When I tried out a bunch of distros, Fedora was among the ones what weren't like the rest. Another was EndeavourOS, based on Arch Linux. A few things I learned while using Fedora Workstation, which was using GNOME as its desktop environment (DE).
Choice of desktop environment
Of all the distros I tried, they all shared similar desktop environments. Some can have multiple distros, each made with a different DE:
- GNOME: probably the most mature of all. It's fast, plenty of animation, its design is quite professional. Except the concept is different. It's thinking desktop in term of workspaces, so each application gets their own desktop. There's no minimize button, no maximize except double-clicking to do so. The Windows key (or Super key) becomes a central key for most actions on the desktop. You use this to switch back and forth between workspaces. GNOME takes 2^nd^ place in terms of memory consumption, close to KDE.
- KDE: probably the one I liked the least. While quite polished like GNOME and Windows-like, it's a bit buggy, a bit too many customizations in Settings so quite cumbersome to use. It's also a bit laggy and heavy, heavier than GNOME. For Fedora cold boot, KDE desktop takes 1.5 GB RAM, while GNOME about 1.2 GB RAM. Small different but KDE is not as fast as GNOME.
- Xfce: Lightweight, fast, comparable to LXQt so they both share the same spot. I happen to like LXQt more due to being a Lubuntu user instead of Xubuntu. The latter
- MATE: If you enjoy the look of old GNOME from back in '09, then use MATE. Like Xfce and LXQt, quite light on the resource.
- Cinnamon: Linux Mint's own implementation of GNOME, Windows-like, light, fast. One of my favorite next to LXQt.
Note that this is my opinion on these DEs as their original forms, instead of the customized looks that can be made by other distros. See Xero Linux for KDE or EndeavourOS for Xfce, ZorinOS for GNOME, Xfce.
Display Protocol
As of the time of writing, there exists two protocols: X11 and Wayland. Wayland is still in development and supposed to supersede X11, which has existed since 1987. I tried Wayland out in GNOME on Fedora and here are a few things I found:
- Firefox finally utilized Nvidia GPU for video decoding through nvidia-vaapi-driver. I tried numerous times on Lubuntu, which uses X11, and it didn't work. I can finally watch 4K content on YouTube, though Iwill probably disable AV1 playback on Firefox because my GPU doesn't support AV1 codec.
- There's no fractional scaling on GNOME, AFAIK. There's only integer scaling (200%, ...)
- No custom resolution. I used that on Nvidia because they never support my resolution 1600x900, which is supported on Windows. It's only available on X11.
- Performance on Cemu is noticeably slower on Wayland than on X11. This is achieved using the Vulkan backend with GTX 1060 and Ryzen 5 1600. It's also darker. The advice on Reddit was to avoid Wayland for this application due to a missing function in Vulkan.
Package Management
Fedora includes GNOME software center for installing and updating apps as well as the OS. This is way easier, more intuitive, and has more apps than using Discover, its equivalent on my Lubuntu or KDE-based distros.
If you are a hardcore and want to use the terminal then dnf is the equivalent of apt:
- At every first run when you open the terminal, dnf caches the repository's package list. It's quite annoying, slow (because I haven't figured out how to change mirror but I digress). But anytime you need to remove a package, you don't have to autoremove all of its dependencies like in Ubuntu, it will do it for you.
Codec
Unlike other distros, Fedora doesn't include the popular video codecs out-of-the-box: H264, H265 for instace. That puts a damper on the first impression of anybody using Fedora. You won't be able to play any videos using these codecs on the Video app (Totem) or Firefox without first installing OpenH264, and you can forget about watching H265. Lucky YouTube uses VP9, which is open-source so you can still watch it on Firefox. Installing my usual app for watching video with Nvidia Hardware Decoding, Celluloid, which uses mpv and ffmpeg as backend, didn't play H264 using hardware decoding because the codec I installed didn't support it, and of course no H265. VLC, however, worked. It decoded H264, H265 normally. But that was because they used their own ffmpeg to do it. Using Celluloid on Flatpak, which is a container format for storing applications, I was able to play videos using hardware decoding. Celluloid on Flatpak packages its own dependencies, which means its own mpv and ffmpeg with support for hardware decoding.
Fixing UEFI bootloader
Reinstall packages related to GRUB instead of running grub-install --target=x86_64-efi like in Ubuntu/Debian
Microsoft Core Fonts (Arial, Times New Roman)
This one depends on preferences, but I installed these fonts so that I can use the docs files exported from LibreOffice Writer on Microsoft Word. For Ubuntu/Debian, you can install the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package. For Fedora, follow this guide to install msttcore-fonts.