I was wondering what happened to the proposal from a month ago…
I understood Matthew’s position as “this should be discussed in the Workstation WG first”, not as a “no”:
in favor of the process outlined above (tl;dr: talk to the Workstation WG, and if that does not come to a satisfying outcome, file a Council ticket for next possibilities).
It also seemed more likely that they would promote KDE without demoting Gnome.
But was there a follow-up on that (e.g. in the Workstation WG)?
I understood Matthew’s position as “this should be discussed in the Workstation WG first”, not as a “no”
And later he said it’s not up to the community but the Fedora Council which at least partially consists of unelected Red Hat-appointed people and all decisions need to be on a consensus-basis, so a single corporate-appointed person can veto everything. FESCO (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) is democratic, Fedora Council is not.
I’m not sure I follow… Did the Fedora Council actually take a decision?
Crazy… so much about the best Distro, huh?
Crazy… so much about the best Distro, huh?
IMO Fedora is still a great distribution, IMO even the best for beginners. Just because certain Gnome-affiliated people are insufferable doesn’t change that (at least not for now). From my point of view it would have been completely fine to discuss that, hold a vote, and if Gnome comes out on top, then fine. But with the changing landscape with Steam Deck and with it more development resources flowing into KDE technologies and also many more mainstream people having their first Linux desktop contact through Steam Deck’s Desktop Mode (=KDE Plasma), I think it’s totally fair to hold a discussion, similar to when Debian discussed Gnome vs Xfce years ago and Gnome came out on top because of offering the best accessibility features.
Lol GNOME vs XFCE, that was absolutely the right decision XD
GNOME is worlds better. But KDE “Plasma” (I hate this name) was like “this is how Windows should look like”
Lol GNOME vs XFCE, that was absolutely the right decision XD
GNOME is worlds better.
And that decision wasn’t about which is better liked by the majority. It was (I’m paraphrasing) “the default shouldn’t put up hurdles for people with disabilities. Gnome supports accessibility techs X, Y, Z. Xfce only tech X.” That’s an objective metric. The same metric could still hold up for Gnome vs Plasma. Gnome might be ahead in that regard. I don’t know the current state. I know that years ago (Plasma 4.x days) adding a Japanese IME under Fedora Gnome was super easy thanks to PackageKit integration of the IME settings of Gnome while under Fedora’s Plasma session it was pretty much all manual configuration. Best out of the box accessibility is a metric I would wholeheartedly support even though my personal interest would prioritize gaming performance over screen readers because I simply don’t need the latter.
I didnt test GNOME or KDE for accessibility but I know KDE 5.27 had various different zoom features while GNOME doesnt.
Orca runs on both but no idea where better.
Both are using Wayland on Fedora and that is pretty problematic poorly, as all apps are different and I assume many dont support the correct portal/API/push service for screenreaders.
The rest seems integration. KDE and GNOME use Packagekit on traditional Fedora.
The Fedora leadership is elected the the community. Also most the community does not want to deal with KDE. KDE is great for power users and people who like customization. Outside of that most people want stability and simplicity both of which KDE is not.
The other issue is the installer and the enterprise. If Fedora switched to KDE by default then the downstream distros would need to as well as Fedora is the testing ground for RHEL, Rocky and Alma. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to run KDE on a server or corporate workstation.
The Fedora leadership is elected the the community.
“The Fedora Council is composed of a mix of representatives from different areas of the project, named roles appointed by Red Hat, and a variable number of seats connected to medium-term project goals.” –https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/
Also most the community does not want to deal with KDE.
Too bad we can’t know this for sure because the discussion and a vote was shut down. The leader was clearly afraid of the possible outcome. No need to “drop the mic” if it was actually so clear cut.
Outside of that most people want stability and simplicity both of which KDE is not.
Baseless claims.
The other issue is the installer and the enterprise. If Fedora switched to KDE by default then the downstream distros would need to as well as Fedora is the testing ground for RHEL, Rocky and Alma.
Wrong. Fedora switched to btrfs as well despite the fact that it’s unsupported by RHEL. Outside the RH sphere of influence, openSUSE manages to offer Plasma equally next to Gnome even though Gnome is default in SLE.
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to run KDE on a server or corporate workstation.
