I think I've mentioned before that I use Fedora Workstation as my
primary computer on my aging HP laptop. I've been running Fedora
on this laptop since I believe Fedora 28 and I've pretty much
upgraded in place all the way up to Fedora 37.
I should note that I've always used the base Gnome Desktop...not
because I particularly like it but because it just wasn't worth
the time for me to switch. I run Gnome in classic mode and for the
most part it stays out of my way.
I finally decided it was time to update to Fedora 39 and I did so
a few days ago and unfortunately, I've run into some trouble. Now,
Fedora is generally pretty good in terms of stability for their
new versions but there have been versions in the past that haven't
been that great.
I think Fedora 39 will be that way for me. Primarily I'm dealing
with Gnome Shell constantly crashing seemingly at random times
whenever I click on something. Of course the Gnome logs are basically
unhelpful. Some google searching has found a few small groups of
people dealing with the same issue and they seem to point to a
combination of either wayland or mutter or Gnome Shell.
It doesn't matter to me much as I'm only interested in being able
to use my laptop effectively on a stable environment. I'm pretty
neutral to Desktop Environments in general and I'm old enough to
have used nearly all types in my computing history. From FVWM,
openbox, twm, i3, KDE, gnome, lxde, fluxbox, and I could go on and
on.
Suffice to say, I don't care all that much...however that being
said, I'm also old enough to not want to constantly tweak my DE/WM
and just have something that works.
Well, I finally decided on installing the budgie desktop. why you
ask? well it turns out budgie basically uses almost all of the
GTK/Gnome stuff I already have installed and it behaves like a more
classic Gnome-classic anyways.
So I get a classic desktop, I don't have to install a ton of stuff
for KDE or XFCE, and I also get to use the gnome-ish system config
tools that modern Gnome uses.
Overall, I'm quite liking it. It's not a 1-to-1 feature parity
transition of course. Notably, I think the taskbar and status area
of budgie isn't quite as good as Gnome-classic in power and
functionality.
However, it seems like my global keyboard shortcuts from Gnome are
carried over somehow so I'm pretty much good to go.
In conclusion, I will likely sit out using Gnome in Fedora 39 unless
my crashing issues are solved somehow with updates. But I do highly
recommend installing and giving budgie a try especially if you are
already a gnome user. It's a good fallback and might even replace
gnome if you prefer the classic desktop.
