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

[woddy]

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).

Expectations, only expectations, there is no stable version today.

[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).

[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]

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.

[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.

[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)?

[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.

[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.

[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💀💀

[hamishmb]

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