Fedora KDE Takes A Blow; Fedora 23 KDE Spin Is "Easily The Worst" They've Spun

[RahulSundaram]

How so Rahul? I usually hear about Red Hat putting developers / time / money into Gnome, but supporting KDE (beyond just "Hey! We found a bug!" or "Hey! We're thinking of a new fdo standard and want your guys input") isn't something I hear too often.

You probably have missed several Phoronix articles covering such work. Refer to http://ltinkl.blogspot.com/ for lot more details.

[RahulSundaram]

Maybe. Maybe this is true. However, let me say that there has been two things about Fedora kde over the last few years that speaks otherwise. First, (and I just double checked this), go to getfedora.org and click on the links to get to fedora kde. At some point, you have to click on very small text hidden somewhere that says spins. .

Yep. This is just a issue with the redesign that is being addressed already. Matthew Miller, the current Fedora Project leader is following up on it.

Second, for (what, 18 months or so?) you do not have a working GUI package manager for kde. Sounds ridiculous, right? It does. The fact taht you do not see anything 'Fedora specific' says a lot.

Yes it does but maybe not what you have in mind.. There is not much Fedora specific about pretty much any component in Fedora. This is just how Fedora works. If work is done, it gets pushed upstream directly for the most part. If KDE does not provide a GUI package manager, they should work on it.

[shawnsterp]

Just thought I would shed some light here as to how the package manager "[works] but maybe not what [I] have in mind." https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1098735

[RahulSundaram]

Just thought I would shed some light here as to how the package manager "[works] but maybe not what [I] have in mind." https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1098735

Kevin Kofler who is the subject of the article hasn't responded to the comments in the upstream bug report https://github.com/hughsie/PackageKit/pull/49. Since he has resigned now, it is unlikely he is going to do the work involved now. Someone else has to work on the code and get it merged. If anyone here is interested, that would be your starting point to work with the KDE special interest group in Fedora to get this finished.

[littleowl]

How so Rahul? I usually hear about Red Hat putting developers / time / money into Gnome, but supporting KDE (beyond just "Hey! We found a bug!" or "Hey! We're thinking of a new fdo standard and want your guys input") isn't something I hear too often.

You are not well informed then. Red Hat sponsors (pays) several Fedora's developers in Brno, who work on KDE and Rahul mentioned a blog of one of them.

[littleowl]

Then again, Fedora is not a proper product for end users anyway.

And can you justify on concrete examples why? I use Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS as an end user starting from 1997 (Red Hat 4.2) and Fedora, especially after F20, is a very good product for the workstation, which greatly benefits the from facts that Fedora has plenty of upstream developers in the list of contributors or users (including Linus T.), sponsored infrastructure and some QA team, so the most serious known issues usually get fixed before the release (Go/No Go Meetings).

[bkor]

You mean a Fedora developer quitting because he's discontent with how Fedora is GNOME-centric? Maybe it is, I don't think that changed much over the years.

Kevin is not quitting because of that. Read the article! There's bits about too many KDE packages, lack of time, lack of QML knowledge, Firefox default (affects GNOME too!), etc. Summarizing this as "GNOME-centric" is entirely dishonest representation.

[Rezza]

As another KDE SIGer here - and this is my personal opinion only ;-) - I think F23 KDE spin is in a pretty good shape. I'm using F23 from early pre-alpha times and I'm very happy with it (with known multimonitor issues that are worst on my laptop because of OneLink Pro Dock that behaves really bad even outside OS). During F22, I was a bit pessimistic about Plasma 5 readiness (and it was Kevin pushing it into F22 as we have to be always the first;-) but in the end, I had to admit it was a good decision. There were some issues as we didn't finish everything on time for F22 (and were bashed here) but F23 makes the integration pretty well.

For Firefox as default browser, I voted 0. I don't like it but unfortunately at the moment it's the only usable browser for general use but pretty buggy one. So I'm forced to use it...

I still believe we will be able to move Workstation forward to be a real Workstation product one day - the best open source desktop OS, not GNOMEstation/KDEstation or whatever. Yes, purists could have own GNOME and KDE spins but we need product for users . But it's just technology. First steps were done by including Qt and partially kdelibs in the Workstation edition but then it got stalled. Maybe it's time to try to revive it .

[TiberiusDuval]

Indeed - KDE is in bad shape. I found Kubuntu 15.10 unusable. Various things crashed multiple times within the first 30 minutes of trying to use it. I was rather shocked that something that bad is even hinted at being usable.

The sad thing about this is that it's 4.x all over again. Back then they blamed distros for shipping it too early, and here we are with a version number of 5.4, with 2+ years of development and Plasma 5 is an unusable mess - inspite of the assurances given that 4.x wouldn't happen again. I'm sure the 5.x series will eventually improve, but if users have to put up with this every few years what's the point?

I finally just gave up on KDE - Even KDE 4, which I stuck with for a long time, still has annoying quirks and a generally unpolished feel.

Did you do fresh install or did you upgrade it from 15.04. I first did upgrade, and had similar problems. Then I removed all KDE settings directories from home directory, and did fresh install. After that system works nicely enough.

[eggbert]

Did you do fresh install or did you upgrade it from 15.04. I first did upgrade, and had similar problems. Then I removed all KDE settings directories from home directory, and did fresh install. After that system works nicely enough.

I did a fresh install. I find it interesting there are reports some users do not have any problems, while for others its a buggy mess. In any case here some of the problems I recall

Hitting back button in the KDE settings usually resulted in a KCrash
Volume control on taskbar disappeared
Upon logging in the desktop appears frozen for a long time
Taskbar gets messed up with widgets not appearing in proper place
Adding widget to the desktop resulted in crash
Dolphin randomly crashes
KRunner stopped returning results
Logging out often caused a crash
Muon software center crashes frequently

This was all within the first 30 - 60 minutes and it did not get any better during the half day I tried to use it. Maybe some users have a higher tolerance to these kinds of bugs, I don't know. I found it pretty frustrating.