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

[reavertm]

I look forward to installing it on my 2 Fedora 40 KDE machines, both of which have been running for years and have been through many, many system upgrades via DNF (absolutely time to start fresh).

I'm too attached to my configs myself to warrant reinstall.
I remember dist-upgrading from RedHat 7.3 I think all the way to.. Fedora Core. (earlier I played with RedHat 5,1 and some 6.x version but I don't think I dist upgraded in permanent fashion, those were times of Linux experiments for me).
At some point i switched to Gentoo around 2008 and I think just with one reinstall on the way I'm rolling that rootfs till this day. On other machines I dist upgrade exclusively (unless I just move homedirs between them).
Even when I was playing with changing disk layouts like partitions/filesystems/RAID/EVMS (sic!)/LVM2/cryptsetup I did those always "in place" even if one could argue if that's not argument to reinstall systems then nothing is.

[hamishmb]

I don't see why people get up in arms about stuff like this - surely choice is always a good thing?

[mirmirmir]

Can I trouble you with a source? I hadn't heard of this

Bro didn't even read the first sentence in the article💀💀

[Mitch]

Bro didn't even read the first sentence in the article💀💀

I did. There was no hostile takeover to be found. It was a change proposal that got rejected. Many Fedora people prefer KDE, so they proposed to make it replace Gnome as the default. It was instead decided that the two should co-exist at the same level, instead of having one or the other.

Seems like completely normal and civil happenings to me.

[AdamW]

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.

That's not quite the right framing. KDE has always been release blocking in Fedora, all the way back to when we first drew up formal release criteria, which was well over a decade ago. Long before Editions were a thing at all. It's never been "unofficial", it's written down in black and white in the release criteria and validation pages.

Practically speaking in QA terms the two are more or less equal and have been for years. Edition status is more about how they're presented on the website, download pages, documentation and so on.

[Panix]

That's not quite the right framing. KDE has always been release blocking in Fedora, all the way back to when we first drew up formal release criteria, which was well over a decade ago. Long before Editions were a thing at all. It's never been "unofficial", it's written down in black and white in the release criteria and validation pages.

Practically speaking in QA terms the two are more or less equal and have been for years. Edition status is more about how they're presented on the website, download pages, documentation and so on.

So, their KDE edition is good (as good)?

[hamishmb]

That's not quite the right framing. KDE has always been release blocking in Fedora, all the way back to when we first drew up formal release criteria, which was well over a decade ago. Long before Editions were a thing at all. It's never been "unofficial", it's written down in black and white in the release criteria and validation pages.

Practically speaking in QA terms the two are more or less equal and have been for years. Edition status is more about how they're presented on the website, download pages, documentation and so on.

Thanks for clarifying, I didn't realize the KDE version was also a blocker before now.

[daedaluz]

This is great news. GNOME is borderline unusable for any productive work. It requires addons for that. Configs as basic as font size are stubbornly kept behind hidden gconf options which is antithesis of user-friendly. It shouldn't exist as any option, not even as a spin. The absurd paddings in Adwaita alone make it horrid (think: dropdown menus in LibreOffice). KDE fixes all that.

That said. KDE has persistent stability issues and uneven quality. Neither desktop is good, both dropped the ball long ago; KDE with its 4.0 catastrophe and GNOME with its 3.0. I don't think either is redeemable, albeit KDE has had very good progress past few years and I tip my fedora for that great work done. Maybe it is redeemable. But in how many years? Another ten? Projects like Cosmic don't spring into existence just for giggles.

[woddy]

This is great news. GNOME is borderline unusable for any productive work. It requires addons for that. Configs as basic as font size are stubbornly kept behind hidden gconf options which is antithesis of user-friendly. It shouldn't exist as any option, not even as a spin. The absurd paddings in Adwaita alone make it horrid (think: dropdown menus in LibreOffice). KDE fixes all that.

That said. KDE has persistent stability issues and uneven quality. Neither desktop is good, both dropped the ball long ago; KDE with its 4.0 catastrophe and GNOME with its 3.0. I don't think either is redeemable, albeit KDE has had very good progress past few years and I tip my fedora for that great work done. Maybe it is redeemable. But in how many years? Another ten? Projects like Cosmic don't spring into existence just for giggles.

Over the years I have seen many projects born with great enthusiasm and expectations, but then they disintegrated.
Maybe it won't be the case with Cosmic, but before laughing or crying I would wait a bit.

[daedaluz]

Over the years I have seen many projects born with great enthusiasm and expectations, but then they disintegrated.
Maybe it won't be the case with Cosmic, but before laughing or crying I would wait a bit.

I'm optimistic on this one. Cosmic has a clean slate, has clearly learned from where KDE and GNOME went wrong as their day 1 lesson, and is written in Rust which has a highly enthusiastic community. Community is important. Anything anyone really asks is a out-of-box nice enough looking stable desktop (ahem KDE) that doesn't feel like a weird art project of constrained user experience minimalism (ahem GNOME).