How much difference do Fedora Spins make?

Linux Distributions
1

I have recently moved from Bazzite to Fedora Budgie and if I am being honest I have not found it to be what I was hoping.

I liked Bazzite and everything just worked but I started to find that using only Flatpaks was too restrictive for what I wanted to achieve. I thought that moving to Fedora which Bazzite is based on would open things up a little more but still give me an overall experience similar to Bazzite were everything just working.

I chose the Budgie Spin as it looked nice and seemed to have a default application selection that I liked but since installing it things have not been as smooth as I would have liked and I have encountered several issues in general usage that I didn’t have when using Bazzite.

For example, VLC has odd audio playback issues where sometimes the audio just doesn’t play unless I skip around a bit and then it might start. Similarly with VLC sometimes some videos just don’t show anything other than a black screen and you can occasionally hear audio due to the above mentioned audio issue. If I use the included Parole media player these issues not no occur but subtitles don’t work as well with Parole.

I have encountered other random quirks in general usage and I am wondering if this is just the nature of Fedora vs Bazzite or if using the Budgie Spin might be the cause of some of these odd occurrences and if going to Fedora KDE (not a big fan of the Gnome look) would help resolve these odd behaviours.

So, do Spins have a greater impact on the overall experience of Fedora? or do Spins just chance how things look due to the different desktop environments and going to a main Fedora edition I am going to experience the same oddness that I am now?

2

Did you use vlc installed via flatpak or rpm?

Also you can install multiple desktop environments on fedora without need of reinstalling fedora. So you can install plasma KDE and try it out.

3

I installed it through Discover not using Flatpak.

Ended up installing Fedora KDE and then solved that audio issue with installing codecs which was a bit of a throw back to earlier days of the Internet.

Good to know, I am keen to try a few other DEs but don’t want to go through the reinstall process.

4

Yeah, I heard it’s licensing issue.

FYI, here is a tutorial on how to easily install DE in Fedora:

5

I tried the official docs to try and install Budgie and I got the following errors.

Problem 1: problem with installed package

installed package initial-setup-gui-wayland-plasma-43.101-3.fc44.noarch conflicts with firstboot(gui-backend) provided by initial-setup-gui-wayland-miriway-26.01-1.fc44.noarch from fedora

package initial-setup-gui-wayland-miriway-26.01-1.fc44.noarch from fedora conflicts with firstboot(gui-backend) provided by initial-setup-gui-wayland-plasma-43.101-3.fc44.noarch from fedora conflicting requests

Problem 2: problem with installed package

installed package sddm-wayland-plasma-6.6.4-1.fc44.noarch conflicts with sddm-greeter-displayserver provided by sddm-wayland-miriway-26.01-1.fc44.noarch from fedora

package sddm-wayland-miriway-26.01-1.fc44.noarch from fedora conflicts with sddm-greeter-displayserver provided by sddm-wayland-plasma-6.6.4-1.fc44.noarch from fedora

conflicting requests
You can try to add to command line:
–allowerasing to allow removing of installed packages to resolve problems
–skip-broken to skip uninstallable packages

Judging only by the names “initial-setup” and “greeter-displayserver” I am guessing I probably and safe to skip those two rather than remove the existing packages.

6

I haven’t used Fedora for a year now so I don’t know right away how to fix it. But did you by any chance install miriway?

7

I did not. After getting the errors I backed out to research the why and what to do rather than going ahead and potentially breaking something.