Hello from Fedora KDE

I recently did a bit of a major woops, and so I decided perhaps it is once again time to Linux distro hop and have settled on Fedora KDE.

You see even though I have been using computers since I was tiny in the days of the Amiga, and I've been using Linux for…21 years now (oh god, I feel old writing that), I'm still a bit of a complete moron at times. Why you might ask? Because I just like to ignore clear problems and "yolo" my way through things apparently.

I had an issue that annoyed me — my main Kubuntu 25.04 partition was getting filled up, and it caused a serious problem recently where I couldn't actually boot into it. Linux doesn't particularly handle a main drive being filled gracefully (still?!), so I thought - okay, I'll actually remove a bunch of games I'm not playing from the other partition and merge them into one big partition for my main drive. That would solve everything. I still had three other drives to fill with games that I keep telling myself I will get around to actually playing.

So, off to download an Ubuntu ISO I went. Burned it to a USB drive, loaded it up and started up gparted. This is where the problems began. The gparted app froze up on me. I (stupidly), thought nothing of it. Forced it closed, started it up again and it got stuck again but this time while scanning my drives for an eternity (okay, a few minutes but it didn't budge). I googled around, found I could launch gparted just on the specific drive I needed it for — it worked! Or, so I thought…

It was going to take an hour or so to resize the drive, so off I went to do some overdue housework. I came back a few times to inspect, all going well but eventually — it froze. Oh no. Oh dear. I left it a while again but it had very clearly frozen up, the app was doing nothing it was just totally stuck. In hindsight, if gparted on a live ISO is being weird, don't use it. Nevermind, lessons learned that will no doubt be ignored again in future.

The only reasonable thing to do at this point where you need your system back quick is to go totally nuclear right? Annihilate the partitions from orbit, and pick a new distribution while you're at it. And that's exactly what I did. So, hello from Fedora KDE - things are a bit different, but also very much the same. The new home that powers basically everything GamingOnLinux.

Feels just like /home

Luckily for me, I don't keep anything actually important on my main drive. It's spread across multiple other drives and the cloud, so nothing was actually lost. Apart from my ability to remember how to properly set up accessing the GamingOnLinux server from within the Dolphin file manager. But, this time when I had it all re-done, I actually noted down the exact steps. Hooray for less confusion for when I no doubt break something again. I'm really good at breaking things, as a few contributors and readers will know. There was the time I completely broke an install trying to compile OBS Studio from source, yes really. No I still don't know how I did it.

Fedora's newer installer is quite nice too, looks streamlined and somewhat inviting and works well! Got me back up and running in no time at all.

I'm glad the Fedora crew decided to promote their KDE edition to full status. KDE Plasma is simply my love, I couldn't be without it nowadays. No hate to the GNOME crew, but your desktop and the design decisions around it just doesn't jive with me. I like all the options KDE Plasma gives me. That, and KDE Plasma is the Desktop Mode on Steam Deck and soon the Steam Frame and Steam Machine too - so it's nice to have everything match.

Anyway, back to work. Carry on.