KDE Plasma 6 - Beta 1 released

Quoting: grigiI needed to get a new work desktop up and running really fast, so I thought I'd try Fedora 39 Kde, an it's working well.
I do miss the much better devtool chain and slots from Gentoo though.

I also love the rolling release thing, whereas on Fedora I have to do big upgrades every few months, instead of being to run "stable" but with "latest release" mesa and installing git Python to test that libraries will be supported on the next version.
All at the same time.

Conflicted if I should move back...

If you want slightly more rolling just enable the testing repos. If you want to go all out you can run Rawhide, but there will be breakage there. I run the testing repos and haven't seen an issue. Granted, it's on a work PC so I don't have Steam or anything installed.

Quoting: grigi

Quoting: BlackBloodRum

Quoting: grigiI needed to get a new work desktop up and running really fast, so I thought I'd try Fedora 39 Kde, an it's working well.
I do miss the much better devtool chain and slots from Gentoo though.

I also love the rolling release thing, whereas on Fedora I have to do big upgrades every few months, instead of being to run "stable" but with "latest release" mesa and installing git Python to test that libraries will be supported on the next version.
All at the same time.

Conflicted if I should move back...

Well, I think you should remember your own use case, and what you really need etc. It's best not to make a rash decision that you'll regret if you need the machine "just working".

If it's purely install time that's an issue, it might be worth remembering you can install Gentoo directly from within your booted Fedora, just create a directory on your root (For example, /gentoo/) extract the stage tarball to it and then continue with the Gentoo install process. This way, until it's ready you can just continue using Fedora as normal.

That'll (hopefully) leave you with a working gentoo install in /gentoo/, granted, you'll only be able to chroot into it, but it's enough to set all the basics up. When you're ready, move the files over to root ( / ) and set your boot stuff appropriately, and you've got a working gentoo install.

Note: This does carry some risks though, so do be sure to have a remediation plan. Just in case. This also isn't a complete guide, but rather a quick overview.

I've installed more gentoo systems from random Linux livecds than the gentoo ones. I've been running gentoo as my primary since about 2007. Just this time I had to rush to get some work done as the ssd died and had to finish a feature for the next day.

Took a gamble on then newly released f39 fully intending to go back to gentoo when done, but now I feel lazy as f39 is working well right now.

Will see how things are the next time I need to install.

That's totally understandable, at the end of the day if it is working as you need, and does the job then it's "good enough" so to speak. Our computers are our tools, we often need them to "just work". :-)

I use gentoo on my desktop, and that works well for my use-case. But on my laptop, servers and other business computers I use a mixture of Fedora, Debian, RHEL, BSD, etc. :-)

Quoting: rhavenn

Quoting: grigiI needed to get a new work desktop up and running really fast, so I thought I'd try Fedora 39 Kde, an it's working well.
I do miss the much better devtool chain and slots from Gentoo though.

I also love the rolling release thing, whereas on Fedora I have to do big upgrades every few months, instead of being to run "stable" but with "latest release" mesa and installing git Python to test that libraries will be supported on the next version.
All at the same time.

Conflicted if I should move back...

If you want slightly more rolling just enable the testing repos. If you want to go all out you can run Rawhide, but there will be breakage there. I run the testing repos and haven't seen an issue. Granted, it's on a work PC so I don't have Steam or anything installed.

I wouldn't really call the Fedora testing repos a rolling release, as even if you stick to them you're kept to the same Fedora version which will eventually need an upgrade.

Rawhide would be extremely unstable in comparison to what he may be used to with Gentoo, in the case of Gentoo, rolling also doesn't necessarily mean you're stuck to the latest version of every package as you would be in say, Arch. You can have a stable Gentoo system that uses slightly older packages primarily[1], and then selectively mark some packages as "testing" to get the bleeding edge versions of just those. (although, if you wanted, you could also set it to have the latest of everything all the time.)

But it does move forward continually, so there is no "big" upgrade every 6 months.

[1] As an example, take the kernel:
https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-kernel/gentoo-sources

On 2023-11-28 the latest batch of kernels were released:
https://kernel.org/

With Gentoo, you could choose between using the latest 5.10, 5.15, 6.1, 6.5 or the latest 6.6 series kernel. It depends which one you would need on your setup. For example, I have chosen to stay on the 6.5 series until 6.6 has had a chance for more people to find issues. :)

- Anyway -

I seem to have accidentally hijacked this articles comment section with stuff about Gentoo..... Sorry Liam! I will stop now


Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 2 December 2023 at 12:54 am UTC

I'm hoping the GA release will be a good time to try Wayland again.