It to mention that fractional scaling does work well, just it’s disabled by default so you need to toggle it on first.
Fair enough; I'm a casual still using dual 1080p panels (though I
wish I was able to score dual 1920x1200 panels; reject 16:9 modernity and embrace 16:10 tradition). Easy to forget that fractional scaling is useful once you breach the 1440p threshold.
I've been drafting up the below in my Markdown notes for a while, idk if anyone really cares, but I wanna share my experiences regardless.
SIX MONTHS LATER: WHAT LIVING WITH FEDORA IS LIKE
A sober reflection on living with Fedora 43, and now 44, six months after installing it on a new gaming PC I built on Cyber Monday 2025
HOW, AND WHY, DID I END UP ON FEDORA IN THE FIRST PLACE?
To make an obscenely long story short:
- While shopping for parts to spruce up my old gaming PC, I saw a 9070 XT on sale for $600 at Micro Center and I just couldn't pass it up. Built a whole new PC and converted the old one into a home server.
- I'm an LTS guy, but my 9070 XT requires at least Linux kernel version 6.14; I built this PC on 01DEC2025 and Linux Mint didn't offer HWE kernels for my hardware until April 2026. By that point, it was far too little and much too late; already settled into Fedora by that point.
- I hate Arch Linux and all assorted variants for one singular reason: the official repositories are *slim* and *far* too much stuff is contingent upon me utilising the AUR. It's not exactly "optional" if half of what I want is there.
- I hate modern Ubuntu variants because Canonical completely stopped giving a shit about their desktop users and went all-in on the server, cloud, and IoT markets. Ubuntu desktops of yore were excellent. Ubuntu desktops of today? Rubbish. At least Ubuntu Server is still plenty usable.
- I'd like to use my gaming PC, not spend eleventy bazillion hours compiling things with Gentoo.
- I completely forgot that openSUSE Tumbleweed exists, but even if I had considered it, I would've probably dismissed it because it's an RPM-forward distro with systemd, no more YaST, and they abandoned AppArmor and ufw for SELinux and Firewalld for Leap 16. What's the point?
- I adamantly refuse to touch a "gaming" distro like Bazzite or Nobara because I have strong opinions all the same as the developers of such "gaming" distros... and they're completely contrary to the assumptions that the Bazzite and Nobara teams make. Same also applies for CachyOS too but that was already disqualified for being an Arch variant.
- This basically left Fedora as the "only" option that fits my arbitrary selection criteria. I'm not particularly happy about that.
Lifelong axiom of being a Linux user:
never pledge allegiance to one company over the other.
All Linux companies are fucking awful
despite their boundless contributions, funding, infrastructure, and paid manpower. That said, Red Hat definitely takes the cake as the first among equals of shitty Linux companies. Using Fedora right now means that I'm basically getting a front row seat to what
Red Hat wants desktop Linux to look like. While they're not an omniscient bogeyman worth doomsaying over, they have their hands in
more than enough free software projects such that what they want comes to pass more often than not. Systemd, Wayland, PulseAudio and later PipeWire, need I go on?
If I had opted to only take Workstation (GNOME Shell) or Plasma at face value... odds are I would've just sat on the 9070XT PC after being built and stayed on my old tower as my primary gaming PC with the Linux Mint install while waiting for Linux Mint 23 to drop. Fortunately, Fedora has spins for anti-Wayland Luddites like yours truly. I ultimately settled on Fedora Cinnamon, but MATE+Compiz and Xfce were also pretty damn ace. Xorg-forward, Cinnamon has no plans to deprecate X11, Fedora already tracks the latest kernel and RPM Fusion provides the latest Mesa. I can play my Steam games, my GOG library off Heroic, emulate all the vidya I so choose, and also binge on local media like music, movies, and TV shows. Truly, Fedora is the lazy man's bleeding edge Linux distro by a substantial margin.
WAS IT PAINFUL?
Well... yeah, but what Linux distro
ain't painful? Even Linux Mint has its edge cases where it comes
just shy of being well and truly "adequate." This is the social contract you implicitly agree to when you decide to abandon Windows (or OSX) in favour of Linux: you're trading off
some niceties and legitimate comforts for
more control over your shit, and most importantly,
silence. Some Linux distros are more painful to adjust to than others, but the name of the game with Linux is still
some modicum of pain. Fedora is unique insofar as it being simultaneously painful
and painless. I'd say it's like a 60/40 split... with the "pain" having the 40. I know, I can't believe it either! The "true" pain with Fedora is less mechanical and more philosophical. Fedora's mechanical pain points are a direct consequence of its philosophical orientation. For example:
PAIN POINT #1:
Fedora ships an almost entirely FOSS stack, barring binary firmware in the Linux kernel. While this is admirable, it also coincides with both software *and* hardware codecs being excluded by default because Red Hat's an American company operating under the constraints of American export controls, American copyright law, and the general American business culture imperative to minimise liabilities wherever possible.
