It's not me, it's you.
I was looking forward to your 34 release and had thought of doing a fresh install just to get the full benefits of things like BTRFS that won't change with an upgrade. I even did the upgrade on my Asus T100 Transformer as a test to see how things worked and ran. It was looking pretty good even if I think that Gnome 3/40 is a crap desktop environment. But the Transformer is closer to a tablet with a keyboard than a netbook but as I only use it for traveling a few weeks a year at most I can put up with the annoyances for the speed I gain over trying to run KDE.
My notebook on the other hand, is my mostly non-work daily driver and had more than enough power to run KDE just fine. In fact I have been running Fedora KDE on it since version twenty something. That's a lot of upgrades over the years and another reason for a clean install. Another reason is that there are quite a few hold overs that need to go, like dragora updater that always launches and the lack of information on how to disable it from starting at boot.
My desktop is a dual boot as I still need some native windows apps for my work, hopefully that may change in the future but for now I still need that environment.
So I had already upgraded the Transformer, it was a clean install of Fedora 33 so it already had BTRFS and the other things so onto the desktop.
The desktop started as a thirty-something version, maybe 31 or 32 so kind of fresh but still missing the BTRFS things that seem good but lets do the upgrade and see what happens and if all is happy then a clean install will follow.
So, due to the lack of an upgrade option in KDE and also having Gnome environment installed, I went into Gnome to do the upgrade. Why is this not an option in KDE I don't know as they both use the same Discover program for updates.
The Discover app did the updates and then the upgrades and all seemed well. Now my desktop has a video card that has caused issues in the past due to it being a Nvidia card. Not a gaming card but a Quadro CAD card. This goes back to the windows and work related things but I have always gotten things to work good enough in Xserver but never really got a usable desktop in Wayland regardless of whether Gnome or KDE but that is not my issue here. The desktop seemed good so on to the notebook.
This is where things really went south. Lets just start out with I knew I would be doing a fresh reload so if it all went pear shaped I would be fine as most all the things I need are on my server (it runs Debian, I don't like living on the cutting edge with my data) and had backed up the rest.
So went into Gnome did the updates and upgrade, all seems to have went well and tried running KDE with Wayland and it locked up after login. From my understanding, as long as you don't have an Nvidia GPU Wayland was to be pretty good with the latest Fedora and the notebook has an Intel GPU so not sure why it would lock up but sometimes these things happen. Reboot and try again, same thing. One last try, it works! Kind of. While I could do things, not all as they should be. Not sure where the disconnect is but here are a few of the things I had happen in Wayland KDE.
OpenArena: A FPS game, in Xserver it runs full screen, Wayland in a ¼ size window displaying just that ¼ of the full screen that cannot be resized, so useless.
Swoopfell: A block puzzle type of game, the mouse will not click on the right third of the game.
Back to Xserver KDE. I got in and started getting SELinux write error messages that would not stop until I stopped the SE trouble process. Removing the SELinux process from the startup would not stick. Maybe a clean install will fix this so not a complete deal breaker.
Then came the updates. This has now become a windows like process. Update, reboot to apply the updates, reboot again to return to the desktop. The other night I had the ultimate windows type update, update, reboot, reboot, another update, reboot, reboot.
WTAF?
It was then I decided it might be time to move on from Fedora. Now I liked Fedora and have many years using it, maybe they were trying to get too bleeding edge, so lets look at CentOS Streams.
I installed it on a different hard drive for a test and to see how it would play, and to see if I could get KDE to run good. Well, even with a world of information at my fingertips and having been a sysadmin for a long time, getting KDE running was eluding me and then the updates struck again. Update, reboot, reboot. Gone.
Where will I go from here? I'm not sure. I am not a fan of the Ubuntu/Canonical empire, Debian is too slow with updates for a daily desktop and many of the versions of things are out of date. LinuxMint has no KDE version for the past several years, which was a surprise to me as they were the last distro I ran prior to Fedora.
Maybe Devuan? It is not using systemd, something I would like to not have but have tolerated with Fedora.
Welp… While I did all the reading ahead and it found the prop WiFi drivers and connected to the internet, it decided to leave the CD/DVD as a repo in place so I got errors when looking for updates, manually rem'd out the repo but it still didn't finish looking for updates until I closed Discover. Also couldn't add my user to sudo (even though user is admin) and had other permissions related issues and quite a few “file/command not found” while trying to fix. Gone.
So, what distro does not use systemd, has a KDE version, and uses RPM?
I had used them in the past when it was the only distro that would run on the notebook I had at the time, many, many years ago, I think the issue was a stable WiFi connection and everything else would drop out after a few minutes and require some sort of restart of the daemon or the notebook itself.
So, sorry Fedora, it's you not me this time.
Not sure if I will land on PCLinuxOS for good but it will be getting a test drive in a little while.
It does seem that life is circular in nature and the circle is once again closing on itself.