 A few months ago I made a video about Fedora Kino White, and if you don't know what Kino White is, basically it is the KDE version of Fedora Silver Blue, which is the immutable version of Fedora. Now there's a whole discussion to be had about immutable file systems and immutable distros, and we will have that conversation in a video one day soon, but that is not the video that I want to make today. Instead, what I want to make a video on is Kino White itself. So when I made that video a few months ago, my intention was to do a long term review like I have done many times before. I would use a distro for a significant amount of time and then make a video about it. And I followed through with most of that plan. I used Kino White for three months straight. And while I wouldn't say it was my daily driver, I logged into it pretty much every single day and messed around with it. And at the end of the three months, it was time to make my video on it. And the thing is, is that I had such a horrible experience with Fedora Kino White, I couldn't make the video. It was just going to be a very bad video. I would have spent the entire time bashing it and saying how this thing is not ready. It's basically a beta. Don't use this thing. It's not good. And I didn't want to do that. I was so frustrated with it at the time those three months was over. I just couldn't fathom even talking about it for very long. It's just that buggy. So I didn't make the video. I took another month away from it, or a couple of weeks, however long it was, just to kind of push myself away from the mindset of how bad it was. And also to uninstall it because I wanted it off my computer. I no longer have it installed on my computer, which is why the stuff you'll see today is in the b-roll. But I wanted to just kind of take a step back and let my emotions calm down. So I didn't spend the entire video kind of saying how terrible this thing was. I wanted to kind of remember the good times, if you will. So that's what today's video is about. I want to talk about my time with Fedora Kinawight. And I'm going to do this in a few parts, but it's mostly going to be a rambly type video. I have no real plan for this. So if I repeat myself often, I apologize for that. So just kind of prepare for a ramble, if you will, a good old fashioned ramble. Let's first talk about what Kinawight is. Now like I said, I'm not going to get too much into detail about what immutable means and how it works when it comes to a Linux distribution. But just broad strokes, immutable basically means that there are layers to your distribution. The underlying layer where all the Linux-y stuff happens, the root file system, all that stuff, is in a vault, basically, that you can't touch, okay? None of that stuff is anything that you're ever going to have access to. And everything that sits on top of that in another layer is the home directory and the stuff that is user-facing. That stuff you can edit and install applications on top of and all that stuff, right? And the benefits of this, as simplistic as that explanation is, is that when someone deploys Kinawight or Silverblue, which is the GNOME version of Fedora that basically they're siblings, when somebody deploys these immutable distros, they know that every single machine that is running those has the exact same underlying Linux on their system. So every part of that underlying system is going to be exactly the same from machine to machine to machine. The idea is that it's going to create stability in Linux, and it also increases security because there's nothing that can touch that root file system. So as you might expect, it's going to be a little bit different from the Linux that you or I probably use in that there is no ability there to touch that root file system. So if you want to use i3 on Kinawight, you can't really do it, at least not in the traditional way. You'd have to build it from the ground up and kind of create your own distro. Kinawight is different. It feels like you're running a different type of operating system, especially, and this is the big point here, is if you are used to having access to all that stuff. So if you're a longtime Linux user, and you're used to being able to mess around with stuff in your Etsy file. So for example, let's just say you wanted to edit your pacman.com file if you're on Arch, or I guess in this case you'd be editing your DNF.com file, right? And there are many reasons why you'd want to do this. One of those is enabling parallel downloads with DNF. Now Kinawight doesn't use DNF outside of Toolbox, but let's just say in this example you wanted to do that, whatever. If you wanted to edit that configuration file, you can do it because Etsy's in the root file system, you don't have access to it. You can see it, but you can't edit it, right? And that's where it feels different. You don't have access to a good portion of your file system. It's just kind of unavailable to you. So the broad strokes benefits of this aren't for the tinkers out there amongst us. It's more for the developers who are developing for this kind of situation, people who use containers and stuff like that. And also for people who are going to deploy this on a lot of systems. And by having every single one of them have basically the same image on them, they can easily update. They can move from different versions easily enough. And it just makes it easier in that way for us regular users, the immutable part of this kind of just makes it feel weird, right? You don't really care if you're just a normal user, because if you just install a whole bunch of stuff from Flatpak, you're