As I have documented before, I bounce around far too much between Linux distributions. I freely admit I tend to do this when I'm stressed about other things in life, and this response must be something akin to prove to myself that I have something that I'm proficient at. Over the years I have used Fedora from the early days of the Redhat -> Fedora transition, right through to today.

Something always seems to draw me back to Fedora. I really like the community, and sites like https://discussion.fedoraproject.org keep me engaged with the project through trying to be helpful to others having issues. I also learn much from the answers others give to questions, often filing those nuggets of wisdom away to use when I have that issue. I read the new articles at https://fedoramagazine.org even. I follow #fedora and #fedora-social on IRC so you could say that I'm somewhat engaged in the community.

I'm always curious why I move away and come back to Fedora. Sure I have my moments of nervousness around IBM's involvement in Fedora, but in reality they have been a good steward of the resources that Fedora develops and passes on to the Redhat releases. They employee a good amount of programmers, offer material resources, and generally have seemed to put a light touch on the distrobution as a whole. I at one point thought that I was making a digital sovereignty choice to move a "European" distribution like Ubuntu or the like. Of course this fails to recognize that the Fedora community is world-wide, just like any other distribution.

So, I'm back on Fedora and this time with KDE. Here's some impressions after using it for 2 weeks:

• Fedora in general is a warm hug. DNF alone just makes me happy.
• KDE 6.5 is a bit more stable than I remember it being. The applications like Tokodon seem to be far more resilient than I remember them being.
• If you can relax about FMU or fear of missing updates constantly, you don't have reboot each day and simply watch for the high priority updates (looking at you kernel updates).
• It seems snappy and simply turning off the bluetooth on this E480 gives a reasonable amount of battery life.

Sure there are some things that I do that are a bit harder on Fedora, such as using my SDR to listen to the local repeater traffic. There is an package for SDR++ in the repository but is older (not old) but still usable. It's a bit harder to make WSJT-X work for probably reasons of my own making, but at least it is available. This all more than I could say for my time with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (not slight, just harder to get those applications over there).

While Gnome has started to have integrated media controls in the lock screen, KDE seems to allow for media controls throughout the experience. It's rather handy when in a customer service environment when I might need to pause or mute media so I can take a call. While I love the workflow of Gnome, if I'm patient learning the key commands, it can operate much the way my 30 years of IT work wants it to. Oh, how I have abused my brain with Windows 3.11, OS/2, Windows 95, OS9, OS X, Windows 2000, etc.

If you are looking to try a "fresher" KDE distribution, I would recommend Fedora 43 KDE for the stability and familiarity of RPM based Linux.