2024-2025 was a pretty tumultuous time for me, this instability in the real world pushed me towards wanting a more stable environment in the digital realm.
This coincided with me finally getting a new laptop to aid in my education, this was the first time in a while that I used a laptop and I wanted to get my money's worth from the touchpad so GNOME was a good choice and paired with fedora's environment that is stable yet tincker friendly when needed.
So after a painless install process, I found GNOME 4 to be a much better experience than the previous version, I found the new design to be much more polished and I actually liked the app icon designs that were more uniform.
the dynamic desktop concept was pretty stupid honestly as the point of having multiple desktops is easy access to application groups (for me at least) and I wasn't about to be destroying my pinkey finger with the Alt+tab shortcut so I resorted to using docked app shortcuts as a proxy to each desktop which wasn't ideal but way better than not having multiple desktops or having an even worse implementation like in Cinnamon, KDE and Windows (XFCE's is pretty decent)
Flatpak has really matured and I found most the applications I needed there but the time it took downloading the extra dependencies on my Tunisian internet was very noticeable to the point where installing from source in gentoo takes less time for graphical applications so I stopped using flatpaks for non-major projects that get bundeled by the devs like LibreWolf and GIMP and others.
dnf's repos were really slow aswell so each package manager complimented the other in it's time wasting sluggishness, syncing the two main repos took AGES each time I wanted to do anything and I'm not sure if there's closer servers mirrors I could have used but it was quite infuriating.
I managed to spend a whole year minus a month with it so it wasn't too atrocious unlike the rest of the year.
Fedora really is the vanilla and painless linux experience that I was hungry for but now, I am ready for some challenge.