RESOLUTION:
RPM Fusion. It's quasi-official anyway considering how the vast majority of paid Fedora developers also maintain RPM Fusion in their spare time. Not to mention that Fedora 42 officially started allowing RPM Fusion repo access for Steam, Google Chrome, PyCharm, and the NVIDIA driver through the new Anaconda Web UI installer... while conveniently omitting the RPM Fusion repos that actually matter, like
free,
nonfree,
free-tainted, and
nonfree-tainted. I haven't been a Linux casual since the Ubuntu 10.04 days when I was a high school sophomore, so terminal all the way for enabling RPM Fusion alongside
ffmpeg-freeworld for full multimedia software codec support,
mesa-freeworld with proper VA-API hardware acceleration,
libdvdcss (yes, some of us still watch DVDs, settle down), and blah blah blah.
PAIN POINT #2:
Fedora is the proverbial belly of the beast; a crucible for Linux technologies that I remain ambivalent toward at best (i.e. PipeWire, PulseAudio, systemd)
or viscerally despise with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns at worst (i.e. Wayland). By using
any Fedora version, spin, or variant, you're basically agreeing to be a lab rat for Red Hat's vision of what the Linux desktop
should be, whether you like it or not. To be fair, it ain't all bad: Fedora's governance is remarkably transparent relative to other FOSS projects with significant community backing. Problem is that a jackoff like me who speaks with the crass brusqueness of a working man gets censured real quick unless I tell ChatGPT "oi m8 I called too many people "cunts" in this post for goin off their rocker. Clean it up so I won't get censured, y dontcha?"
RESOLUTION: It's more of a non-resolution, but the answer is "grit my teeth, bear it until I can't bear it no more, go back to Linux Mint if the latest Red Hat controversy of the week pisses me off that bad. Maybe flirt with a QEMU image via
virt-manager a few years down the road when my acrimony is still present but no longer acutely felt." It's my own arbitrary selection criteria that had me end up on Fedora Cinnamon over Artix, Gentoo, or openSUSE Tumbleweed anyway. It sucks, but hey: no
uutils or
sudo-rs lunacy that breaks everything like in every goddamn Ubuntu release since 24.04.
PAIN POINT #3:
SELinux and firewalld are hideously overengineered for a home user context, but they're prevalent here in Fedora since it's a Red Hat project. No more AppArmor or
ufw niceties for you!
RESOLUTION: Learn to live with them
despite the suck. Firewalld is actually
more accommodating because it interfaces cleanly with
nftables, opening and closing individual ports is easy (if a bit verbose) with
firewall-cmd, Fedora's desktop editions have a shockingly versatile number of ports open by default for you to fiddle with, and the zone methodology is surprisingly rational if you're like me and you run a home server now. SELinux is... well let's just politely yet firmly state that it's an indictment unto SELinux itself for
paid RHEL engineers to explicitly hedge every goddamn tutorial video officially published by Red Hat by acknowledging "yes, this is painful because the syntax is obtuse and the tools aren't unified. I wish it were different, maybe it'll change in the future, this is what we need to live and work with." Having said that,
setenforce 0 is amateur hour. If I hate Red Hat Poetterware software slop as much as I claim I do, the least I can do is properly inform myself of its virtues, pitfalls, quirks, neuroses, design, and assumptions by actually
living with the damn software in the first place and learning it on
their terms. If I'm gonna hate something, I ought to inform myself properly to maximise the rhetorical effect of my hatred, right?
PAIN POINT #4:
Fedora Flatpaks, while appealing insofar as condensing all runtimes into a single binary, have a spotty track record for quality.
