So, I've been a user of Gentoo or Arch/Artix for a long time now. I like being able to control exactly what is installed on my system, and I have learned a whole lot about how software is configured and how to build a Linux system from nearly nothing after using them.
The thing about that, though, is if you use bloated or just plain complex software, these don't seem to be as thoroughly tested or have as deep of documentation on these systems as the corresponding simpler tools. If you want to use dwm or sway, you're going to have a great time, within some bounds of what you try to do with it. Tiling isn't the most supported way to use most programs, and if you're trying to run Steam or otherwise run Windows software through a compatibility layer the tiling can cause bugs with the software. Some bugs I've seen are rendering to only part of the window, crashing, buttons not being visually aligned to where they're drawn, etc. This isn't actually a problem with the tiling window manager necessarily but with the software running in them, but it's just been the standard ever since Windows 1.0 to target floating and I don't think that will ever change. So, with Gentoo and Arch, you're kind of railroaded into a tiling window manager that won't have the best compatibility, so even if your system itself is compatible with some software, your window manager won't be.
My goal on my primary Gentoo system was the highest compatibility with software possible. If you're on a functioning, updateable Gentoo system, then you absolutely MUST by necessity have a working, stable, and fairly up to date build system and toolchain. This isn't the case on other distros that don't ship with a copy of gcc or even things like make, rsync, and git. This means that on Gentoo, if you need to build some third party software from Codeberg that's not in the Gentoo repositories, you are sitting in your default PATH on an excellent toolchain to build anything that's thrown at you, ready to go.
Since I was running into issues with software I wanted or needed to use due to tiling, I took the risky choice to try and get KDE working on my Gentoo system. According to the Gentoo wiki, it has "excellent support" for KDE, so I did my best to get it working. It did ultimately work for about 6 months, however I ran into a lot of issues with the Nvidia graphics in that laptop interfacing with KDE (never buy Nvidia products, I'm just stuck with them), and eventually, an update failed to compile in the middle of building the desktop which broke my desktop completely. Those builds are not quick, either, and that version just would not build and I could not mask it and install a previous version. Basically, I just had to wait for it to be fixed, having my "highest compatibility" machine not even having a functional GUI. That pissed me off pretty bad.
As someone that wants to get a job as a sysadmin eventually, I'm fairly well versed in Red Hat-isms, so Fedora's always been at the back of my mind. I didn't want to use it previously though because I can't stand using (new versions of) GNOME, and I just find their whole philosophy on the desktop misguided and controlling. But then it turned out that Fedora started offering KDE as a flagship workstation version of the operating system, so I hopped on board. I tried it out for awhile when it first came out, had some issues, then went back to Gentoo. But then I tried again.
I needed an operating system to set up on my fiance's fairly legacy computer (the same era as the Thinkpad T420 that I was using day to day actually) and I wanted it to get fairly new driver updates and support but also not be too resource intensive, and so I gave Fedora KDE a shot. It worked surprisingly well on this really slow Dell Optiplex hardware, and after seeing how it performed, I started installing it on more systems: first my fiance's upgrade computer they received after I installed Fedora on the first one, then I put Fedora on my Nvidia main laptop, and finally I put it on my Thinkpad T420, my last system still using the classic Gentoo and Sway tiling window manager workflow. Now, it's even running the backend for vps1, the server you're (most likely) reading this on.
So far it's been great. It is really the best experience I've ever had with a "just works" distro. In my past experience when I use the distros that are supposed to, again, "just work", I get all kinds of bad behavior or unmodifiable crap. For example, with Debian based systems like Ubuntu or Linux Mint, I install a LOT of software on my computers that I set up and eventually a package installation somewhere breaks something, causing a horrible bug. Fedora is pretty good about managing configuration files, with a system similar to the .pacnew files generated by pacman on Arch. I feel free to install basically anything on Fedora and it's going to work 99% of the time out of the box, with everything set up fairly default so documentation is easy to find. The toolchain is also super up to date on Fedora (some would say straight up bleeding edge), so there's rarely any compatibility problems building software from the internet you find on Codeberg or whatnot.
