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

[Danny3]

That's a great decision!
Plasma definitely deservers it!
Nice to finally have serious competition to OpenSUSE!

In my opinion all the mainstream / popular Linux distro should prioritize Plasma and Gnome integration and support as these are the most modern, advanced, featurefull, polished, secure DEs available for Linux.
And they should do it in equal mattter as both are good!
Too bad that Debian developers / maintainers just prioritize Gnome only and are not even afraid to show it everywhere, including the installer, which offers Gnome 3 times while Plasma and others only one time, when it should present every DE only once.
If they wanted to suggest Gnome and Plasma to new users they could've just added a text or some kind of hover tooltip explaining that theese are more popular than others.

[mirmirmir]

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.

People greatly overestimate other's interest in Linux. Smallest inconvenience can be the deciding factor to not use Linux. Forget about "how the fuck do I make circle in gimp". "It can't stay 5 minutes to work properly" is enough to push people away from Linux.

[ahrs]

So in simple plain English terms, if I go to https://getfedora.org which version will I get if I click on the first thing I see?

[skeevy420]

"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...).

"Drain the swamp" has been a phrase for as long as I can remember and it has always meant to take something bad and make it better ... because swamps have a bad reputation so removing the swamp is somehow a good thing. They're nature's version of "that neighborhood" when the swamp can be one of the most vital places and ecosystems to have. "Drain the swamp" is one of those dumb phrases like "have your cake and eat it, too" because for 99.9% of people the whole point of cake is to eat it and not to admire it as a pretty wedding cake.

I say that, but have you seen all those fucking cake shows with fondant disasterpieces? Talk about having your cake and seeing it, too.

Draining the swamp in the most literal manner, actually draining a swamp, is a workaround for not building better housing and not having adequate land management. I just find it kind of ironically funny that the phrase you're using to mean "to fix workarounds" is itself an actual workaround.

Anyways, I'm not arguing for or against RHEL or Fedora and I'm one of the people who applauded their decision to pull X11 support and who thinks that KDE fucked up by still supporting X11 with Plasma 6. At some point supporting X11 is raking the forest when the solution is to do a controlled burn to remove old growth so what remains can grow stronger and new growth can take the place of the old. The alternative is the Great X11 Forest Fire of 2025.

[skeevy420]

People greatly overestimate other's interest in Linux. Smallest inconvenience can be the deciding factor to not use Linux. Forget about "how the fuck do I make circle in gimp". "It can't stay 5 minutes to work properly" is enough to push people away from Linux.

I'll neither confirm nor deny having to search for that a couple months back

[jaypatelani]

I thought cinnamon or Budgie might be the way to go forward but KDE is not bad.

[Vistaus]

Now well have a Gnome based "Workstation" and a KDE based "can't get any Work done on this buggy crap" edition

I thought it was the other way around?

[Vistaus]

Choice isnt changing. KDE was already present and will remain present. There is no more choice and no less choice.

However there is a potential to greater confusion IMO.

Yeah, so much confusion! It's not like other distro's don't offer choices. And Windows is also very easy to choose, with no S, Home, Pro, etc. editions. Android too, with all manufacturers going barebones and none of their own customizations and additions. Fedora is the only one confusing people.

[Mitch]

While I'm very happy to see this increased exposure to KDE, I'm NOT surprised. Some big names in Fedora have already said KDE is effectively, low-key treated at the same class as Gnome in Fedora. For context, Gnome was considered a blocking software, where any package or anything that seriously broke Gnome would cause the overall distro not to ship updates to that particular software across the board (e.g. Kernel upgrades, or Gnome itself) until all major issues were resolved. Normally, the community spins (Cinnamon, XFCE, etc.) didn't necessarily have this privilege, but at some point, KDE's Community spin did unofficially get this privilege.

So again, Fedora's people have said that KDE has been treated at Gnome's level for a while now, so this big change and announcement are more of an acknowledgement and officiation of that fact. This says: "we treat this edition as a flagship so if you use it, it is at our top-level tier of official support" or something to that effect.

[pt21]

Still thinking this a McKinsey recommendation so they can fire all Gnome developers and push development effort upstream.