RESOLUTION: Don't fucking use
any Flatpaks if you can help it. That's easy enough for me because I'm a stodgy old fart who prefers the muscle memory of "GUI terminal application ->
sudo dnf --refresh update -y ->
sudo dnf install foo" over faffing around with GNOME Software and its inclination to highlight Flatpaks over proper transactional RPM packages. I personally came to despise Flatpaks after finding out that Flathub runtime environments are liable to go kaput and defunct. So much for having a GTK2 runtime to play the
Linux-native version of The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings via Heroic Games Launcher; no wonder CD Projekt RED never bothered with a Linux binary for Witcher 3. These days, my hierarchy is "native RPM packages > self-contained, distro-agnostic binaries (re: the Tor Browser Bundle) > AppImages for emulators like PCSX2, DuckStation, melonDS, mGBA, and so on... maybe Obsidian whenever I get bored of qOwnNotes > FOSS programs I have the wherewithal to
git clone and compile from source (I've done it at least twice for shits and giggles) > Flatpaks for whatever you need that lacks the aforementioned (I only have one optional Flatpak installed... and that's adamcake's Bolt launcher for RuneScape 3 and OSRS; I yearn for the days of RuneScape.jar; everything else are default Flatpaks that Fedora Cinnamon ships with by default)
ARE THERE OBSCURE PROBLEMS WITH FEDORA FEW (IF ANY) PEOPLE TALK ABOUT?
Several. I also have zero faith in any meaningful change happening.
PROBLEM #1:
Fedora's official documentation is total dogshit ass. Bifurcated between the Fedora Wiki and the Fedora Documentation portal. The
Fedora Wiki is more akin to a
developer's wiki, and not an all-in-one portal for technical documentation. The
Documentation portal itself is
extremely shallow and functions more like an index. I'm gonna be blunt here: most relevant day-to-day "how the fuck do I do this?" troubleshooting is better served by the venerable ArchWiki.
You will almost never find anything of value on either portal (wiki or docs). The only time you'll probably ever touch Fedora Docs is to make sure you do the dnf upgrade song and dance correctly. Literally every Linux distro is basically the same thing: kernel + systemd + GNU tooling + display stack + package management ecosystem + mandatory access controls; it's only the last two that truly differentiates most mainline Linux distros anymore. Therefore, ArchWiki >>> Fedora Documentation portal in like 90% of circumstances. The remaining 10% aren't even best handled by Fedora Documentation either; it's best served by the goddamn
RHEL DOCUMENTATION PORTAL. Firewalld, SELinux, and Cockpit (among
many others) are covered in
much greater detail in the
downstream product! What the actual hell, man?! I wouldn't take such umbrage with this if the Fedora Documentation portal had useful articles for stuff like Firewalld, SELinux, Cockpit, getting Blu-ray playback via
libaacs,
libbdplus, and
libbluray functioning (yes, I have a BD+DVD RW drive; sadly it's a USB drive because my SSD setup eats up all my SATA ports), etc etc. But no, it's completely fucking infantile. I ain't asking for you to pardon my French anymore; Fedora was explicitly meant to be a project for "the Linux hobbyist" once upon a time. Why are we abstracting away genuinely useful information? Why are we pretending that Fedora's userbase
ain't full of people who already know how to
grep text files, use
journalctl, and have the Red Hat Bugzilla account integration set up whenever a SIGSEGV happens?
PROBLEM #2:
All the fun stuff has Ubuntu/Debian assumptions. Not just Chrome, Spotify, basically any major proprietary application that elects to maintain binary application repositories instead of defaulting to Flatpaks, either. I'm talking about stuff like Docker Compose, where making it run on Fedora
is possible, but SELinux and Firewalld will always get in your own way of firing up say... Navidrome or Jellyfin or FreshRSS. Theoretically, Podman can fill the void. I can also personally attest to standalone Podman paired with
systemd --user services being far superior to standalone Docker. Unfortunately, Podman Compose is total dogshit ass too! It's the
uutils of containerisation insofar as getting you like... 65-70% of the way there, but you can never quite work out the boundary between Podman Compose shitting the bed
or your own shitty translation of a
docker-compose.yml template into a Podman Compose equivalent, or if it's just the Docker Compose image itself being completely effed upstream.
PROBLEM #3:
I have no incentive to participate in the Fedora community. Fedora Magazine is full of authors who are literal Fedora developers, but they
all write like I'm an impaired and infantile desktop user who "oohs" and "aahs" over vague descriptions of large scale updates. Oh, but don't you
ever point out how condescending and idiotic they sound. Why? Fedora Discussions has no place for acerbic commentary on genuinely frustrating oversights and design choices; mind you, I'm the one who swears so much that a salty sailor would slap me and say "Well, I never!" Fedora's governance is community-oriented to a certain degree, but Red Hat always gets the final say. Even if that's just an uncharitable post hoc rationalisation born of cynicism and pessimism, let's not forget that Fedora's governance structure is still full of people who
work for Red Hat. What incentive do otherwise conscientious objectors have from getting in the way of the assholes who sign their paycheques? I'd rather spend that type of energy writing to my local congressmen or attending community meetings held at the local police precinct every month.
