I have been using Debian Stable MATE for a number of years now. I like the stability of it. MATE is a nice desktop, fairly minimal, not too minimal, and keeps out of your way.
Last year I upgraded to a Beelink computer, which has a tiny form factor and is much more powerful than my previous computer, which was of c. 2010 vintage.
A few weeks ago I bought myself a swanky ASUS 4k monitor. I was happy enough to contemplate buying a 1080p monitor, but I figured that if I was going to splash the cash, I might as well do a proper upgrade. In retrospect it was a good move. 4k is too tiny, but there was a nice spot between 1080p and 4k that suits me fine.
I had tried Fedora in the past - around the 30’ish mark - and I left feeling unimpressed. I went back to Debian. I tried GNOME on Debian, and it wasn’t horrible. That’s a pretty low bar to clear, mind.
So I decided to go the whole hog and try out Fedora with just the GNOME desktop. Fedora seems OK. It is up-to-date. My bluetooth still doesn’t work on Linux, but I think that is a kernel issue that will take the maintainers time to resolve. It’s no biggy for me as I don’t really use bluetooth anyway.
Fedora seems quite bleeding edge, which is a change from Debian Stable. There’s been no big gotchas. I quickly found out I should install RPMFusion to get mplayer working. I also have a few programs that work with OSS, which was relatively easy to install.
I figured that since I was playing with GNOME, I could try building an app for it. app-builder is available from the central repos, but seems to have a bug in it, preventing it from working. So I installed the flatpak version, which worked, but was incompatible with the version of Glade. That’s that project shelved for sometime in the future, then.
GNOME. Hmmm, that vexed question. I do like that the settings are all in one place. I like how the apps are searchable. I think you need to watch a few vids on YT to see about shortcuts and getting a decent workflow going.
I have recently been using the kitty terminal emulator, which I found to be pretty good. I thought I’d give GNOME’s one a go, though. I found that I could have a fairly decent set-up on my 4k monitor as a development environment. I have firefox on the right half of the screen for reference purposes. On the left side I have 6 terminals going on the boil. One for compiling and others for editing. I needed to skrink the fonts down a bit. I actually quite like the way it is set up, and I think it’s actually better than the way I was using it before on MATE.
So, yeah, I’m fairly positive, although I of course reserve the right to rage-quit Fedora, GNOME, and the machinations of Darth Poeterring. The sage continues.