Korora 20 "Peach" KDE Review: Enhanced Fedora 20 and up-gradable to KDE 4.12.1

For many Linux users, Korora, dropping an "a" from it's name last year, is to Fedora what Linux Mint is to Ubuntu. Is it really true? Why I am saying this because Linux Mint not only packages Ubuntu in a user-friendly fashion and just makes it work - in my tests, it actually outperformed Ubuntu. With a comprehensive collection of performance statistics from my evaluations last year, this year let me review the first big release of 2014 with a comprehensive assessment of Korora to check if it is able to outperform it's mother distro - Fedora.

From Korora 20 http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

Korora 20 is based on Fedora 20 released recently and like Fedora, it ships with Linux kernel 3.12. Korora 20 provides options to users for KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon, Mate and XFCE spins. I downloaded the KDE spin, about 2.3 GB in size, for this review. It has KDE 4.11.5 pre-installed along with a host of ready to use utility softwares.

From Korora 20 http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

I used my Asus K55VM laptop with 2.3 Ghz Core i3 3rd generation processor, 8 GB DDR3 RAM and 2 GB NVIDIA GeForce 630M hybrid graphics. I created a live USB using Mint Image Writer and first did a live boot followed by installation. Post installation it got upgraded to Kernel 3.12.7 and I installed KDE 4.12.1 along with Bumblebee for Nvidia hybrid graphics. In sections below I take you through my experience with using Korora for a week.

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Fedora 20 "Heisenbug" KDE Review: With KDE 4.11.4 & kernel 3.12 now, bleeding edge but stable!

Honestly when I started using Linux back in 2009, I didn't like Fedora much. Ubuntu was my choice for being easy, fast and efficient. However, as I matured as a Linux user, my fondness of Fedora increased. I reviewed Fedora 19 in July 2013 and was very impressed with the performance it offered. Fedora's latest release Fedora 20 "Heisenbug", named after a bug, was released on 17-Dec-2013. This year witnessed 3 Fedora releases and having used all of them, I had built my expectations - I didn't expect anything radically different but functional incremental innovation over tried and tested desktops. I guess Fedora 20 lived up to my expectation in some aspect and not fulfill in certain others. I'll take you step by step through my experience of using Fedora 20 KDE over the last one week or so.

From Fedora 20 http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

Fedora 20 comes in all popular flavors: KDE, GNOME 3, XFCE, LXDE and Mate. I start my review with the KDE spin, I liked it most while reviewing Fedora 19. I downloaded the 928 MB 64-bit ISO and used Mint Imagewriter to create a live USB. I did a live boot and then installed on my Asus powerhouse (K55VM, Core i7 2.3 Ghz quad core processor 3610QM, 8 GB DDR3 RAM and NVIDIA 630M GeForce hybrid graphics). 

When I installed Fedora 20 shipped with KDE 4.11.3 and kernel 3.11.10. However, 3 days ago I received update for KDE 4.11.4 and kernel got updated to 3.12.5. Think about it - Fedora users have already started using the 3.12 kernel and Ubuntu users will receive it in April 2014 once 14.04 LTS release comes out! Fedora is definitely bleeding edge!

Fedora 20 still ships with X window system and I guess we need to wait a bit for Wayland. I guess in 2014 we get to see Wayland in Fedora and Mir in Ubuntu. Anyway, being a casual user, I feel I won't even notice much difference between the two!

In this review, I start with aesthetics, hardware recognition, applications, bugs that I noted, good points that I noted and finally, performance compared to other relevant KDE distros that I've used on this machine.

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