Fedora 43 works out of the box: the year of desktop Linux

Desktop Linux now works out of the box on a laptop

An ordinary laptop. A clean install of Fedora Workstation 43. And not a single afternoon wasted on tweaking. Wifi, bluetooth, screen, external monitor, touchscreen, tablet mode without a keyboard and even the gyroscopes all respond on first boot. The only manual steps were adding the dock extension and the maximize and minimize buttons in GNOME. Less than 24 hours later came the first bug: the laptop took forever to charge and, while plugged in, drained more power than it took in. A BIOS reset to factory settings fixed it. Nobody knows why.

Hardware that used to fight back now just works

For two decades, the phrase "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" has worked as a running joke. What is striking now is not that a laptop recognizes all its hardware, but that this has stopped being news. Alongside the case that works, the flip side: a machine running Fedora 41 unable to update on its own and forced to toggle the screen mirroring setting every time it wakes from sleep. When wifi does not show up after installing, the old trick still works: connect the phone via USB, enable tethering and download the missing firmware from there. Intel keeps the same iwlwifi firmware for the 7265 chip and its siblings, and recent Debian versions already ship it by default. The silicon lottery still matters more than the distro you pick.

GNOME, KDE and Cinnamon: four desktops and no truce

GNOME is the default environment on Fedora and Ubuntu, and much of it is developed by the same engineers. That does not stop it from having a cult-like fruta among enthusiasts: some cannot imagine anything but KDE, some champion Linux Mint with Cinnamon for being simple and intuitive, and some have spent years on a rolling release without ever seeing a kernel panic. The atomic variants —Silverblue, Kinoite and Bazzite as a derivative— have arrived in force: immutable system blocks that can be rolled back in their entirety.

And then there is the awkward argument: there are too many options. Dozens of distributions, families, desktops and managers, to the point that there is a name for the exhaustion of choosing. The thesis that Linux will never go mainstream until there is a single ultra-polished version runs into the obvious answer: the variety is not a design flaw, it is the product.

Is Fedora a rolling release? No: six months per version

It is worth clearing up a common misconception. Fedora is not a rolling release except for its Rawhide branch: it publishes a new version roughly every six months and each edition is supported for a little over a year. Those who want continuous updates can find them in Arch, in the atomic versions that refresh almost daily —up to twice a week on some derivatives— or in an Ubuntu LTS that faces the same predicament every time its cycle runs out. The longevity figures are telling: an install on a 2011 Core i7 stayed up to date until 2022.

The detail that throws everything off

Amid all the enthusiasm, the thing nobody quite comes to terms with. macOS remembered the position and size of every window back in the MultiFinder days; Windows added it in version 3.0 and OS/2 Warp took it for granted. On Linux it still depends on whether the specific app bothers to save its own settings. ThinkPads with Ubuntu ready in twenty minutes. A minimalist manager running faster on a Core i3 than Oracle Linux on a Xeon. And the window, when closed and peine, shows up wherever it pleases.