I just switched from Win 10 & 11 to Fedora KDE, about 2 weeks ago. Total Linux newbie. Not looking to hack my OS or anything. I’m relatively computer literate, but not at all a programmer. I just want an OS that works and mostly gets out of the way. And obviously doesn’t spam me with ads or steal my data or lock me into a subscription.
So far: Fedora and Plasma have been wonderful. But…
-
Computer feels slightly slower. I’m surprised by this.
-
Fedora or Mint…“it just works” isn’t exactly true based on my experience. “Most stuff mostly works okay” is more like it.
-
I had a service keep crashing upon boot: xwaylandvideobridge. Trying to read people’s reports and diagnose was frustrating. I ended up removing it (which I had to look up and figure out how to do). Not sure if I broke anything or not, but it seems like things are working.
-
Boot time is definitely slower compared to Win11. Not slow, just slower. Like 35 seconds. I tried to figure this one out using stuff like “systemd-analyze” but that was also annoying / frustrating. Trying to interpret the output and then trying to interpret what the tech people are saying in the forums. Plus my specific output I was getting from those programs didn’t look right or make logical sense (like it was adding up a bunch of processes as 11 seconds, but then saying each of those processes itself took 11 seconds, which I guess is possible if they are running simultaneously, but not sure).
-
Weird stuff with youtube / video codecs. Firefox would glitch/hang/freeze playing youtube, especially if god forbid you try and do something radical like scroll back in a video. I seriously thought my video card was self-immolating. I finally just figured this out after much suffering. I think there was something about cisco h.whatever codecs, which I installed. But those are apparently terrible. Then I followed this not newbie-friendly fix after trying to figure out how to remove the Cisco ones: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia?highlight=(\bCategoryHowto\b). Not sure why this kind of stuff doesn’t work out of the box. Having one of the biggest websites glitch using one of the biggest browsers is…not…great.
-
HP printer: finally, some good news! I have an HP laser printer and had to print some stuff off last night (a PDF and Word doc). Plugged in the printer, it recognized it correctly, I added printer, it added itself smoothly. Then ctrl-p worked flawlessly.
Thanks for reading through this. No Nvidia card. it’s AMD Ryzen 7 CPU with integrated Radeon Vega 10 GPU. 20 GB system memory with 2 GB allocated for the video card. I didn’t install anything for graphics, I just let Fedora do its defaults.
I looked up the codecs to get the specifics. This was the first thing I found when having Firefox + YouTube issues: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/openh264/
Installed that and it wasn’t any better. Then had to figure out how to remove it and try the rpmfusion stuff (whatever that is).
Here’s the output of systemd-analyze critical-chain:
The time when unit became active or started is printed after the "@" character. The time the unit took to start is printed after the "+" character. graphical.target @12.832s └─sddm.service @12.832s └─plymouth-quit.service @12.727s +98ms └─systemd-user-sessions.service @12.681s +20ms └─remote-fs.target @12.659s └─remote-fs-pre.target @8.131s └─nfs-client.target @8.130s └─gssproxy.service @8.044s +85ms └─network.target @8.037s └─wpa_supplicant.service @8.002s +33ms └─basic.target @4.810s └─dbus-broker.service @4.627s +137ms └─dbus.socket @4.607s +1ms └─sysinit.target @4.596s └─systemd-resolved.service @4.452s +143ms └─systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service @3.827s +613ms └─local-fs.target @3.814s └─boot-efi.mount @3.692s +119ms └─boot.mount @3.552s +118ms └─systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-e61e388b\x2d6938\x2d4f16\x2d9746\x2dce2c084d3f44.service @3.206s +170ms └─dev-disk-by\x2duuid-e61e388b\x2d6938\x2d4f16\x2d9746\x2dce2c084d3f44.deviceAnd here’s the output of systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg (had to covert to jpg to allow the upload):