It’s been an interesting six months learning the tiny bit I have on Linux but I’ve essentially made the switch from Windoze. I still maintain a Win 11 machine just in case but 99.9% of what I do (which isn’t much) gets done with Linux. There’s still the issue of which Joplin I should be using, appimage, flatpack or snap but the official appimage directly from Joplin does seem to install and work better somehow.
I’ve got another question though. There were a ton of opinions about which version I should start with as a rank beginner. I gave every one of those suggestions a try (wore out a USB stick loading ISO images over and over and over) and strangely enough I settled on a version that I can’t recall anybody suggesting - Fedora with KDE Plasma. I came across this by accident and gave it a shot. That’s what I settled on finally.
So, to my question, is there a reason it didn’t get suggested as a good beginner’s starting point? It seems to do everything the other versions did, just with a GUI that I find easier to use and that’s strictly a case of personal opinion. Is it unsafe? Does Red Hat have a bad reputation? Or is it too basic and thus limited in some way?
Up until a month or so ago Joplin was crashing every time I switched profiles but that was either fixed by a more recent version of Joplin or by one of the nightly system updates to Fedora . It works fine now.
I still miss my Paint-dot-net but Krita gets the job done. Pinta was unable to do a simple task like cropping a specific size chunk and GIMP had me lost within seconds. Obsidian fills in for a few tasks that Joplin can’t handle (paste some stuff from a particular website and Obsidian formats it properly while Joplin gets terribly confused, so I paste into Obsidian, copy the result and paste that into Joplin) but overall Joplin somehow just feels snappier than it did under Windoze even though I’m running on a far, far weaker box.
To a degree it's expected since an AppImage has less sandboxing and container overhead; but I don't think that your experience is necessarily universal, Flatpak and Snap are doing things like bundling updated Mesa drivers, GTK versions, Wayland protocols, audio libraries, and etc; looking at the Snap now, 15% of the users are still on Ubuntu 22.04 which is 4 years old; despite that they're running Joplin with GTK and GPU drivers from 2025. There's 100 users doing that on 18.04 even.
KDE is awesome and Fedora is too, however I think it's fair to say that KDE became much more recognizably awesome with KDE 6 release about 2 years ago; and until then might not have been treated on par from devs and users compared to Gnome. Even by Fedora itself, "Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop", the official release as opposed to the spin/remix, is only a year and a few months old. (I think)
But I'm happy Fedora pushes KDE, because the combination of the two is fantastic. You might similarly like to try e.g., Kubuntu if KDE is your thing, where you'd then be able to compare the base distribution layer (Debian/Ubuntu vs Fedora itself) vs the graphical layers, but ultimately, they're more similar than different except where you might be exposed to requirements like e.g., running an application server at work on them. Businesses would be fine with Ubuntu Server, but I've never seen anywhere happy with Fedora Server due to the more rapid lifecycle (this is ignoring RHEL/CentOS/etc, which are built on Fedora - enterprise loves those). If you're happy with Fedora though as you are now, you could easily run it for years, it achieves what it aims to be brilliantly and is in many ways ideal for home users in professional capacities too.
Fedora has an excellent reputation for security and I would say amongst the best in the general desktop Linux distributions by default, putting significant effort into things like e.g., SELinux, pushing Wayland super early, having robust package building transparency standards & etc.
Red Hat the business also has a good reputation in Linux. They've contributed massively over 30 years. Anytime money is involved some people will start spouting nonsense ignoring the reality that Linux is both a community and commercial endevour at the same time, like any company there can be dramas, but put simply, if you can't trust Red Hat then we're all screwed, basically.
This sounds to me like maybe you've new or niche hardware and there's been updates to the kernel or driver stack; Fedora is fairly aggressive in upgrading these to the latest versions moreso than e.g., Ubuntu which does the same via "HWE" releases but with a longer delay - which can be the difference for some people between works great and not working at all. (& which would impact the snap stability for example, since it uses Ubuntu, and the Flatpak, since the runtimes are separated to the system but I'm less sure their release cycles).
Let us know your experience on Github, in the six years I've been helping out Pinta, it's been mostly a very small collection of people working on it and at one point was basically a single person doing 99% of all the work. It's healthier these days, but I think Pinta has like 3x more Linux users than e.g., Joplin does but gets significantly less engagement. It isn't some big thing with active devs work but people using the tool to make it better for themselves and others in their spare time. There's genuinely a lot of valid feedback that people are happy to post on Reddit & etc but never actually gets seen by the people who might be like "Oh that's so obvious, you're right actually!" - that isn't me saying everything can be taken on, but as one of the people helping out with it, you'll begin to see that sometimes it's a small world in many ways yet huge at the same time (I do the Joplin & Pinta snap too to be clear, and some nicher stuff in Pinta itself outside the Snap bit from time to time).