probably not even going to notice that this thing is different, right? You're just going to use your applications. It's when you start installing stuff from RPM Aus Tree, which is the method that Keena White and Silver Blue use to install applications is that's when you're going to notice things a little bit differently because every time you install something, you have to reboot your computer afterwards because it's made a change to a layer that only gets applied once you've done a reboot. And the thing is, is that if you've ever used Windows before, that's awfully familiar, right? It's whenever you install something on Windows, not always, but anything that has to do with editing the registry or something like that, you have to do a reboot. And to have that happen on a Linux machine just feels kind of icky, right? It's not a big deal. It's not a deal breaker, but it feels really, really weird. So that's kind of the overarching thing that Keena White is. It's very confusing for most normal users. And even I still don't have my mind completely wrapped around it. And I'm sure that explanation did nothing to help you out whatsoever in terms of actually understanding what this thing is. I will try to do better when I talk about immutable file systems in another video, maybe actually write some things down and stuff like that. Hopefully you're a little bit further along in understanding what this is. So let's talk about the actual distros. So outside of immutable stuff, the biggest takeaway I have from Keena White itself is that it's buggy. Like I said at the beginning, the experience I had with Keena White was God awful. Now the biggest thing here is that I think that the reason why I had such a horrible experience was that first of all, this is a fairly new project. It's only been around for maybe a couple of years. Second of all, KDE is notoriously, I guess I shouldn't say notoriously, but it definitely has some issues when it comes to doing certain things. It's never been the most stable desktop environment. So some of the things that I experienced were definitely KDE's fault. But I think the biggest problem I had was that it feels like KDE and the immutable aspect of Fedora, which is the main thing of this distro, it just feels like they don't go together. There are things that KDE expects to be able to do that it can't do for whatever reason. So things like installing themes. I'm not exactly sure why they're installing KDE themes in the root part of the file system, but apparently they are. Because when you go to install themes, which you would want to do in a plasma session, and you do it just the normal way, you go into the settings, you go into appearance, you go into global themes or whatever it is, and then you hit the add new themes thing and you find a thing you want, you hit download and you get an error. Like it's just an error, right? You can't you can't download that thing. It just does not work. Now there are workarounds to this. There are things that you can do. You can install, you can download the theme manually and then put it in dot local, which you have perfect access to. It works okay, but the application of those themes doesn't work all that great. There are things missing. There's icons that don't show up. It's a mess, right? And like I said, some of this is KDE's problem. Some of it feels like it's just kind of two things that aren't really meant to be together at least quite yet. It's a weird experience. Now, obviously that's the thing that I noticed first, because the first thing I do when I install KDE desktop is that I braced it because, of course, I do, I want to change it from the default thing. And to do that, you have to install themes and icons and change colors and get Kovantem up and running and all this stuff. And that I wasn't able to do that ever in three months, just kind of completely turned me away from Keena White before I even got into some of the other things that I had problems with. So some of my experience past that first few weeks probably has to do with my disinterest in Keena White because of the lack of ability to theme the damn thing. But I did use it and I used it for I kept it on my machine for three months and I used it often. And at the end of the day, the thing that I noticed the most outside of the theming part is that I was getting errors after errors of random things crashing K when crashed several times. Now, I'm not sure if that's the Keena White thing or KD thing. There's been a lot of talk from me recently about how buggy KDE is and I hate doing that because I love KD so much, but it feels like there's a lot of bugs. And a lot of my experience with Keena White is the reason why I've been saying that a lot because, like I said, K when was crashed frequently and I was having problems with the settings application crashed like over and over again in this in Keena White and I'm not sure what was going on there. And somebody's going to ask, well, did you file bug reports? I've every I did file the bug reports when that pop-up came up. Like, you know, when something crashes, sometimes KDE will pop up with like a bug reporter things. I went through that and did that whenever that popped up. But it doesn't pop up all the time. Thank goodness, because I would start multiple times a day. But the thing is that I did file those when that pop-up came up. Other than that, I didn't put any effort into it. I probably should have. But the point is, is that I was getting crashes and weird errors and stuff like that. I think I even took a screenshot of one of the errors that I might put up here on screen here somewhere. It's