Is Fedora's KDE Spin Too Bloated?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Is Fedora's KDE Spin Too Bloated?

This weekend on the Fedora mailing list a debate has begun over whether Fedora's KDE desktop spin is too bloated and what could be done about it...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-KDE-Bloat-Debate

[tildearrow]

What do you think of Fedora KDE?

Maybe removing Akonadi will help.
And definitely replace Konqueror...
Oh, and one more thing: Drop Amarok (it definitely is bloat) and maybe Dragon (and replace it with mpv/VLC).

Actually I can only think of GhostOfFunkS going all "KDE sucks" and "standard desktop" right now...

[Awesomeness]

Too bloated: Yes (nobody needs 3 web browsers by default). Still one of the better KDE distributions.

[shawnsterp]

Last time I used fedora kde was a couple of years ago. I left in disgust. They did not even have a working gui package manager. There were two different ones installed, and neither of them actually worked. Couple that with the constant bickering between the fedora kde maintainers and the rest of the fedora community (which for some reason could not understand why the kde ppl felt like they were being treated like second class citizens). That was reason enough for me to look elsewhere.

But bloated? Bloated is a funny word. Does bloated really mean too many applications installed by default? I know that back then, fedora kde was faster than kubuntu. I am willing to bet it still is.

[PuckPoltergeist]

Too bloated: Yes (nobody needs 3 web browsers by default). Still one of the better KDE distributions.

Web developers do need them. And anybody else, nobody need to install this.

[Beerbaron23]

If you're looking for the best Plasma experience OpenSUSE provides just that, it's the lightest, fastest and most stable and complete implementation available, even a good margin better then Neon.

[tildearrow]

The kde experience can be remade on the generic stack from GNOME.

Not really. As an example, GNOME won't let you create arbitrary panels with arbitrary content and place them in arbitrary positions (Dash to Dock is limited as well), and probably there is no extension for that...

[WolfpackN64]

The KDE Fedora 25 spin was so unstable I went to openSUSE for a better KDE experience.

[ssokolow]

A more important question to ask is whether the gnome stack can be justified at all?

The gnome experience can be remade on the generic stack from KDE.

An equally valid correction. GNOME began as an "I'll make my own desktop, with beer and hookers." response to KDE and every piece of GNOME infrastructure I can think of is an NIH copy (typically a buggier, more unstable one, based on my own personal experiences) of something KDE did first and, quite often, did better.

(eg. GNOME itself began as a response to Qt's old, non-libre license. GnomeVFS is a clone of KIOSlaves that was significantly buggier when I was comparing the two in the KDE 3.x era. KParts are something GNOME never really copied. D-Bus is the jointly-developed successor to KDE's DCOP, appindicators are a crippled implementation of the protocol first implemented by KDE's KStatusNotifierItem, etc. etc. etc.)

In fact, that's the big reason that so little is shared between the two. GNOME refuses to use KDE components for various reasons (eg. "C++ with a C binding offered is still too much C++" was one actual reason I remember reading about back in the GNOME2/KDE3 days) while KDE dismisses the idea of throwing out what they already have because the GNOME alternative is inferior in some way (eg. documentation, features KDE needs, stability, etc.) and nobody is volunteering to bring it up to parity.

[Awesomeness]

Web developers do need them.

Web developers should be skilled enough to install them.