PROBLEM #4:
Fedora's glory days are long behind it. A huge consequence of ecosystem convergence, convergence that was largely spearheaded
by Red Hat however directly or indirectly, is that you no longer have meaningful differentiation between your competitors. As stated earlier: kernel + systemd + GNU tooling + display stack + package management ecosystem + your choice of mandatory access controls (or none at all) is what every goddamn Linux distro basically is. Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 13 were meaningfully different from one another in more ways than Ubuntu 26.04 and Fedora 44 currently are. The days of going to your local library to rent a copy of "Linux for Dummies" where it ships with a KNOPPIX and a Fedora Core disc in the little sleeve are
long past us. No one
ever recommends a Fedora or even a
Red Hat variant for noobs. Linux Mint is the uncontested king, and the people who waste their time evangelising for Fedora Atomic and variants of that platform like Bazzite, only appeal to foolhardy normies who think "psh, Linux Mint's amateur hour. I want something more TECHNICAL" only to balk at the value proposition once you need to actually layer stuff in via
rpm-ostree and get kicked square in the urethra once you realise you need to self-host your own image and rebase to it. All the greasy, sweaty, maladjusted turbonerd power users who need something truly granular have more robust options like Arch and Gentoo to play with. Fedora's only real niche, at least for me, is "the lazy man's bleeding edge Linux distro." It's a job that's done admirably, yes, but not without considerable cost. FFS is it too much to ask for a minimal-netinstall ISO so I can manually build my way up, the way that I can with Debian, Ubuntu, or even
Arch?
IS FEDORA CAPABLE OF SPARKING JOY?
Surprisingly enough... yes. It really does spark joy. Okay, "joy" is a bit of an overstatement. It's more like "contentment in finally having software that's adequate, functional, and
nothing more." The irony is that I'm using more recent versions of Cinnamon that most Linux Mint users probably only get to experience every 2-5 years. The transition from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44 tripped me up because the Cinnamon start menu changed ever so slightly with different icons and different column spacing. Turns out that this version of Cinnamon is what will actually ship in Linux Mint 23 (whenever that launches)! I got the updated Cinnamon just two days shy of the April Linux Mint blog post roundup thingamajigger that Clem does at the end of every month. That was pretty funny, all things considered.
The ways that Fedora sparked joy for me are mostly divorced from a desktop use context, surprisingly enough. It's "common knowledge" that Fedora's priorities lean toward enterprise features and innovation for its own sake. That's the canned line that every Linux blogger and news outlet's talked about since Bob Young and Mark Ewing sunsetted Red Hat Linux in favour of Fedora Core in 2003. Having a home server (using Ubuntu Server because Docker Compose relies on Ubuntu/Debian-forward assumptions that I learned about the hard way... I digress) means that I regularly ssh in and out of it. I don't like firing up a GUI terminal all the time, I always have a Firefox window open at any given time, so guess what? I learned firsthand of
Cockpit and its countless excellencies, joys, perfections, and virtues (in case it wasn't clear... I
adore this program). Cockpit, a Red Hat product, makes Ubuntu Server 24.04
that much nicer to use. The irony ain't lost on me!
I have... tons of venomous hyperbole to levy against Fedora Server and its appallingly inept implementation and performance for Raspberry Pi (especially given how it
ain't available on Raspberry Pi Imager of all things!). Not the time, nor the place for that criticism... but I would say that my temper and disposition against Fedora Server softened a fair bit once I tried some headless QEMU VM shenanigans with the official QCOW2 images that
Fedora Server (and IOT/Cloud/CoreOS) has available. I will spare you my hatred of SELinux, and instead
warn anyone reading this to do the
restorecon song and dance if they downloaded the QCOW2 image from Firefox and moved it to
/var/lib/libvirt/images. The only way to avoid that headache altogether is to literally
cd in a terminal to that directory, then execute
sudo wget https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/44/Server/x86_64/images/Fedora-Server-Guest-Generic-44-1.7.x86_64.qcow2.
On the flip side, QEMU and freely accessible QCOW2 images mean that I have a staging ground for any home lab shenanigans before I commit to bare metal. Though this is more the joy that QEMU and
virt-manager sparks, and not anything inherent
to Fedora itself. Nevertheless, I have the capacity to fiddle around with headless server things on a grossly overbuilt PC that plays vidya and does workstation crap with aplomb. I suppose that's more of an impetus for me to check out AlmaLinux, Ubuntu Cloud, basically any distro that provides a QCOW2 image. Fedora Cinnamon itself does a bang-up job as a substrate for my shenanigans, so I really have no complaints. Only real bottleneck is decision paralysis and whether or not I can resist the urge to just play SMT Nocturne on PCSX2 with a Firefox window open on the fusion calculator to see how quickly I can fuse Uzume and Daisoujou. That actually brings me perfectly into the next thing I wanted to talk about.
