Fedora Kinoite first impressions
A few days ago I installed Fedora Kinoite on my media PC connected to the living room TV, and it's left me rather disappointed. For some context, the laptop was running Mint before this, but I felt like it was time to refresh things after several years since the last clean install. Being put on the waitlist for the Steam Machine was a push to finally get around to it since I don't expect a restock soon, and the release of Plasma Bigscreen sent me in the direction of KDE Plasma. Bazzite set up to boot into Big Picture mode would also be a good option, but unfortunately the laptop doesn't quite have the horsepower to run Steam (whether playing the games itself, streaming them, or just keeping it in the background) on the 4K TV, so a gaming focused distro like Bazzite was out. The appliance-like nature of an immutable OS was appealing for the living room use case, and Bazzite is based on Kinoite, so it was a pretty easy decision to try that out given the good track record my partner has had with Bazzite (still running great!).
With that decision made, all files backed up, and an afternoon free, I got to installing. The first hiccup I ran into is that Kinoite doesn't offer a live image to test things out before installing! I flashed another drive with a Fedora KDE Plasma edition image to test things that way, and everything worked as expected. I went ahead with installing Kinoite with that reassurance and happily everything did go smoothly. Not a surprise since this laptop has had no issues running Linux in the past, but always nice to see.
Once it was installed and my account was set up I installed Plasma Bigscreen. That took a little bit of figuring out since I have no prior experience with rpm-ostree, but before long it was installed too and with a quick log out, switch session, log back in I was using Bigsceen. It's clearly not intended to be a keyboard and mouse desktop environment, but it looks good on the TV and was still perfectly navigable so it loses no points for me using it that way (using the TV remote as input with HDMI CEC didn't work either, but that is almost certainly a hardware limitation so once again no lost points).
Since this is a media pc the first thing I did was go to test out playing videos off of my external hard drive. I opened Dolphin (the file manager) and saw that there were no thumbnails being shown regardless of the layout I chose, but that's not the biggest issue, something for another time. Clicking on the file I wanted to play I was greeted with a dialogue to choose which program to use to open it. This surprised me but hey, sometimes file associations need to be set, no big deal. Except I couldn't find a media player to choose. Seemingly Kinoite comes with no video (or audio!) player out the gate! For a distro that markets itself with "Surf the web, keep in touch with friends, manage files, enjoy music and video, and get productive at work without having to worry about breaking your system." this was especially shocking. No matter, I installed Haruna, Elisa, and VLC (for good measure) from the Discover store and was watching videos and listening to music with no issue. Still no thumbnails in Dolphin which I was hoping installing those would fix, but I figured maybe that's just how Dolphin is designed.
As far as streaming video is concerned, Dropout.tv and YouTube both worked fine, so I was satisfied everything I needed was working as intended (installing my password manager from Discover worked too, so I could log in everywhere). At least I was satisfied until I came home from work and my partner reported that Beacon.tv (Critical Role's streaming service) wasn't working, which is bizarre because it has worked just fine on Bazzite. Off to investigate! Opening Beacon, the player just showed a black box and no error message. The console was no help either, some CORS messages but nothing that made sense to be causing this issue, at least not to me. I had a hunch it might be missing codecs so I went off to find those. I found some messages online saying installing programs through Flatpak should have all the dependencies you need including codecs, so why worry? That wasn't helpful since either the default Firefox was missing codecs regardless, or isn't installed through Flatpak, and I'm not about to install two Firefoxes on one system (and fuck Chrome), that's just a recipe for misery. Some more searching led me to this Howto for hardware and software codecs for SilverBlue, Kinoite, and CoreOS. Following the instructions plus a few reboots later and Beacon was working! And wouldn't you know it, thumbnails are appearing in Dolphin now too.
That's about where I am now. I seem to have everything working after a fair amount of time in the terminal learning rpm-ostree and going where my intuition from years of troubleshooting computers (Linux or otherwise) led me. This was not at all what I expected coming from Mint, Pop!_OS, and Bazzite as well as Fedora's own website. If this is was someone's first exposure to Linux it's no wonder that they would bounce off of it hard, especially if they aren't working with computers in this way on the regular. I have a newfound respect for "batteries included" distros too. I have a hard time understanding who exactly belongs to Kinoite's core audience, or at least who would be best served by it over the other options out there. I do intent to continue using it for at least a bit now that it's in working order, but once I have another free afternoon and the interest I plan on distro hopping some more. Aurora is what I have my eyes on for the next reinstall, I'm hoping to find the ease of use I was looking for in Kinoite but without the gaming focus of Bazzite. Whenever that happens I'll be sure to post about it, hopefully with far fewer words dedicated to the bumps in the road.