Around six months ago, I migrated my main machine to Manjaro, as mentioned here. I liked it, and I liked it enough that I also switched to using it as my home media PC / alarm clock.
It has been great, using it as my alarm clock. I don’t think I’ve been happier with my alarm clock setup, ever. The interface of using KAlarm is super easy, and as a proper calendar ought to, it can handle “second Sunday of the month” or “on the 15th of the month” events (for example). That Manjaro hooks into the high-quality audio on the soundbar I use on my television, makes the music it plays a joy to wake up to.
Alas, on my main machine, I drive Manjaro harder, and it crashes.
Of course, I have a lot more installed on my main machine. I do more with ImageMagick, Tesseract OCR, The GIMP, Kdenlive, and Mozilla Thunderbird. Although I have webmail, my primary interface to my mail server is Thunderbird. I like Thunderbird enough that I do a monthly donation to the project to help keep it going.
Both machines have the Nextcloud client on them; that’s how I get the MP3 files to the alarm clock PC. But I tend to do more file organizing on my main machine than on the alarm clock PC.
I don’t do Discord on the alarm clock PC, and I do on my main PC.
The two problems I was experiencing with Manjaro were:
- I’d click on something, and then Manjaro would crash to reboot.
- Just sitting there, the hardware would simply freeze. In other words, I’d be reading something on a web page, that might be long, and then I’d go to scroll, and everything was frozen. The clock had stopped updating, and there wasn’t enough machine left to poll the keyboard to see if the caps lock key or nums lock key had been hit.
The crash to reboot would happen maybe twice or thrice a week. This last Sunday, it did again, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so-to-speak.
What to move to? Although OpenSuSE has always been super stable, I still dislike how woke they’ve gone. Also, the last time I tried to install from an ISO of theirs, there was definitely something broken in the image.
I decided to try the Fedora KDE Spin. So far, I like it. It did present a couple of problems, however.
The first was that after I rebooted, I changed /home to mount to my second hard drive and I rebooted again. I could not log in as me. I could log in as root, but attempting to log in as me failed. In the journalctl the message was that an attempt to cd to my home drive failed, due to permissions.
I was fortunate that (logged in as root) the very first search I did found a Stack Overflow article which showed that the /home ownership had the wrong owner. I wish I could find that article now, so I could link to it. Anyway, the solution was:
restorecon -Rv /home
from the command line. I was already logged in as root, so I didn’t need sudo. If I could have gotten logged in as me, I wouldn’t have needed restorecon.
The second problem was that Firefox does not come with all the codecs for playing multimedia preinstalled. Manjaro did this beautifully. OpenSuSE is like Fedora this way, but it is easier to solve on OpenSuSE.
I ended up having to do a Firefox Refresh, which is less than fun. All my Multi-Account Containers now need to be redone, and I have a lot of them.
There are only two things that I don’t like about moving to this Fedora KDE spin.
One is that I have two monitors, and every time I move the mouse between them, something in KDE Plasma wants to “stick” the mouse cursor to the boundary between the two. I have to push the mouse an extra bit, to push past the current monitor and to the next one. I haven’t taken the time to find out if there is an easy fix for this, but I suspect that there is.
The other is that in Thunderbird, apparently Tools > Message Filters are stored in the Thunderbird directory and not in my user profile. This isn’t Fedora’s fault; it is something in Thunderbird.
I did choose to install the non-Flatpak version of Thunderbird, because I don’t like Flatpak. I have no idea if me keeping everything in my /home on a separate hard drive plays nice with Flatpak. Admittedly, I have not done the research. But it seems to me that when one changes distributions with significantly different packaging (rpm versus deb versus tar) that Flatpak would be a problem. I don’t know, but I doubted that Flatpak was the universal image for all Linux’s forever. Wasn’t Snap supposed to be that? (I don’t like Snap, either).
Anyway, I had more than 30 message filters, some with 20 email addresses in them, for filtering my mail into folders. Those message filters are gone. Rats!
I do like how Fedora KDE Spin puts the OK and Open buttons in the upper-right corner of dialog boxes instead of the lower right.