I don’t know which to install… Gnome “workstation” or KDE “personal”? I want to experiment with Gnome, but I not a technical user. Is there any reason I would NOT want to install Workstation? I’m new to Linux, having only experimented with Mint. If I do install “workstation”, are there a lot of changes I need to make it appropriate for a casual user, like myself? (e.g. things I need to uninstall?)
Workstation and KDE are both good.
We do have a ‘Beginner Guide’ for KDE though, Beginners Guide to Fedora KDE
You don’t really need to uninstall anything as a beginning user on either, they are both very leightweight compared to the commercial offerings. Pick one, install it, stick with it and learn. We are here to help if you have any questions on either.
Cosmic needs less customization to Workstation/Gnome most of it must be valid to F44 IMO
or this worth to follow
Both Gnome and KDE have large user bases so more people who can help if there are problems. There are issues that are difficult to solve using the forum but easily resolved with an experienced user looking over your shoulder — look for a local Linux user group or ask friends — one desktop is often popular with a local community.
Workstation is a great option for a new user. (In my experience, KDE is less reliable and less visually consistent.)
You don’t need to follow any random youtube videos or website guides for customization; Workstation works great for a new user out of the box.
There are two exceptions that do require manual configuration, if these situations apply to you:
- If you need proprietary media codecs, you have to go to a third party to get them: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia
- If you have a NVIDIA GPU and need the best performance or full features support, you have to install the driver from a third party: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA
Thank you, MatH, for the advice to just pick one. At some point, I will have to stop reading forums and watching YouTube, and actually try out things for myself.
Thanks, PA yaslanan, for the very valuable links! What can you tell me about “atomic spins?” The only thing I know is what the Fedora website says, “The whole system is updated in one go, and an update will not apply if anything goes wrong…”
Thank you, George, for telling me about linux user groups. I will see if there are any in my area.
Thank you, Yuri, for telling me I might need to manually configure something… The information at the links you sent is very valuable!
gnome is great if you want to have a experience where you dont want to see the desktop and when you see it, you want to think you have something like mac os
kde is for the people who interacts with its desktop and like how it looks and want to customize colors, icons, fonts, windows, decorations and more, in gnome, not much options, in kde, you get drowned in them
one always tries gnome, sees it is not for you and moves to something else, kde most times
I had only one try with atomic. I turned back because I had difficulties to add my Lenovo keyboard handling during suspend/resume.
With this setup (not a random yt one) I feel pretty safe.
Edit:
For choosing your favorite simply use QEMU Virtual Machine Manager
sudo dnf in @virtualization
and test ISO-s. Fast and safe.
The MATE and Cinnamon spins are less of a jump from Windows than Workstation or KDE.
As I mentioned in this post, using something like Ventoy will allow you to non-destructively test multiple distros and desktop environments.
I strongly recommend that you do such testing for several reasons:
- Most importantly to determine which distro/DE suits you best;
- Ensure that your hardware (and peripherals) are well supported by any particular distro/DE;
- Take the opportunity to compare different distros/DEs without wiping your existing install.
I’d note that after you do choose a distro/DE, you can always change the default DE without having to reinstall Linux.
Good luck!
It is a bit oversimplified, but a DE (Desktop Environment) is a workflow. You like it (more or less) or hate it 
There is no ideal workflow/DE, there is one you are OK to live with.
I’d say the best way to decide which workflow (thus a DE) is the best for you is to try different DEs as VMs, if possible. There are bazillions of reviews of each DE, but your experience is what matters. Try GNOME, KDE, etc and you will see what you like most. The base of Fedora is solid and is the same across its DEs (more or less). The rest is personal preferences and workflow (DE) .
P.S.: you will have to accept some of the ideas implemented by a DE, which has its own limitations and advantages. Again, you will try and choose what you like most.
I switched from Fedora Workstation to Silverblue (so Fedora atomic desktop) a few years ago and stayed on it as my daily driver. While not as tweakable as traditional desktops, it has the main advantage that should something go wrong with an update, you can easily boot into a previous deployment (i.e. a previous state of the base system). Also, major upgrades (i.e. from one version to another) are almost as easy as regular updates.
In the docs you will find more details.
I hwve been atomic user more than 5 years runned basically all there is to see diffrences and always came back to fedora ones. If you are tinkere as me lewrning curve and finding your workflow takes time, but now days not so much needed as i can install shels and cli stuff easy using brew and development depencies using mise and also pipx. VMs i use TUI one, music cliamp and so on. If i need something to isolate or do temp stuff it is then toolbox or i spin podman quadlets container as thow away.
What comes to atomic it is more user friendly to leqrn and just works setup with rollbacks and get to use linux. When it comes to finding your flow and what you want that is just testing and finding your way there is no limits now days that was some years back still. I could recommend atomic as it gives you more forgivnes on learning, but if want to learn more how things go wrong and debug and fixing then workstation is more better on that.
Eventually it is your preverence the starting point is there and you will make it for you what ever you choose
Mike B., how is that better/worse than using Timeshift?
Well, these are two different concepts, even though their benefits sometime overlap:
- Taking BTRFS snapshots using tools like Timeshift or BTRFS Assistant[1] enable the user to restore a previous snapshot, should something go wrong. However, these actions are not baked into the system[2], and the user needs some prior knowledge on how to use the tools properly.
- RPM-Ostree is Fedora atomic desktop’s approach to the package system and image delivery[3]. The base system is composed from RPMs server-side and delivered to the client as a deployable image, translated as an upgrade to the system. At least one (good, as in bootable) older deployment is always available to the user, so if for any reason the user cannot boot into the new (pending) deployment, they can always select a previous deployment when booting, similar to how someone boots into a previous kernel on a traditional desktop. There are no tools needing installation, and no significant learning curve, only understanding the basic concepts. Packages can be layered on top of the deployed image client-side, but it’s not as flexible as installing a package via
dnfon a traditional Fedora desktop. GUI apps are generally installed as Flatpaks.
Also, because the base system is decoupled from the GUI apps and kept “thinner”, system upgrade issues are way less common. One has to assess if for their specific use case the added benefits outweigh the drawbacks of a somewhat less flexible system.
Timeshift is specific to Ubuntu and its downstream distros, but on Fedora you’d want to use BTRFS Assistant, as Timeshift has some compatibility issues. ↩︎
At least not on Fedora. OpenSUSE’s approach to atomic desktops is somewhat different AFAIK, as they make use of BTRFS snapshots as a core system functionality. ↩︎
At least for now, as Fedora is working on switching to
bootcsometime in the future. ↩︎