CAN YOU PLAY CRYSIS (or any other video game) ON FEDORA (comfortably)?
The answer is a resounding yes. I know, I can't believe it either! Provided that you go through the whole
RPM Fusion Multimedia song and dance, and make damn sure you install the 32-bit hardware acceleration, Steam, Epic, GOG, Heroic, and Prime/Luna games
will work about as well as you can reasonably expect (except the mass-market slop with invasive anticheat and the obscure titles with Windows Media Framework FMVs). Steam, Heroic, Lutris, all those clients work as you'd expect. I will concede that I'm not a multiplayer gamer; the most multiplayer I do in a week are in Master Duel ranked singles, Warframe defend missions, Space Marine 2 co-op, and Dark Souls III co-op and invasions. Maybe if I actually owned stuff like Dragon Ball FighterZ, Street Fighter IV, or even did SSB Melee netplay via Dolphin, I'd be singing a different tune... or maybe the same tune. Either way, I don't know. At the barest of minimums, Fedora 44 (released 28APR2026)
finally has
ntsync enabled by default! That's one less reason for Bazzite to exist, and the fewer reasons for Bazzite to exist, the better!
Insofar as
emulation is concerned: Fedora handles emulators with grace and aplomb. I would be more concerned if it
didn't handle my retro games with aplomb to be frank. Even 15-20 years ago, emulation was one of the things that Linux could arguably do
better than on Windows. All the big emulators like Snes9x, DuckStation/Mednafen, PCSX2, RPCS3, PPSSPP, Dolphin, mGBA/VisualBoyAdvance, Desmume/melonDS, Citra/Lime3DS/Azahar, and so on, are beloved FOSS staples of any seasoned retro gaming enthusiast's toolkit. You can spare yourself the headache of running individual emulators and just rawdog RetroArch as an all-in-one aggregator. They either have AppImages, Flatpaks, or native distro packages for just about every goddamn Linux distro under the sun. Does Fedora do anything unique to help retro gamers? Not really, but it certainly doesn't
hurt my retro gaming experience.
A huge upshot to tracking Fedora is that the Linux kernel, the related firmware, the underlying Mesa graphics stack (re: from RPM Fusion), all that stuff, tracks
stupidly close to upstream. I've spent a ton of time over the years daily driving slow-paced stuff like mainline Debian, Ubuntu Server, and Linux Mint. Honestly? It feels kinda liberating not having to faff around with Debian Backports, the PPA song and dance, or anything else along those lines. This sounds more like developer jargon, but you'd be
blown away how stuff that ran "well enough but with minor niggles here and there" on Linux Mint somehow work "perfectly without qualification" on Fedora with the same launcher args, the same Proton version, etc etc. This is a natural consequence of Valve, AMD, Intel, etc working closely with the upstream kernel and Mesa team, and naturally those teams work at a much faster pace than the LTS crowd does. Honestly, I prefer LTS either way, but I still appreciate the change of pace regardless.
IS FEDORA WORTH RUNNING, REGARDLESS OF HOW I QUALIFY IT?
I suppose so, yes. I'd personally recommend a Xorg-forward spin like Cinnamon, MATE+Compiz, and XFCE. Yet the other spins (and there are countless) are probably worth their salt too. If you're in a bind where you need a reasonably up-to-date kernel and/or display stack for such and such hardware, Fedora's probably the least shitty of many bad options. Unfortunately, I think my ambivalence is specifically because Linux desktops (as a whole, not just Fedora specifically) still feel like they haven't evolved past 2015. Where's the Ubuntu Unity from 12.04 that was genuinely excellent kit with contextual/fuzzy search via the ALT button in the dashboard? Where's the granular flexibility of Openbox, paired with sweaty turbodorks sharing their XML files via code blocks in forum posts and eventually GitHub? It's all just... bland, boring, and utterly milquetoast. So many GUI tools are deliberately omitting or otherwise obfuscating critical functionality. Everyone's thinking that the average user is a severely inept loser who quivers in their boots at anything remotely resembling a command line. Developer convenience is prioritised over user ergonomics. It's all so fucking tiresome man. As it stands, Fedora Cinnamon does what I need it to do and nothing more. That's an achievement unto itself, especially given how many distros (including Fedora in Workstation and Plasma releases) consistently try and fail to reinvent the wheel every other year. My biggest concern is "is this achievement sustainable?" That's a much harder question to answer, and tbh, I don't even think the Fedora guys themselves know the answer to that question either.
