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Review: Fedora 42
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Many of my experiences with Fedora were frustrating or underwhelming, at least when using the default options. Some of these were fairly minor issues. For example, I was looking forward to trying the new system installer with its streamlined interface, but it looks like the KDE edition is still using the classic installer only while the GNOME/Workstation edition offers the new installer. Having the two flavours using different installers makes it seem like Fedora doesn't yet truly see the KDE edition as being on equal footing with the GNOME edition.
Having zRAM enabled probably makes sense in some situations, I know some people find it a useful tool, but it ended up backfiring in my situation, making my CPU churn. This, on its own, wouldn't be a big deal, but re-activating the zRAM device after I've explicitly disabled it is frustrating. It gave me the impression the distribution was fighting against my efforts.
Some elements worked well for me. Discover is a capable software centre and the KDE System Settings panel worked well for me. Some of Plasma's default settings are not to my taste, but the desktop is extremely flexible and most features can be tweaked.
The DNF package manager feels faster now than it was in the past and its output is clearly organized. I also like that DNF uses clear, English words for its action commands.
Back on the "con" side of things, forcing Plasma to default to a Wayland session (no X11 session is available on the system) feels premature. Plasma's Wayland session is visibly slower and much larger in RAM than its X11 session. The Wayland session also wasn't stable. X11 should probably be the default or, at least, available as a fallback option without the user needing to manually hunt down and install the X11 packages.
I like that Fedora 42 is making it easy to add third-party repositories, such as Flathub and RPMFusion. In early versions of Fedora this required the user to know third-party options existed, then find them, and then manually add them. Fedora 42 makes enabling third-party software repositories as simple as clicking a box in the welcome window.