Since my first experience with Linux just a few months ago, all kinds of distros have passed by the PCs at my desk. Starting with Arch, then Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and many others, I've experimented quite a bit. But the world of Linux is never-ending, and despite my many experiences, I haven't spent a whole lot of time with the KDE desktop environment, or any Fedora-based distro.

Recently, I heard about Aurora, and I'll admit the modern website for the project convinced me to give it a shot. But thankfully, I don't regret it at all, and I've found this to be a great experience for potential converts from Windows. It feels a little different, but overall, it's a very positive and breezy experience that comes highly recommended.

A familiar experience with tons of customization

Classic desktop with a new twist

Switching from Windows 11 can feel a little daunting, but Aurora OS, like most Fedora-based distros, is fairly easy to set up. It did take a long time to extract the files initially on my laptop, which made me think the process had frozen, but after giving it some time, it eventually pushed through, and booting it up went smoothly.

The KDE Plasma desktop is one of the best when it comes to providing an experience that's similar to Windows 11. You have the application launcher on the left side of the screen, with a taskbar showing your pinned and open apps, while the right side of the taskbar has a variety of icons for all the kinds of things you'd expect. Volume and brightness controls, internet, Bluetooth, and even a clipboard history, along with notifications and a panel for access to more in-depth settings.

Sure, the launcher is a bit different and more categorized than Windows, but once you get into the swing of things, it all becomes pretty easy to understand. One thing I love about KDE is that it even comes with an equivalent to Flow Launcher and PowerToys Run, with KRunner. Pressing Alt+Space gives you a search bar for apps and some system commands you can quickly perform using just the keyboard.

Where things get really interesting with KDE is its fantastic customization options, and while Aurora locks things down a bit, it's still fantastic. See, Aurora is what you'd call an immutable operating system, meaning a lot of the system files can't be touched by the user. This enables the system to be more stable and allows you to more easily roll back to a known good state in the event that something breaks after an OS update.

Because of that, installing themes from the KDE system settings always resulted in errors, though some of the themes did become functional. What you should do instead is download themes from the KDE store on the web, and extract the files into the appropriate folder. There are some official instructions for this, but they don't seem to be fully accurate, so I had to do some digging. It makes things a little more cumbersome, but it helps ensure that themes don't attempt to modify root files that are read-only.

Once you get past that, you can install themes that dramatically change the look and feel of your desktop. I really liked the Sweet series of themes that add a pop of color to everything, and they look fantastic. I love how much can be customized, including window controls, icons, the taskbar and launcher, and even the lock screen.

What's even cooler is that, similar to Linux Mint's Cinnamon UI, you can also easily create new panels (similar to the taskbar) and move them to any edge of the screen you want. I created a top panel that has all my system tray icons and clock, leaving the taskbar to only house app icons. But the flexibility here is immense, though I did experience quite a few crashes when rearranging things — not system crashes, just temporary errors that sorted themselves out fairly quickly.

Apps just work

Flatpak is the best

One of the big problems with Linux is that the paradigms of package management can make it more of a pain to simply use normal apps as most people would use on a normal computer. Using tools like APT or pacman to install packages is more complicated, and the variability between different Linux distros and the package managers they use, or even the package types supported (such as DEB or RPM), makes things a little frustrating at times because learning one Linux distro doesn't mean you've learned them all.

Aurora has its own approach to this, too, but it's one that works extremely well and helps provide one of the most seamless experiences you can get. It comes with Flatpak and Flathub set up by default, giving you one of the easiest ways to reliably install apps without having to mess with any system files or dependencies that would require modifying root files. When you first set up Aurora, it comes with the old-school discover store, but once it's fully updated, it becomes the new Bazaar store, which has a very modern UI and even a curated section from the Aurora team so you can find the most relevant apps quickly. It's a great way to get started with installing apps, and while not every major app is on Flathub, the majority of what you would want is.

