Review: Fedora 41 Kinoite
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
I've run Fedora's Silverblue in the past, when it was a young branch of the distribution. At the time Silverblue still had some growing pains and I was expecting there to be some rough edges when I tried Kinoite this week. However, for the most part, I was pleased with how well Kinoite performed. There were a few visual glitches in Discover and the duplicate names of repositories was confusing in the software centre, but otherwise Fedora Kinoite performed well.
The Anaconda system installer is still awkward compared to other mainstream distribution installers, but it worked. Likewise, Plasma 6 is overly heavy and several of its configuration options are buried under piles of customization screens, but it also worked. The Wayland session was pleasantly responsive and stable.
I think Kinoite has found a good balance in shipping enough applications to be useful right away without cluttering the application menu. Thanks to the Flathub repository we have access to plenty of desktop applications and games.
One of my complaints about running atomic distributions tends to be how awkward it is to install new containers and run software inside them when I want a compiler or additional command line utilities. Kinoite still has this problem, but the Toolbx/Toolbox utility does a lot to simplify the process and make it more comfortable to fetch and run additional programs in the classic way.
Generally speaking, I liked the setup of Kinoite. It's a bit heavy, a bit awkward at times, but the main concept (atomic updates combined with Flatpak packages and containers) worked well. This is one of the better experiences I've had with a branch of Fedora in recent years.
One of my few complaints while running Fedora Kinoite this week wasn't about what was included in the distribution (virtually all of the included tools worked well), but what wasn't offered. Something I enjoy about Mint and openSUSE are the ways in which those distributions meld their components together. They aren't just collections of separate packages, but a mesh of components which work together. Fedora, in my opinion lacks in this area. There are a lot of great technologies showcased in Fedora (Btrfs, Discover, Flatpak, Toolbx, and atomic system images), but they don't work together.