The main thing unique about Red Hat operating systems is their integration of SELinux with every install. This makes your system have effectively a second permission system from the default Unix permissions that adds a layer of security, so that certain applications can only access certain types of files. It's not super clear how to use it and I think it could use with some more documentation or something like the Rust book, but basically any task you're trying to do you can find a guide for that specific task and fixing the SELinux permissions on the Fedora docs. It's pretty annoying to deal with on servers in particular, where you need to have both your Unix and SELinux permissions set up correctly for anything you're hosting to the web, so I wouldn't recommend Fedora on a server if you haven't used it before and haven't had to work with SELinux policies previously. But, this is a static site, so the SELinux stuff isn't too bad to deal with and I have it all scripted out to be done automatically now on site updating. On the plus side, Fedora with SELinux hasn't been vulnerable (as far as I know) to any of the recently discovered Linux vulnerabilities since SELinux filters them out, and Fedora gets very current kernel versions patching these issues out as soon as possible anyways, whereas systems that are slower and don't use SELinux like Debian can be straight up vulnerable for awhile before fixes or mitigations are backported.
Now that I've used Fedora on all these systems for about a year now, I can say it's pretty smooth. I know where to look and generally what to do if there's permission issues, and if you're installing stuff directly from DNF and you're not hosting anything on the web, these issues basically never come up otherwise, which is good. Fedora is very polished about handling the permissions appropriately and correctly automatically in all the cases it reasonably can. I have it down to a science now where I can get a full Fedora system with all my favorite software installed within a day, where the real limiting factor is just my trash internet at home, not actually any real configuring work. I have a git repository of dot files I pass around between computers and it's as simple as just copying the desired files into the correct places to get a new system up and running. (If you're wondering, my dot files are not public because I keep personal stuff in there and modified versions of public configuration files that I don't know or have the rights to redistribute.)
Some statistics: all my computers are running Linux (since I graduated university I removed my last copy of Windows at home), all but one of my computers is running KDE (including the Steam Deck but not including my ThinkPad T400 running Trisquel 12.0), and all but two of my computers are running Fedora (everything but my T400 and my Steam Deck).
A couple years ago I got a great gift of a librebooted ThinkPad T400 from ebay. I haven't used it much, just because when you're using a machine that's librebooted, you might as well go all the way and also use a fully free, FSF-approved OS, so I had Trisquel 11 on there and it was pretty bad. Updates would randomly fail, packages were in the repositories that were uninstallable, and it looked butt ugly. It also had a totally dead battery. So I left it sitting on a shelf for years.
After picking it off the shelf just to get it updated recently, I saw that Trisquel wanted to update to version 12. During the update process, of course since the battery was bad, the power cable momentarily lost connection and the computer shut off, toasting my installation completely. So, I bought myself a new aftermarket battery from China and then I put the latest Trisquel 12.0 on my Free Software Foundation membership card (it has a built-in USB drive for this purpose), and installed it from scratch. This time, I actually learned effectively how to use a Librebooted system and what all the different functionalities were (which before just kind of confused me whenever I tried to boot anything on it), and Trisquel 12 is working pretty good. It's using MATE, which I really like, though lately I haven't been using it just because I've been trying to distance myself from X11 software as much as possible. I don't know anything about X11's code quality, but what I can say is a lot of programs to do basic things on X11 are legacy software that it's a miracle even still work, and things are prone to breaking or crashing or not displaying fonts correctly or not scaling correctly or screentearing... I just don't particularly like it. Going from using exclusively Wayland forever back to an X11 system is kind of a system shock.
But overall, the software support is better than ever. Most of the things I've installed have just worked (besides some terminal emulators, but that's because my ancient 2009ish integrated graphics are terrible), and I can surf the web and use my desktop and stuff with only 4Gb of RAM, which is pretty impressive. It also has ungoogled-chromium available in the apt repositories, and Kiwix the offline wiki reader in the default repositories as well, which is great because I use Kiwix all the time instead of Wikipedia whenever I'm working offline.
I've now switched over for the foreseeable future to using this Trisquel 12.0 computer as my main laptop, and we'll see how it works out in the future. I can say that everything that I actually output (basically this website and my Rust projects) all work just fine on this machine. I imagine the packages won't update a whole lot though in the near future, and might border on being legacy nearing the end of Trisquel 12's lifecycle. Honestly I was surprised Trisquel even put together a whole new release, and considering that the quality is outstanding. Definitely the best of the completely free operating systems (by FSF standards) that I've experienced.
That's all for today. Hope you all have a great weekend.
June 5, 2026