Fedora 40 Kinoite review

Overview

I had an unexpected ssd failure and the only OS install image laying around was a fedora kinoite I had been meaning to play with. There was work to do so I needed something up and running immediately so I went ahead and installed it. I used it for around a week daily until my new m2 drive arrived. As there aren’t many reviews, I figured I’d write one!

SystemD

I’ll go ahead and start this by saying I don’t prefer systemd. I grew up on FreeBSD and Slackware with sysvinit. That said I rarely use a system without it these days, and it serves it’s purpose fine. As long as alternatives are alive and being used I’m fine with it.

What is an atomic OS?

I’m only going to go into a basic overview here, but it is important you understand this because it’s the main difference between regular Fedora workstation and Kinoite.

On an atomic OS all system files and applications are within a read only file-system image. Any changes or additions are just layered on top of this image and can be reverted at will. One of the major benefits to this is applications and the user cannot inadvertently or maliciously alter the base OS. Another is that this makes rolling back changes very easy so you will always be left with a working system.

This comes with some drawbacks as well, which I will explore further as I come to them.

For an example of an atomic OS simply look at chromeOS. The core underlying system is read only, and can be reverted to at any time.

Installation

There really isn’t much to say here. The installation process is the same as regular Fedora and went without a hiccup. For reference I am installing on an HP elitedesk 800 g3 mini with 16gb ram and 2tb ssd.

First Impressions

This was my first time using Fedora since around version 20. The KDE Plasma 6 interface operates just like version 5 that I’m used to and was no problem to customize to my liking.

Kinoite (and Fedora in general now) supports flatpak, and in Kinoite this is actually the best way to go due to the atomic nature making this one of the easiest ways to install software.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that attemping to use yum or dnf to install software doesn’t work! In Kinoite you can use rpm-ostree but be warned, anything installed in this way causes a rebuild of the OS image and can take a long time creating the new image. Realistically you should not install anything that way if possible, and if needed keep additions to the base image to a minimum.

This leads to the next section. How do you get things done without dnf or yum? This is where toolbox comes in.

Toolbx

Toolbx (which I will refer to as toolbox) is

a tool for Linux, which allows the use of interactive command line environments for software development and troubleshooting the host operating system, without having to install software on the host. It is built on top of Podman and other standard container technologies from OCI.

If you are familiar with docker or Podman you will have no issues getting set up with toolbox. Simply run

toolbox create

to begin. The first time you run this you will be prompted to download the default fedora development environment and create the toolbox. You can then enter

toolbox enter

to enter a shell into the toolbox. Unlike docker and Podman toolbox runs on the same filesystem as the host OS and you have access to all of your files. You can now use dnf and yum to install software all you wish. There is much more to toolbox than this, just know this is how you will manage much of the software on your Kinoite.

Other nuances

During my time I ran into several issues related to software not working properly inside a toolbox. In some of these cases I could have used a workaround with rpm-ostree but I couldn’t justify all of the image rebuilds. If you had a small set of known software you could do it all at once and this wouldn’t be an issue, but I was testing lots of different things to see what came up.

Another thing to note is the directory structure is different, as the OS is read only the writeable folders such as home have been moved to /var. This caused several configuration issues.

There really wasn’t any software I couldn’t get running, but there were several things that became too much trouble to try, mostly system level software. Generally userland activities shouldn’t be too difficult to adapt.

There are several other known bugs here.

Final Thoughts

Overall I really enjoyed my time in Kinoite, and ended up installing Fedora 40 Workstation on my new hard drive when it arrived and I’ve been running it since.

I feel like Kinoite would really shine for laptops and company or education devices that have a known set of software they will need to run. It would be an extra layer of security against users modifying their systems. This would also give those users a quick means of rolling back to a working system.

Another thing, I was able to perform every bit of actual work I needed to do without issue. Google Chrome and Thunderbird are the main tools I needed, and someone without complicated requirements could easily live on kinoite and benefit from it’s stability and security without ever noticing the atomic nature of the OS. I had issues with the flatpak VS Code, but I think some of them could be mitigated with some research into flatpak configuration.

In conclusion

If you need to ensure everything you are trying to do works with minimal friction, and your needs vary from day to day, Kinoite is probably not for you.

However if you just need an up-to-date, stable and consistent environment with apps that are available on flathub or in a toolbox environment then Kinoite should be a serious contender for your OS.