But Aurora also has another benefit compared to most other Linux distros I've tried — it handles AppImage files flawlessly. AppImage packages are self-contained app files that you can download from the internet and just run, without having to install them in a traditional sense. Beeper, one of my favorite apps to use, is only available as an AppImage file, and in the past, I had some trouble setting it up properly on both Linux Mint and Ubuntu, but AuroraOS just handles it completely smoothly. I just double-clicked the file, got prompted to choose whether to always launch it as an executable file, and there it was; Beeper was added to my launcher, and it functioned perfectly.

Between these two options, you should be able to use the majority of typical consumer-facing apps you would expect, though there are also methods available for further options if you need them. It's possible that this isn't too different from standard Fedora (I haven't used that one before), but for someone trying a Fedora-based distro on a laptop for the first time, this was pretty great.

DistroShelf is built-in

For anything Aurora can't do

Just recently, I wrote about how Distrobox is the best way to use multiple Linux distros within your terminal if you have a Linux host, and one of the big reasons for that is that it adds a lot of flexibility if you have an immutable operating system, as is the case with Aurora. You're not going to be able to modify system files easily on Aurora, so some dependencies and utilities may not work for specific tools.

Thankfully, Aurora knows this may be a problem, and it comes with DistroShelf and Distrobox set up out of the box. DistroShelf mostly just gives you a UI to manage and launch your Distrobox containers, which do the heavy lifting. You can easily create containers for various Linux distros, such as Arch or Ubuntu, and within those containers, you can use those distros to their fullest extent. They're completely self-contained and don't interfere with your system files, but you can still do all the things you'd usually do, so they're perfect for setting up a development environment (or multiple) that don't interfere with each other. It all just works seamlessly.

Setting up Distrobox containers is fast and easy, so there really isn't much of a hurdle to overcome here, especially if you're already interested in development in the first place.

Easy updates

Aurora promises reliability

One of the big focal points of Aurora's website is the reliability of the system and how easy it is to handle updates. Aside from the Bazaar store used to update your Flatpak apps, Aurora handles all its updates centrally in the command line, and the company promises updates are properly tested before rolling out to users to ensure nothing breaks. A single command in the terminal (which can also be accessed through the launcher) updates the OS and all its packages in one go, making things easy to handle. Plus, updates are continuous forever, so you should never have to go through the hassle of manually installing a new version of the OS.

Because reliability is so important for the Aurora team, rolling back a potentially broken update is easy. After installing an update, the previous versions remains available so you can easily roll back to a known good state and keep working without any additional frustrations. Since I've only had a few days with it, I haven't experienced this particular side of it all too much, though I do see the option to boot an older version of Aurora when I start my computer; I just haven't needed it.

Performance

Booting takes a while

Generally, I praise Linux for its snappy performance and smooth transitions compared to Windows, but this is one area where Aurora has felt a bit more neutral to me. It's not that it's horribly slow, but boot times seem to be much longer than I was used to on Linux Mint (the previous distro I had on this laptop), which is a bit strange.

While using the PC (with a 12th-gen Intel Core i7-1270P), I also feel that apps take a bit longer to open compared to when I was using Linux Mint, though again, it's not too slow. It's just that usually, I can say that Linux is clearly faster than Windows, and here it seems like more of a tie. I haven't measured this in any scientific way, though. Maybe KDE is just a slightly more resource-intensive desktop environment, considering my wife has also experienced some sluggishness with Kubuntu, and I recall that some handhelds I've tested with Bazzite also take some time to boot.

This doesn't stop me from recommending Aurora, though. It's still a great experience all around, and things like animations are all smooth and look great. The OS doesn't feel slow in general, some things just take a split second longer to load.

Aurora OS is great

All things considered, I love what I've seen of Aurora OS so far, and I'm keeping it on my laptop for the time being. Setting up the apps I care about the most was a breeze, and while customization was a bit more frustrating, the options afforded to me by KDE are very thorough and look great. It's been a great user experience for the most part, and I'm happy to recommend it to others curious about Linux.