I’ve been running kinoite on my laptop for a short while now, and I wanted to address a few miscellaneous things.

First: I recommend trying the out of the box experience for a while before going far customizing it. For example, someone mentioned your filesystem layout with subvolumes: that’s the default in kinoite: home, var, and root are in subvolumes.

Second: Wayland either is or is about to be the default in fedora (I’m running the beta for the next version, and it’s Wayland by default). Try it and see if you have issues before trying to switch to x11.

Flatpak is your first stop for installing software on kinoite, but the fedora repo that’s configured by default is missing a lot. If <your favorite search engine> shows software available that you don’t see in discover/flatpak, you need to add the flathub repo, which is easy to do, but not obvious (to me) that it wasn’t the default.

Finally, Nvidia experience might not be good ootb. You might need to take extra steps to get the proprietary Nvidia driver.

Good luck with your endeavor!

Edit: Firefox

I don’t understand why the default install of Firefox isn’t the flatpak version. Switch to the flatpak version and you won’t have to worry about codecs.

Lol, I just noticed that this thread is 3 weeks old… How is your setup working out?

Is Wayland worth using?

For a first dive into the Linux ecosystem, I recommend Xorg. I use Wayland myself (Hyprland), and that’s why I know that it’s simply not ready for general adoption. There are many features that are missing, won’t be implemented, or are done much differently compared to X. Some say Xorg is old and bloated - I say it’s a mature technology.

There are also some applications that need root privileges to work (Veyon Configurator is one that I struggled a lot with) and you have to do some weird pkexec hackery to launch them.

Wayland’s development has more drama and bickering than an average sitcom - I recommend Brodie Robertson’s channel if you’re interested.

advantages/improvements to using Wayland

Wayland is better for gaming. It has a noticeably lower latency because the entire Wayland stack is implemented in a single program (what they call the compositor) as opposed to several in the X11 stack (X server, compositor, window manager) that need to communicate with each other. Unfortunately Steam and some other applications often produce graphical artifacts on Wayland+Nvidia.

Does bloat actually matter

Compared to Windows, it is insignificant. My work laptop is a Macbook Air from 2015 running Linux Mint on just 4G RAM without issues.

Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?

Install the tldr program. It’s a bit like man but lists practical examples of a command instead of a full documentation.

What are some habits I should practice

Make use of your home directory. Most user applications will have a config file in several places - usually in ~/.config (user config) and /etc (systemwide config). You should only edit the systemwide config when it makes sense, and always prioritize the user config.

A common practice is to have your /home directory on a different partition, or a different physical device. If the system breaks or you decide to distrohop, you can unmount/disconnect /home and only wipe the root partition while retaining your user files.

I also recommend using Timeshift to back up your system. It’s even better if your root partition uses btrfs since it natively supports snapshots.

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux

I needed to leave the Windows ways behind me. On Windows, I had a hard drive mounted as F: and an external HDD mounted as H:. Moving to Linux (Manjaro at the time) was basically a snap decision since Windows had obliterated the boot partition during an update and then broke itself, and I had no idea how to properly set up the filesystem didn’t consider how I wanted to set up the filesystem, so I mounted them to /mnt/f and /mnt/h on a whim. It caused me many hours of headache later.

I wouldn’t worry about wayland vs xorg at this point. There are reasons to prefer one over the other but, as a new user, if it works it works. And if something is broken, it’s easy to switch between them (I assume it’s an option in the login screen?).

I’d just recommend whatever your distro defaults to, because that’s what they think works best.

Same as systemd if you stumble upon an argument about that at some point. It’s something the distro has made a decision about and taken care of, so it’s not something you have to choose.

As for a tip: On Linux, the “app store” (I think it’s called “Discover” in KDE?) is actually pretty good compared to Windows. If possible, applications should be downloaded from there rather than directly from websites.