Kinoite, cont.
At first glance, the menu appears to be identical to the one on the host machine, which runs Solus Plasma. Not being entirely sure how to command an update from the terminal, I decided to just use Discover to do the first update. I recall reading something about updating all the packages at once, and this appears to support that idea.
The update takes a few minutes to complete, which makes it easy to believe that it's replacing a number of packages. And considering that it's repacing the whole system, I'm suitably impressed. Finally it ends with this:
Yep, no "Reboot to use the new kernel" message. Obviously, the whole system is getting replaced.
The next order of business is to work my way through the settings, and configure any that may need it. As with all Plasma installations, this is where I can create some virtual desktops on the bottom panel, and get rid of unnecessary annoyances like sreen dimming and locking. The settings here all look identical to the settings on any other Plasma installation. I should be able to breeze through this task pretty quickly.
As expected, that didn't take long. It seemed to me that I had a lot more defaults to change than on other systems, like Solus, but I don't really remember how this went on the ordinary, non-immutable, version of Fedora. I didn't notice any different settings, or anything else out of the ordinary, so no surprises here.
Here's how the UI now looks, with the Breeze dark theme selected, and eight virtual desktops to work with. The rest of the changes have to do with behavior, so they're not visibly evident here.
Normally, my next step in setting up a Plasma implementation is to install some new software and do some configuration of BASH, /etc/fstab, Thunderbird, and Vivaldi. This is where I expect to see some significant differences in the terminal, as I don't know how installing individual packages works here. I know they're all flatpaks on this system, but will dnf still install them? Or will I need to use flatpak commands to do that?
Hmm... As I expected, things be different here. I guess I'll soon find out just how different they are.
I tried using dnf to install vivaldi, not really expecting it to work, and I wasn't disappointed. I got an error saying that the command "dnf" is not found. So I used a flatpak command to connect with the repository at flathub, and that worked fine. When I tried to install the micro editor from there, though, I had no luck, although several packages with "micro" in their names were listed. So, I guess I'm stuck using nano, which is already present. I hope I'm able to find flatpaks for the rest of the stuff I need. At least I've learned that I can install individual flatpak packages. At least, I think I can. I haven't actually installed any yet.
Trying to connect to my NAS shares met with limited success. I was unable to find a flatpak for either nfs-common or nfs-utils, but when I modified /etc/fstab to reference those shares, created the mount points in /mnt, and ran the mount -a
command, all seemed to work just fine. Dolphin was able to display those shares, but I was disappointed to find out that I was unable to enter any of them. I've seen that error before, altogether too many times, and I'll try experimenting with ownership and permissions, but I'm not very hopeful for a solution.
As on other systems, though, I could select Dolphin's Network
category, and connect with my NAS using Dolphin's native smb protocol. From there, I could not only connect with its shares, but could easily enter any of them and access its contents. I have no idea why I have those issues with nfs, but having smb access means I can contiue with this exploration.
I'm not so confident that I'll be able to find flatpak versions of the rest of the software I need, though. I'll just have to cross my fingers and hope for the best. Having needed to use only one flatpak app on Solus, I'm not really familiar with finding what I need in one flatpak repo or another.
As it happens, I was able to find Thunderbird, and installed it, but could not fine Vivaldi anywhere. And I was able to find and install aisleriot (for Spider solitaire) and kshisen (for Shisen-sho), but not gnome-mahjongg. So, again, I've been somewhat successful, but not entirely so. I'm getting my flatpak skills refreshed, though. 🙂
My conclusion will follow soon, after I've configured and tried out what I've been able to install.