Linux Saloon 27: Fedora 36

Great discussion guys! Thanks to everyone for their insight.

Thanks to Jinda for confirming that dnfdragora doesn’t work. That was my last experience with it several releases ago too. That’s actually a major factor in my previous answer to @CubicleNate and @MichaelTunnell as to why I haven’t tackled a series of spins for Fedora. I hate the command line for package management, and a low-level graphical package manager a la Synaptic or YaST Software is extremely import for me.

Regarding @Thiscolin 's suggestion about Calamares becoming sort of a standardized installer for all distros, I agree that it would be an excellent choice for many of them. However, it should be noted that Calamares depends on the KPMcore partitioning library, which is part of the KDE framework, so it brings along a huge number of KDE5 library dependencies. On non-KDE spins of SpiralLinux and GeckoLinux I simply configure Calamares to uninstall itself along with all the KDE5 libs on the destination system, but it probably adds at least 100MB to the ISO size. It’s also very very difficult to make Calamares follow the GTK/Qt theme of the system because it has to run with root privileges. It is possible to make it work, and it’s not a critical requirement to make the theming correct, but it does take a lot of time and effort to get it right for maintainers like myself that insist on those little details.

Indeed. Even mixing Qt apps with GTK apps usually works pretty smoothly and doesn’t take up too much library space. But in the case of Calamares it actually depends on the KDE Framework too, so that’s where all the extra cruft comes from if the ISO doesn’t already include Plasma. In other words, all KDE apps use Qt, but not all Qt apps use the KDE Framework. Calamares uses both.

The main thing that it needs from the KDE Framework is KPMcore, it’s basically an abstraction layer to make working with disks and partitions easier and safer.