I have a laptop – a Framework 13, AMD CPU – which I received for the purpose of making KDE-on-FreeBSD good on it. For KDE Akademy Reasons, that laptop is covered in stickers: bicycle stickers, KDE, RUN BSD .. and it got three Linuxes installed on it next to FreeBSD. I mentioned that KDE Akademy is people, and I’d like to thank Doug (openSUSE), Neal (Fedora) and Harald (KDE Linux) for helping me get the bits in place. Here’s some brief notes about the resulting systems.

  • I must have botched the openSUSE installation. This is my go-to Linux distro for the past ten years at least and … this time it just isn’t a very good experience. A KDE Plasma 6 session auto-starts, but it is the X11 version, and scaling is messed up on the 2880x1920 screen, such that fonts are too big and UI elements too small. The KCM for scaling doesn’t work nicely, and clicking on buttons like Apply is haphazard. It might just be X11 bitrot, though, and I have not sat down with the system to figure out what’s going on.
  • KDE Linux, I know it’s there, it starts, but I find that I don’t have confidence that the immutable + flatpak does anything useful for me, and I fear that it takes stuff away – although I can’t exactly articulate what, since I don’t want to sit down to try to turn it into my daily driver and then on day three find out that spacebar-heating is disabled in the flatpak portal. Dangit, I need my spacebar heating. Someday I’ll sit down longer with KDE Linux, but not with this laptop.
  • That leaves Fedora, which doesn’t deliver a stock wallpaper but does provide a really nice KDE Plasma 6 experience. Here, too, I can’t put my finger on what makes it nice, it just … is. It’s a wayland session. Using the Keyboard KCM and swapping ctrl- and caps- just works, and it stays there even in the face of jiggery-pokery with connected keyboards (unlike in an X11 session on FreeBSD). Scaling is reasonable at 170%. Scrolling with the touchpad goes the “right” direction. Focus-follows-mouse is easy to configure.

FreeBSD works pretty well on this machine, right now except for the oops-poor-choice WiFi, but that is enough to keep my from daily-drivering it just yet, and that’s why this post is all about Linuxes. The configuration space is the same, though.

One hardware trick I found since I last wrote about this machine: the hardware turns out to have a “Fn-lock”. Press Fn-ESC to prefer function-keys over media-keys. (Source: forum posts) It even says “Fn-lock” on the physical escape key, but I had not connected those letters with the desired functionality yet. This setting is preserved across hibernation and reboots.

Takeaway: fear of change is a genuine cause of non-adoption of technologies; Fedora KDE Workstation is pretty darn nice; like many others I have covered over the laptop’s branding with queer stickers.