A Layman Learns Linux - Fedora (Part 1)
Fedora Linux was my next stop on my Linux journey, and it made a great first impression. However, I encountered my fair share of issues when it came to setting up additional drives.
After my initial struggles with Mint, particularly the troublesome stutter I encountered while gaming, some kind folks in one of my Discord servers recommended that I try Fedora Linux.
The name immediately gave me pause. Yes, I was judging a book by its title, and 'fedora' has sadly become synonymous with terminally online 'nice guys' and otaku and whatnot, which isn't fair to anybody, really. Nevertheless, Fedora Linux seemed pretty slick and feature rich, so I conducted some light research to see what was available.
Of the Fedora variants, three stood out. There was an Official KDE edition that reminded me of SteamOS thanks to the familiar Plasma desktop environment. Plus, 'mainline' Fedora logically had the largest user base, which ensured that I would have plenty of resources should I need to troubleshoot.
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| The default Fedora KDE desktop along with its default media players |
Nobara seemed promising as a more gaming-oriented variant maintained by Glorious Eggroll, who I already knew as the Linux wizard responsible for creating custom versions of Proton beloved by Steam Deck users around the world. He created Nobara to suit his and his father’s needs for a more streamlined version of Fedora, but the fact that the distro was largely maintained by a single person made me a bit skittish. It seemed like a passion project being shared with the world, and while there were a number of Nobara fans out there, I wanted something with a wider user base in case something went wrong. I downloaded the ISO anyway, just in case.
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| The default Nobara UI, though it also comes in KDE, Gnome, and SteamOS flavors |
If I wanted something that hewed even closer to the Steam Deck experience, Gaming Mode and all, I could also check out Bazzite, a popular up-and-coming distro which sought to replicate SteamOS in Fedora (as opposed to Arch) right down to the bootable gaming mode for maximum performance. This one had been getting a lot of hype from the handheld PC community before Valve started rolling out SteamOS for other manufacturers' hardware, and I had even seen videos of people using it as their main desktop operating system. Choice, choices!
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| KDE really seems like the go-to desktop environment for Fedora spinoffs, huh? |
This variety of options inspired me to try something new. Instead of using balenaEtcher to mount a single distro to my flash drive, I used a program called Ventoy to set up my USB drive so that it could accept several different ISOs at the same time. I could simply drag and drop the disc images like I would any other file, so I tossed all three Fedora variants on the flash drive and booted up Fedora KDE first. It felt familiar enough thanks to KDE Plasma, and I figured that it was the base upon which Nobara and Bazzite was built; if any issues arose, or if I ran into more issues with gaming performance, I could always try those out later on.
Compared to my last attempt, installation was a breeze. I followed a YouTube guide that recommended installing a few custom repositories and drivers. I’m not sure if they actually did anything, but nothing broke, and the batch of test media that I tried all worked fine. I considered that a success. Within a few minutes, I was able to find exactly the kind of refresh rate options that Mint lacked, and in a sensible location: in the Display Configuration section of the settings, accessible from the desktop with a single right-click. Adaptive Sync was set to Automatic by default, but even with that left as-is, Tony Hawk 3+4 ran like a dream. We were officially back in business.
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| Finally - a real settings menu! |
Beyond installing the rest of my basic software and syncing my various application accounts, all of which went off without a hitch, the next big step was setting up a new storage solution. As mentioned in the last installment of this column, NTFS are technically supported in Linux, but compatibility can be spotty, particularly when it comes to user permissions not always transferring properly between Windows and Linux. Most serious Linux users recommend formatting drives in a natively-supported file system such as ext4 or btrfs to ensure long-term stability. This turned out to be easier said than done.
I started by copying over all of my essential data onto a Seagate external hard drive that I had picked up during a recent sale. I left it in its default exFAT state, an ancient but broadly supported format, to avoid any potential NTFS compatibility shenanigans. On boot, Fedora immediately recognized the drive as a USB device. I mounted it with a single click and was immediately able to access its contents. So far, so good!
Next, I followed a guide to reformat a newly installed Western Digital Blue hard drive using the built-in KDE Partition Manager, but I encountered an input/output error when trying to create the partition table. I downloaded GParted, a more fully-featured partitioning program, and the same errors popped up. To make matters even more confusing, the failed partition process in GParted resulted in the new drive and the rest of my hard drives (not SSDs, strangely enough) completely disappearing from the file explorer. They were still visible in KDE Partition manager, though. What was going on?
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| I saw this screen a lot during my first week with Fedora |
OK, back to Fedora! The ext4-formatted hard drive was...not appearing as ext4 in Linux. GParted could still see it, albeit as an unallocated volume, so not all was lost. I went through the standard steps, and to my surprise, no errors arose! GParted showed the drive as ext4! The drive was even appearing and automatically mounting in the file explorer as a new Internal Drive! Was this the end of my hard drive woes? Of course not!
Next time: learning the Linux filesystem and understanding how directories are organized! And maybe getting hard drives to work.