just, it was just not a good experience. It was absolutely kind of horrid, to be honest with you. And the thing is, is that I expected better, right? Silver blue has been around for quite a while now. And I expected Keena White to be at least mostly as polished as silver blue seems to be, but it's not. Now, I don't know whether or not this is because it's a fairly new product is much newer than silver blue, or it's because the KDE and immutable aspect of it don't really go together. I don't know about that either. I'm not really sure what it is about Keena White. It just made it really bad. Now, it's also possible, and I should put this out there, that it's just a me problem. So I talk about this a lot that I sometimes am an idiot. When it comes to Linux, it happens. Sometimes I just don't know what I'm doing. So it's a hundred percent possible. There were solutions to the things that I was experiencing that I didn't actually find. So some of the problems that came up, I did Google and try to find a solution to because I mean, I did use this for an extended period of time. Some of them I didn't. Whenever, like when K-Wing crashed, I almost universally just stopped using Keena White for the day and moved back to regular Fedora or whatever I was using. Right. So there are some of the bigger problems where I was just like, I'm done with this for the day. I'm going to move on and actually do some other work. Some of it, like I said, I did Google and try to find work around. So like the themes aspect, I did find a work around for that. It didn't work all that well, but it worked somewhat, I suppose. So there is that aspect of it that it just could possibly be me and my hardware, like maybe my hardware doesn't like the mutable aspect of Linux and doesn't run it very well. Who knows, it's possible. So I guess I should talk a little bit about the good experiences that I had. So I think that my three months with Keena White really led to me to believe that Flatpak is probably the best package manager out there for Linux, not necessarily should go back to that and just say maybe not the best, but definitely the one that most people should use. You shouldn't use Snap. You shouldn't use app images. You should use Flatpak. I think my time with Keena White is the reason why I now think that Flatpak is kind of the main thing. I really had a good experience with downloading Flatpaks on Keena White and using them. They all worked really, really well. And if Fedora can get to the point where Flathub is enabled by default, it's going to be awesome because you're going to have this gigantic access to a whole bunch of software that you wouldn't have access to normally without enabling RPM Fusion or building a whole bunch of stuff yourself, whatever happens to be. Right. And it was just a really good experience. It's not an experience I ever had when I was using like Ubuntu and Snaps. It just that never felt like a really good experience. This Flathub and Flatpak integration in Keena White is really good. And I think that the reason why I thought it was really good is because you're kind of forced to use it. Right. That's the main way of installing software. You're not supposed to use RPM Ausstree to install anything. You're supposed to use as many Flatpaks as you possibly can. And because of that, I used a lot of them. And that has led me to use a ton of Flatpaks on my main install of Fedora. I have like 30 of them installed now. It's nuts. So my experience with Flatpak and Flathub on Keena White was really good. I didn't mind the RPM Ausstree stuff. I know I didn't do a very good job of explaining that earlier, but I didn't mind having to install a few things via that and then reboot my computer. It felt weird, but I didn't mind doing it. And I liked that the ability is there to do stuff against it. If you want to install like BTOP or something like that, BTOP doesn't have a Flatpak version. So you have to install that from the terminal. In order to do that, you use RPM Ausstree. Just think of RPM Ausstree as like DNF, but for immutable file systems. I suppose that's probably the simplest way of explaining it. So the Flatpak and Flathub thing is probably the most positive thing that I had to say about Keena White itself. Other than that, I don't have a lot of good stuff to say. Keena White's not ready. Now the question then becomes, is Silverblue kind of the same? And I don't know. I haven't tried to see Silverblue yet. I kind of want to put some space between me and Keena White before I give Silverblue a chance because I don't want it to taint. I don't want my experience with with Keena White to taint my experience with Silverblue. So I'm going to probably put that off a little bit. But eventually I will do a Silverblue long term review. If you are interested in that, make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss it. Look at that, me being a YouTuber. So at the end of the day, just kind of bottom line. Keena White's either not ready or not good. Either way, you want to look at it. I don't really care which way you look at it. I'm glad that it's off my system. I'm even now a few weeks after I uninstalled it, I'm quite happy that I never have to see it on my system again. And I say that never, maybe in a couple of years, I will have forgotten how bad of an experience it was and try it out again. Maybe it'll be better. But as of right now, I'm quite happy that I'm not using it. So that's my experience with Keena White. If you have thoughts on Keena White or any of this stuff, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. 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