Conclusion
Overall, Fedora 41 KDE ain't bad. But it could be so much more, relatively easily - well, like so many other distros out there, which all seem to subconsciously refuse or reject the concept of mainstream good user experience. But then, of all the distros out there, Fedora has always been the one to push the boundaries, to be the pioneer of new tech, new kernels, new features, and experimental stuff. For that reason, I can't really say they're wrong with testing Wayland, but they are wrong in not giving the superior X11 option. By giving users no choice but to use an inferior solution, that's a rather defeatist approach to development. Also, that's something "big tech" does often, and the Linux and FOSS crowds go wild over - Microsoft forces BING and Edge, you can't use a different browser engine on iOS, Google this or that, blah blah. And then what, Wayland, take it or leave it. Much choice, such wow.
The installer is simply ridiculous. Awful. And it hasn't improved one bit in a decade, which is quite sad. The fonts aren't amazing, again, and HD scaling isn't as good as it should be, a regression or a direct artifact of the Wayland choice, I don't know. The Plasma System Monitor with its pointless stacked CPU graphs remains a joke. All of these mar the experience, and make the nice, slick Plasma behave in a rather mediocre fashion. There's really no reason for that. No reason whatsoever.
On the plus side, the boot sequence is clean and smooth (if not ultra-fast), the desktop works well, Wayland works well enough (if you're good with a B- grade), and you get the colorful and flexible repertoire of visuals and software, the way only Plasma does. I do have to highlight dnf and Discover in a very positive way. In this release, the package management is excellent, and the integration quite good. So there are nice things around, but overall, they're not enough to make Fedora a must-have choice. As always, it's a cool testbed, too stable for what it stands for, but that's as far as I am wiling to embrace it. Not great, not terrible. And we're done.
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