktop
touch htop.desktop
touch nvtop.desktop
#touch org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop #unsure
#touch org.gnome.Console.desktop #unsure

I am not so sure if I find Nautilus so horrible, it seems to have gotten better. I am not sure how to get Dolphin to work, as some things like mounting a LUKS encrypted drive are nonfunctional currently.

Removing the default Text editor is often necessary, otherwise you need a ton of “change default app” actions afaik.

Breeze icons took over pretty much everything though, which is not nice. I could try and live with Flatpak Kate, Okular, Gwenview etc only though.

2

Did you install it in a toolbox Container, Podman Image or Layered?

3

I layered it, because its a file manager. Same for Kate and Konsole, even though Kate may be sufficient in a container and terminals can use flatpak-spawn

4

You need to use gnome-tweaks to set the icon theme to Adwaita. However, in my case, this also caused Dolphin and Konsole to default to the hicolor icon theme.

Instead of using kgx --set-shell=/bin/fish, I prefer to use chsh or set fish in the Konsole profile.

To eliminate desktop entry spam, you can use a GUI app PinApp on Flathub. you can add a NoDisplay boolean value and set it to true.

Additionally, I cannot get KDE applications to display correctly under Wayland. I had to follow the suggestions in Qt applications in GNOME Wayland to force these KDE apps to use X11 instead.

5

You should not change your user shell, as programs expect bash and will break. Fish is not POSIX compliant.

I also dont think using XWayland is a great idea. They display completely normally, just with messed up icons

6

Depending on who you ask, bash isn’t exactly POSIX compliant, either (I recall setting bash as the login shell on FreeBSD used to be a no-no.). As long as it isn’t the login shell in /etc/passwd, it should be mostly fine, but yeah, using chsh to fish isn’t without risk.

XWayland is a good compromise for those few apps that still aren’t quite Wayland compliant. I’m running out of examples for it, off the top of my head, to be honest, but XWayland in general as a concept is sane, if you need it.

You can grant access to the filesystem to flatpak applications using Flatseal (which is itself installable via flatpak). Personally, I prefer flatpak as it installing KDE stuff on Silverblue or Gnome stuff on Kinoite via RPM brings in a ton of stuff that I don’t need. I’ve installed Gnome apps on Kinoite via Flatpak without issue. I’m not telling you you need to do this, to be clear - overlaying this is supported. But I’m suggesting that flatpak could still also be an option here as well.

7

Running a native Wayland app through XWayland sounds odd.

Dolphin doesnt only need root filesystem access afaik, but also

  • udisks2 mounting
  • mtp
  • smb
  • …

I have not tested if the Flatpak supports that