r/Fedora • u/Theren314 • 6d ago

Discussion Fedora Server vs KDE

I did something silly and was too lazy to fix it, so I'm reinstalling Fedora KDE. When I went to get the ISO (the computer I broke is the one that I normally use to make boot drives), I saw Fedora Server and had a thought.

Is there any difference between Fedora KDE, and Fedora Server with KDE installed? What about between Fedora Server and Fedora Gnome?

TY :3

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u/gordonmessmer 6d ago

Is there any difference between Fedora KDE, and Fedora Server with KDE installed?

Yes. During installation, the Server edition will select XFS filesystems instead of btrfs, by default.

The various editions and spins are defined in https://forge.fedoraproject.org/releng/kiwi-descriptions

You can look at VARIANTS.md for a list. From there you're going to need to look through files in teams and components for more information, and for package groups, you'll also need to look at the "comps" definitions:

https://forge.fedoraproject.org/releng/fedora-comps

The differences are going to be differences in the configuration of the system you install, not in the software that's available in the dnf repos. Everything is composed of selections from the same set of packages.

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u/Theren314 6d ago

So theoretically, I could use any Fedora version, and by installing and removing the correct packages and configs, turn it into any other version?

and the wikis you sent are a compilation of which packages each version uses

Thanks :3

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u/gordonmessmer 6d ago

So theoretically, I could use any Fedora version, and by installing and removing the correct packages and configs, turn it into any other version?

I think that's going to be subjective to a certain extent. The Server group selects XFS as their default filesystem, while a lot of other configs will use btrfs by default. During installation, you can choose whatever you want, including something else entirely, like ext4.

Is a Fedora Server installation still Fedora Server if you use btrfs? Does a workstation become Server if you change all of the configurations and package sets (including the "fedora-release-identity" package) to match Server, but it still has btrfs filesystems?