Fedora 42 Change Proposal Wants To Make KDE Plasma The Default Over GNOME

A change proposal filed for fedora 42 seeks to make KDE Plasma the default desktop of Fedora Workstation while GNOME would move to its own separate spin/edition. The proposal has yet to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but given Red Hat's deep roots with GNOME, I have a hard time seeing this pass at least in the near-term.

Joshua Strobl known for his work on the Budgie desktop and Solus Linux along with Fedora developers Alessandro Astone, Marc Deop i Argemí,Steve Cossette, and Red Hat's Troy Dawson have submitted this change proposal on making Fedora Plasma Workstation the default for next year's Fedora 42 release.

"Switch the default desktop experience for Workstation to KDE Plasma. The GNOME desktop is moved to a separate spin / edition, retaining release-blocking status.
...
With the release of Plasma 6, KDE Plasma has developed into a high quality, well-regarded desktop experience."

The change proposal goes on to argue about KDE Plasma 6 providing an improved end-user experience, good standardization support, good Wayland support, and broad industry and community support.

This proposal to make Fedora Plasma Workstation the default for new Fedora Workstation installations is rather ambitious given Fedora's long history with GNOME. Red Hat continues employing many upstream GNOME developers and is often driving many of the new features going into the desktop. It'd frankly be very surprising if FESCo votes in favor of this proposal and everything comes to pass for making KDE Plasma 6 effectively the default desktop of Fedora Workstation. In any event we'll see where this goes and those wanting to run KDE Plasma 6.0 can easily do so as an alternative spin/option with the upcoming Fedora 40 release.