My Day With Fedora

  • 30/10/2018
  • 2-minute read

I used Fedora 28 today for work instead of my usual OpenSUSE Leap 15 installation. Here’s how it went.

My setup:

  • Intel© Core™ i7-4500U CPU @ 1.80GHz × 2
  • 16GB Ram
  • 250G SSD

Here’s the software that I needed for work today:

  • Synergy
  • LibreOffice > 6.0
  • Chromium Browser
  • Spotify
  • NFS
  • virt-manager
  • Graphical multi-tab text editor
  • Tilix
  • Pidgin
  • Hexchat
  • KeepassXC

I use Synergy as a virtual KVM between my home server machine that handles my storage, email, etc. and this brings us our first real problems. The “software” application in Gnome doesn’t list Synergy even when I search for it and I was wondering if I would have to go download the RPM it’s creator (I have a valid license so that’s not really a problem). I ran ‘dnf search synergy’ and there it was. If your software installation tool only covers “best of” software but not everything then it’s usefulness is only marginal at best.

I installed Synergy and when I ran it I received an error that I shouldn’t close it because there is no systray available. This is a pet peeve that I have with a lot of distros who use Gnome 3. Either the systray isn’t enabled or isn’t available at all. The fact is that a lot of applications still use it. Of the ones that I use, Synergy, Pidgin, KeepassXC, and Hexchat all fall into those categories. I like having a clean work environment and being able to minimize apps to the systray helps with that. And so I said goodbye to the pure Fedora experience and installed Cinnamon (It also wasn’t available from the GUI software application) and the rest of the apps from the CLI.

Everything else went as expected. I didn’t have any more hiccups as long as I used the dnf command to install the apps. I mounted the directories from my home server to my workstation with NFS so I didn’t have to worry about data loss. I did notice lag from the time that some apps were launched until they were ready that I didn’t notice with OpenSUSE, but I didn’t do a real measurement so that was entirely subjective.

There really wasn’t anything keeping me from doing my work that couldn’t be worked around in a matter of minutes.

Suggestions for Fedora:

  • Bring back the systray into Gnome 3
  • Remember yumex? It was an awkward but very powerful graphical tool for Yum. Bring it back at make it your primary software installation tool.