You may have nailed it there. It was about the time I grabbed some quick deals on a few (3) of those “mini” PCs. They came with W11 Pro but got wiped upon arrival. The Joplin crashing took a few weeks and numerous updates before it stopped and I never considered the hardware as a possible cause. I just put it down to inexperience (still a strong possibility) with Linux. It has been rock-solid since then. It’s running on all 3 with a WebDAV sync target on a Synology NAS and has been the only application that has worked perfectly across the LAN from day one.
I’ve never used Github for other than grabbing new releases of applications. I’m not a fan of “social” media, so I never paid any attention to that aspect of it but Pinta did look great when I first tried it six months ago. When it didn’t do the few thngs I used PDN for I had to move on. I’ll take another look at Pinta and Github though, six months is a long time between experiments.
I have used Red Hat since 1996 (and Linux exclusively since). In those days there was only Red Hat and no Fedora.
I switched to Debian (Ubuntu is a Debian spin, essentially) for a couple years, but then switched back to Red Hat. When Fedora was spun out as the community version in … 2003, I jumped on that and never looked back.
I have used nothing but Fedora for home usage (desktop and laptops) and every server I have ever spun up for more businessy things. Fedora is rock solid and problems are aggressively tackled.
Red Hat has arguably done more for open source than any one company and they have somehow kept their integrity throughout all of these years. From day one, their lawyers were on the forefront of staving off Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and Apple and others who tried desperately to dismantle the whole concept. (Not a lot is said about Red Hat’s legal team and their contributions.) Irony: Open source saved Apple as a company later on. Heh. The engineering teams at Red Hat are vocal idealists and the company gives them freedom to voice their opinions and also work on side projects … whether using Red Hat’s equipment or not. Red Hat is a very good company.
The only two criticisms (and the first is more of an inconvenience than a criticism):
The Fedora Project is more open source purist than, say, Ubuntu. If there is a licensing issue with a package (for example, many video codecs), Fedora simply will not ship them. But, if you use flatpaks to install things like your video player, especially if that flatpak comes from Flathub, then those problems disappear. (Red Hat was instrumental in the development of the flatpak model as well, by the way.) Before flatpaks, you had to install codecs from other repositories, which is not rocket science, but a PITA for those who, for example, are new to Linux or not technically savvy.
Largely because of point #1, Ubuntu has captured a lot of the community mindshare. Red Hat’s focus has always been on the enterprise, first and foremost (and its why Red Hat because a Fortune 500 company even before IBM bought them). Fedora feeds that version of linux, but the Ubuntu folks (Canonical) were never the purists that Fedora is and shipped non-free software and made it easier for new users to use Linux at home with fewer configuration steps. They also focused on the UI more than Red Hat at the time. Red Hat took the long view and Ubuntu focused on “make it pretty and easy RIGHT NOW.” (Mind you, though that gave them wins earlier on, they have suffered because of their weird bespoke interfaces in the past). The end result is that you will see software projects build for Ubuntu first, now. Fortunately, Flatpaks and Appimages make that very nearly a non-issue.
Anyway. Too much history. Apologies. Long story short: I am a huge Fedora advocate. Good choice.
(Disclaimer: I have never used their KDE spin, but I hear good things.)
By the way, I build RPMs (installable packages) for Joplin for Fedora. I keep up with the stable release and the executable is the appimage that comes straight from the Joplin repositories (I don’t rebuild Joplin). If you are interested in weaving Joplin into the normal Fedora workflow of updates and whatnot. You can enable the repository and install the package with …
I'm running three Linux systems. I got a helluva deal on a few mini-PCs (as in almost free) so I have Fedora 43 Plasma on the main daily one as well as on a backup that gets updates before I dare to put them on the main. The third is what I try new stuff on. Fedora 44 Beta is there normally these days, but in the last two days I've loaded "ElementaryOS", "Kubuntu", "Mint", "Solus Plasma" (which never would boot after install), and Xubuntu.
It's back on Fedora 44 with KDE. A few of the others couldn't find my core applications, Joplin being the main requirement, and some were just plain ugly compared to KDE. I have a Synology NAS and a few of those distros were unable to locate the necessary software (Synology Drive) to keep things in sync. It's quite possible that I could have gone searching and found how to get Joplin running but after Fedora simply "Discover"ed it and installed it with no fuss I kind of made a simple Joplin install one of my requirements. No instant Joplin, means instant rejection. The tech savvy would simply issue a half-dozen terminal commands and there it would be, but for now I prefer to have it installed for me and Fedora does that. Long gone are the days where I would be toggling in data and instructions on the mainframe front panel switches, debugging core dumps and telling new operators how to clear card jams. I like things simple now and so far Fedora and KDE Plasma lead the pack in that regard. I still miss my 8088 and 6502 systems though. Is there a version of Joplin that will run on a system with 16K of RAM? I do have dual 360K floppy drives if that helps.
