Fedora KDE Desktop Spin Promoted To Same Tier As GNOME-Based Fedora Workstation

[Alexmitter]

People greatly overestimate their own intelligence just because they can install a linux distro. The general public might not all be computer literate, but if they found their way to the Fedora download page, they aren't complete morons. This change isn't that confusing. "That one kind of looks like Windows and that one kinda looks a bit like Mac" and they'll go with whichever they are more comfortable with.

The reason for confusion is as there will now be two desktops offered by default that have vastly different levels of quality control and understanding of offering a quality product which practically means the KDE project as a whole has absolutely no understanding of quality at all. Overall it will be quite a quality downgrade to Fedora as a whole and may damage the brand of the project for years. It should have stayed a spin.

[mrg666]

I think it is good to see KDE getting equal footing with GNOME as it deserves. Happy for the KDE project, keep at it! And, I appreciate the open mindedness of the Fedora Project. I will stick with both.

BTW, I love the consistent and simple look of Plasma. It works great and efficient too.

[V1tol]

Looks like Fedora got concerned that many people choose KDE and complain a lot due to bad state of it on Fedora. Or completely switching distros to ones with better support. In any case that is a good call - people who love Fedora and prefer familiar DE will have an option.

I'm happy for KDE users, but boys, those screenshots make my eyes bleed because KDE is so ugly!

I consider GNOME to be ugly and I can't change that. At least KDE has functionality to customize its appearance - you can even create your own GNOME there if you want.

[Britoid]

I think this is a bad call.

Fedora doesn't have enough KDE contributors to push it as the same as gnome. Remember, one of the reasons X11 support is not on the KDE install by default is the argument that they had too few resources to offer both.

The Workstation product has quite substantial engineering effort behind it, including developers and designers who identify larger areas of work that may take multiple years to complete and then working on them in a way that has "drained the swamp" to fix major issues that no one even remembers any more because they were fixed properly instead of hacked around.

With KDE they are able to do some engineering, like they pushed for Wayland to be made the primary session upstream, but they will mostly be consumers of what upstream produces.

What's there to maintain when upstream are the ones that maintain the X11 support.

[Liarus]

Seeing these comments about DE wars is hilarious, it's just a change of status, the KDE spin was already there, it just a different status now.

If you hate KDE don't use it, if you hate GNOME don't use it, that's really where it should end.

Whatever that change of status implies it doesn't affect you as a gnome user anyway.


Just hold hands people, I'm glad KDE can be there, hand in hand with gnome as a Fedora flagship

[Espionage724]

Can't you just enjoy more choice?

Maintenance burden™

[anda_skoa]

The reason for confusion is as there will now be two desktops offered by default

Nothing changes for Fedora Workstation. This is a new product.
Just on the same status/level as Workstation but clearly separate.

The new Fedora internal working group has shared responsibility for both.
Which makes sense given how much of the system level components are identical regardless of the desktop shell running the user's session.

[skeevy420]

What's there to maintain when upstream are the ones that maintain the X11 support.

You have to learn to read between the lines when it comes to what Fedora and GNOME folks mean when they say words. For example, take X11 support, if you fire all of those people or put them on another project, now they technically have too few resources. That might actually be true, but it's not the reason.

Before I get to the reason I have to comment on dude saying the phrase "Draining the swamp" like that's actually a good thing. It isn't. Draining the swamp is how Republicans find new beach front property for housing in Florida. The swamp, places like The Everglades, protects them from storm surge, act as a massive carbon sinks, houses unique wildlife, and a lot more. Don't drain the swamp. The swamp is a very good thing.

Draining the swamp to fix issues kind of implies that they forced-out their KDE developers; that RHEL/Fedora created a hostile environment for their KDE developers. That's what draining the swamp means when you don't take it so literally. I don't know how true that is, but I do know that the R/F folks are very pro-GNOME and are usually anti-Anything-Else.

That takes us back to the X11 support. If you know all of that then you know that it wasn't about the resources, you know that it's because R/F focuses on Wayland damn-near exclusively. It had fuck-all to do with what KDE does or doesn't support and was about R/F wanting everything to align with their Wayland-only vision. Between RHEL and IBM, they have the resources, both money and manpower, but from their perspective X11 is working on glass when they're trying to perfect transparent aluminum with Wayland.

[You-]

What's there to maintain when upstream are the ones that maintain the X11 support.

Who will respond to the X11 related bug reports? Fedora's KDE SIG said not them, they dont want them as it is too much for them to handle. You cant force volunteers to work on things they don't want to.

or as a more generic question on the price of supporting X11, when there is a bug delaying the next release of Fedora, who will fix it? Who will add the hardware support for new hardware? You cant just wait for some volunteer somewhere to do the work because that doesn't have time limits - they are not beholden to the Fedora release cycle.

...

"Drain the swamp" is a term that predates Trump and his meaning of it.

In this case it meant fixing the technical debt, fixing the drivers, instead of adding workarounds for it everywhere.

read this blog post from 2020, that referred to an earlier blog from 2014 (which ironically refers to a 2001 talk about draining the swamp), to get an idea of what was meant by work done by Fedora, which benefits everyone. Without those engineering resources, your favourite distros would also suffer and the anti Red Hat people will have less to be proud of because their systems would be more broken.

Now, going back to X11. Red Hat/IBM are not the only FLOSS company in the world. If they chose to not support it, someone else should have stepped up. If you don't like Red Hat/IBM, you should be happy that they are not polluting your favourite project and you can work on it in peace.

No one stepped up. (I now expect a response by that one guy re-arranging deckchairs on the titanic saying he is maintaining it now...).

[avis]

The hell just froze over.