Ooo I actually did Fedora with KDE as my most recent install! It’s now running as our living room media computer and my partner has no complaints! I DID have some issues, though—it was actually more difficult than I expected! At first, it refused to play any media from my SMB server from the integrated video player or even VLC. After a lot of digging, I learned that the Fedora version of VLC is not shipped with SMB support, so I had to go find and install Samba plugin. Then it played! Mostly. Except for when it didn’t play video, or a file at all. THEN I learned that Fedora doesn’t ship with the video codecs I’ve had in all my other OSes! So I find a helpful post from a while ago on some forum that leads me to install THOSE… and it works! VLC now plays everything, and from my server!
…oop, except the speakers make a loud horrible popping sound randomly when not playing media! This took me two days to fix. Initially I plugged in a 3.5mm to USB adapter and that worked fine with no pops, but the whole point of me playing with new OSes is to learn to how to fix things, first by searching the internet, then asking if I can’t do it myself (I have a couple friends who can fix legit ANYTHING Linux.) For the Fedora install, I was stubborn and REALLY didn’t wanna ask anyone for help. Eventually I found out the popping was caused by the system going into some sort of power save mode for audio. I found a terminal command that fixed it but it was back every reboot. I found a few different suggestions of edits I could to to config files and none worked. FINALLY one post had a suggestion for someone having the same issue that actually fixed it for me! I get a pop on startup, but most OSes do, and no pops at all when using the OS.
Overall, I like Fedora, but it did have more issues than I ran into when installing Pop!.
Last night, I got all messed up with my partner and played games with friends. Super early in the morning, I decided to wind down by trying to install CatchyOS alongside the Windows install that was already on another mini desktop I just switched out to the Fedora one. Since it’s a type of Arch Linux, I expected hilarious results, and me not being able to figure out how to install it at all, having heard of Arch’s high learning curve. In like 30 minutes, I had it installed, working perfectly with everything, VLC plays every file from my server, custom global themes work (still having trouble on my Fedora install with those…) and wow. I love it so far, but I’ve only used it for like a half hour last night and a bit this morning hahaha
I installed it last night while all messed up after played games online with friends all night and this morning I woke up with vague memories of doing so…. It’s working perfectly, it’s so fast and pretty. Holy balls. It has none of the issues my fedora install had and had to learn to fix, either. This fuuuucks. Thank you for the recco!