Formatted my Desktop PC

Every now and then I will format my Desktop PC and move to the latest version of Pop!_OS. With the latest release of Pop!_OS 24.04 and the new COSMIC desktop, I have decided to part ways with it, in favour of Fedora 43 KDE Edition.

For years, Pop!_OS has been my go-to daily driver on both my desktop and my laptop. I have had a great experience with it. It's been stable, resource efficient and compatible with all my hardware. It did everything I needed it to do. Integrations were good and GNOME shell extensions were aplenty thanks to the open source development community.

With the official release of COSMIC desktop last month, I had a play around with it and decided against it (for now). During its alpha release stage, I made a list of what I wanted from it. It's a good first release, but it's not as feature rich as I'm accustomed to.

It's lacking Nextcloud integration with files and calendar. There's no weather applet, bitcoin price applet, drop-down terminal replacement, home assistant integration, firmware integration with Lenovo. I'm certain this will all be ironed out in the future.

I knew eventually I would need to make a decision on which distro I wanted to use for my desktop. I went distro hopping for my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen13 and landed on Fedora 43 KDE Edition. I tried it on my desktop PC and it's been excellent.

I use my desktop for video content creation (obs-studio, kdenlive), gaming (steam) and video calls (zoom). Happy to report all of this works well on Fedora 43 KDE Edition. There is a slight grievance with Wayland using remote desktop share over Zoom - the keyboard characters when you type on the sharing partner's screen will not be the correct characters.

If you're looking for a nice, polished, feature rich, well maintained and supported Linux distribution and desktop environment with good hardware compatibility and community contributions, I would highly recommend Fedora KDE edition. I've been using it for a few months now (both on laptop and desktop) and it's been great.