From Kubuntu LTS to Fedora 43 KDE on my Dell Latitude 7300

I was having some weird trackpad issues on Kubuntu LTS on my Dell Latitude 7300, there were random right or left clicks happening while using it, both while I was moving the cursor myself and while typing. Disable trackpad while typing was enabled so it was not that. It got so infuriating that I decided to try another distro, and so I decided to try Fedora KDE, since I had read that KDE support has improved a lot in Fedora recently. It's also been awhile since I tried Fedora. 

As with most modern distros, it's pretty easy to install and doesn't take too long, especially on a reasonably powered machine like this one. This is what I was greeted with on the first login. It's a fairly stock looking KDE other than Fedora Kicker icon and becomes more stock when you apply a default KDE theme. Breeze Dark is always my usual choice for KDE. I think it uses the same or close to the same version of KDE Plasma desktop as KDE Neon, currently version 6.5.5, which is a fair bit newer than Kubuntu LTS. On the plus side it should have a fair few things fixed, but it may be a little bleeding edge.

And here's how I set it up, I have added more virtual desktops, moved the panel to the top and changed the theme to Breeze Dark. This is pretty much how I setup KDE on all my machines.

Apart from web browsing, (using Chrome, there's an rpm available on Google's download page) I mostly use my laptop for image editing with GIMP and a little bit of video editing with Kdenlive.  To get libx264 output working, I did a bit of Googling and installed the RPMfusion repos and installed libavcodec.

Once I did that, Kdenlive could now export to x264 video, and many other options. Updates on the KDE edition of Fedora are handled by KDE's Discover, just like Kubuntu, or on the command line using dnf instead of apt, using these commands to first check for updates and then install them: 

sudo dnf check-update 

sudo dnf upgrade   

I've installed all my usual apps such as Audacious for playing music, VLC and MPV for video playing,  and Soundkonverter for converting media along with qbittorrent and Filezilla. One slight annoyance I had was sending a file to my Android devices with KDE Connect failed for some reason. I disabled the firewall in case that was the issue but that did not work, but then it  turned out that it was SELinux being too restrictive. Disabling it or turning it down a bit will do the job, allowing KDE Connect to work. To disable SELinux, edit /etc/selinux/config with your favourite text editor and set SELINUX=disabled and then save, exit and reboot. Also Mkchromecast (for casting audio to Chromecasts) is not available in the Fedora repos so I need to look into how to get it.

Another slight annoyance I have had is getting used to a much newer version of the image editor, GIMP, as the devs for some silly reason have made it so that the default paste is now as a single layer, rather than a floating layer, which is now in the paste sub-menu. "Paste into selection" is now "Paste as floating layer into selection" - very inconvenient!  GIMP has also crashed several times, mainly when it's been left open for a long time, especially between Suspend and Resume. Also, GIMP no longer remembers the last font used in the text tool.

So far, Fedora 43 KDE has been performing much better than my many previous attempts at using Fedora, usually I use it for a few days and find it to be too buggy or there's a big showstopping bug that drives me back to my previous distro.  It's been over a week and I'm still using it and everything is working fine so far, a lot more stable than when I have previously used Fedora.  It's unusual that the only issue I have with this Fedora version is actually just an issue with the latest GIMP. And I've yet to encounter the random trackpad clicks that I had in Kubuntu either...

Update 27/01/2026:

I am still getting the occasional random false trackpad clicks, but not as much as before. I do wonder whether if it's only happening when the laptop gets much hotter.