A rough week for Fedora Kinoite users (at least for this one)

6 March, 2025 - Categories: Fedora - Tags: Kinoite, Atomic Fedora, Linux

By Steven Rosenberg

Things can run off the rails a bit in any Linux distribution — for all, some or few users — and it's not fun waiting for things to begin moving in the right direction: back onto the rails.

And I'm almost tired of hearing myself say that, in my anecdotal experience, I run into one show-stopping bug/problem per Debian release (meaning one every 2 years) and one in Fedora every other release or so (one every year).

I also remember the issues being resolved within a couple of weeks. It all sounds great until you're in the middle of one of those bugs.

For the past two weeks in Fedora Kinoite, I've been "hit" by two fairly serious issues at the same time. And one prevented the other from being resolved.

First there was the matter of the 6.13.4 Linux kernel.

Until this update, Kinoite had been great for the few weeks I have run it. My Silverblue/GNOME/GTK (I never did nail it down) issue with power management that led to the screen freezing, with the laptop unresponsive until I did a hard boot, was gone with the switch to Kinoite.

Any KDE or LXQT live system also made the issue go away. I ran Debian, Lubuntu and Fedora live systems for days at a time With any system based on either of the QT desktop environments, all of my problems were gone.

I felt lucky that a (relatively) quick rebase from Fedora Silverblue to Kinoite also made my 2017 HP Envy Intel laptop run without trouble.

That all stopped with the 2/26/2025 update to Kinoite. The update replaced the 6.12 kernel with 6.13.4, and right away I started getting frozen screens, sometimes at random but also every time I tried to upload a photo to a WordPress site using any Flatpak web browser. Again, the only way back was a hard reboot.

The latter bug is known, but that didn't help me, especially because I was experiencing another bug: Something having to do with Fedora Infrastructure's Cloudfront service was preventing me from getting new updates to the Kinoite main system. It would error out with HTTP 502 every time. This went on from 2/28/2025 until 3/5/2025, when I finally got a new Kinoite deployment.

That 3/5 update was a little shaky. I did have one freeze — likely when the system was automatically suspending after a certain amount of idle time. But I was able to upload in Flatpak browsers, so I could get work done.

Now I'm running the 3/6/2025 Kinoite image, and everything is working like it should. No freezing screens — yet.

I hope it continues. I have been thinking of where to go next, distro-wise, but sticking with Kinoite is what I'd like to do for now.

And while I know it can take up to two weeks — and I never remember it being longer, it seems longer when waiting for the problem (in this case the can't get an update problem) to be resolved.

I'd like to thank the Fedora Infrastructure team and all the Fedora/Red Hat developers for figuring out the problem and putting a fix in place.

All of this makes me realize that aside from the Universal Blue project, there are very few atomic-style distributions available for general use. OpenSUSE does have one, which I have tried and do recommend, and there is also Vanilla Linux. I'm not sure what you call NixOS, but it's kind of atomic/immutable. Still none of the "big-time" Linux entities are as all in on atomic as Fedora (and eventually, I hope, CentOS and RHEL).

I'm still intent on giving Atomic Fedora a longer run as my main OS, and I am glad to finally be back on track with updates and a (hopefully continual) lack of screen-freezing bugs.