LinuxLiom

I am on a mission to gain familiarity with Linux desktop distributions. My reasons have been outlined on this page. Here is my first review of Fedora 42, written a little over a month after installing it as my daily driver.

Installation experience

Installing an OS on a computer is not something new to me. It is a process I have carried out dozens of times both manually and with some automated installations. Soon I want to get hands-on with a PXE boot in my home lab. What I’m trying to convey is that this process is by no means new to me. I found the process simple to execute with Rufus and a thumb drive. For someone who hasn’t installed a new OS to hardware, it might be complicated, but no more complex than a Windows or another Linux distribution.

First impressions

Only after installation did I realise that Fedora 42 was just released in Spring 2025. For a new release, it worked better than I had expected. In settings, there is an option to revert to Fedora 41. I never found myself needing to revert to this older version.
The only minor sticking point I have is that the VScode IDE app was initially running in a third-party virtual container. I broke the OS a week or two ago when working in partitions. I realised my mistake before rebooting the laptop and ran a backup of my files before confirming my suspicions. This event was a blessing in disguise, on reinstalling the OS I found an MS-supported VScode distribution online.

Other pleasant surprises

With Fedora 42 being a new release, many third-party software suppliers still only have support up to version 41 on their web pages. In such cases, I just installed the latest release for version 41 and I’ve yet to encounter one that doesn’t run on 42.
I find the dnf package manager is often more intuitive than other managers I have used in the past. While I think there may come a time when it installs the wrong package, its suggestions so far haven’t led me astray.

Things you might find annoying

For anyone migrating from a Windows OS, there are some things in the UI that might perplex you. In stock form, the control bar can only be accessed when the hotkey is pressed. In stock form, the UI windows don’t have a maximization button between _ and X, this needs to be added with gnome tweaks. Like with all Linux distributions, there is no clipboard and ctrl+x, and ctrl+v are not system-wide as in Windows.

Gnome tweaks

For many of the issues raised in the above paragraph, there is a solution. One of the benefits of Linux is how customisable it is as a platform. For extreme, unique customisation, one can go down the rabbit hole of ricing. To get a UI to resemble a Mac or Windows OS there are several Gnome-based apps in the software store to configure the OS as desired.

Conclusion

So far my experience with Fedora 42 has been issue free. I think it makes the grade as a daily driver. If you are looking for a change of scenery from Windows then it might be a bit jarring, but from another Linux desktop OS the migration is not so bad.