I spent the first full day of Fedora use setting up a few more of my dev tools, installing PostgreSQL, and actually working, when I could. I normally would set up a VM for PostgreSQL, but I’m running Fedora as my work OS, so I figured I’d just install it. One difference between my openSUSE Tumbleweed working environment and my Fedora environment is I installed MS Visual Studio Code, whereas on Tumbleweed I’m running the Visual Studio Codium package. Codium is basically a custom built VS Code, without MS’ junk underneath. If things continue as they did today, I may use Codium instead on Fedora as well.

First of all, it’s mildly infuriating that Gnome doesn’t have a system tray for applications by default. Pretty much everyone is gonna install that extension, so why not just have it by default? That was my first irritating experience of the day, while trying to toggle through different team collaboration applications.

Throughout the day, I consistently had applications that would lock up for no apparent reason. Sometimes just switching workspaces would trigger it, other times I’d be interacting with the application and it would just freeze, a few times I’d try to alt-tab and everything would lock up. There wasn’t an apparent cause, it would just happen.

Applications that I had ran earlier and closed wouldn’t open again. I had to logout several times throughout the day and log back in to get things like the Extensions application, Terminal, Settings, Firefox, and one time even the applications menu (Super key). At one point I installed Konsole and began using it, because gnome-terminal wouldn’t open anymore, and I couldn’t shut down everything and logout at that moment. I missed Konsole anyway, so I’m not complaining about that change. Firefox and Chrome each had a freeze/crash during the day as well.

I hope I see another Fedora user make some kind of claim about Zypper being slow, because DNF is definitely slower on the same hardware. At one point it took upward of 5 minutes to refresh repos and then it was downloading at 15kb/sec. I even checked my internet connection with the Google Speedtest during all of this to make sure my internet wasn’t failing (245mb/sec, at the time, according to Google). It has been consistently slow doing pretty much everything, compared to Zypper. I do have the Mirrorcache mirrors configured in Zypper, not the default opensuse.org mirrors, which helped Zypper a ton, but I’m not even sure it was slower before I did that.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make it the entire work day using Fedora. MS VS Code would get slower and slower as I used it and I’d have to restart it about once an hour or it would eventually just lock up. I don’t normally use the MS build, so I’m not sure if this is a Fedora thing or a MS thing, hence I may switch to Codium. I ended up switching over to Tumbleweed around 1:30pm. I did restart into Fedora in the evening and sync up everything for tomorrow, which ended when the file manager locked up after copying some files.

So far, I’m not impressed with Fedora 37. I may go against my initial thoughts and try the KDE spin to see if these issues are just Gnome issues. Other than the freezes and having to logout/in repeatedly, I’m also disappointed that I had to install an extension. I didn’t want to need to do that, I wanted to use Gnome as it comes. I don’t really have intense demands, yet, it already proved to have an inadequacy.