While I generally agree that there’s probably not much appetite among the distributions for switching default, this point seems weird. I don’t see why KDE would be any less desired than Gnome in that segment.
Customization is usually the enemy of reliability and supportability
KDE Plasma 6 on Kinoite is actually really stable now for me. Some issues at the beginning, but their refactoring really made sensw.
To be fair, there is and has been a KDE spin. I can see an argument for gnome, as it’s overall the simpler environment. Simple defaults has been fedoras thing for a long time.
I can see an argument for gnome, as it’s overall the simpler environment. Simple defaults has been fedoras thing for a long time.
They could make that argument then and not just close the topic by declaring it a trademark issue.
Fedora is recognized as the Gnome distro, though. It really is a branding issue.
Fedora is recognized as the Gnome distro, though.
Things could change. That why it was brought up for debate. The debate could have concluded that changing defaults is not the right move.
It really is a branding issue.
And what would be the trademark(!) issue? The default desktop edition is called “Fedora Workstation”, not “Fedora Gnome”, so the branding is not tied to Gnome in any way. Seems more like an attempt to kill a discussion where the popular vote might be undesirable.
I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt in that they misspoke when saying trademark. Clearly it’s not that, but those nuances are not universally known.
And branding is not something up to popular vote. It’s, by definition, an image someone or some organization wants to project to the public. To them, they have spins for other DEs/WMs and that’s enough. And why wouldn’t it be?
And branding is not something up to popular vote.
The suggestion wasn’t about changing branding. It was about changing one default, just like when PipeWire replaced PulseAudio or when btrfs was elected to be the default FS. The product would still be called Fedora Workstation and kept its trademarks, logos,…
To them, they have spins for other DEs/WMs and that’s enough. And why wouldn’t it be?
Who is “them”? Clearly not the Fedora community or the community-elected Engineering Steering Committee. The ability to vote on that was taken away from them by one person unilaterally declaring that. FESCO would have decided to just keep Gnome. Looks to me like that one person would not wan to take any chances that the community-elected committee might vote differently.
The vote likely would of favored gnome. Fedora is enterprise oriented and focuses on being a new version of the stable enterprise. KDE changes very quickly and they do not fix bugs before introducing new features.
If anything the alternative would be xfce4 but that’s not viable for other reasons.
The vote likely would of favored gnome.
No need to kill it then. Obviously the Red Hat representative got cold feet.
Fedora is enterprise oriented and focuses on being a new version of the stable enterprise.
Fedora describes itself as a community-led distribution, not as a corporate beta test for RHEL: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/
The enterprise is part community. Rocky is part of the community.
Rocky is part of the community.
Rocky Linux is part of the Fedora community? WTF?
Is it? I didnt find it looking for GNOME.
I came to Linux, started with random DistroWatch recommendations, then used Ubuntu based, thinking it was the most supported.
Then dared to use something else, right at the edge of modern but well supported, that was Fedora.
Came to Linux, found KDE on Manjaro and searched for a well working but not antique KDE Distro. Found it with Kinoite.
Not a single GNOME on that way :D
You can argue that GNOME is only used that much because it is “Workstation”. Literally doesnt even include the DE name.
But I see how RedHat really needs a testing ground, and I also see how GNOME is a desktop with quite a lot corpo stuff directly integrated. If I needed active directory, Exchange etc, it would be the best option.
Also, not having many options is great for a corpo DE.
I don’t understand the simpler argument. Installing and using extensions and gnome-tweaks to change basic settings is not simpler. And I strongly dislike a large number of defaults.
With KDE Plasma, defaults make more sense to me so I barely have to change configuration. If I really need to, the setting is there and easily used.
Since KDE changed to dbl-click by default, the only thing I change is Numlock on boot. 10 seconds to fix, and I know it’ll stay changed because KDE is allergic to removing user settings.
True, Plasma is very usable out of the box. Well, if you like floating panels.
KDE is not good for stability and control. It is consumer oriented instead of enterprise oriented.
There isn’t anything wrong with the KDE spin. If you want KDE it is available and well supported.
Wait are you saying is Gnome is better for enterprise environments cause it’s harder for the users to mess things up? If so, yeah I can see that. It’s perfect for the simple-minded. Not saying that all Gnomes are simpletons, just that I too would rather have some boomers Gnome.
Exactly
I am what you call a simpleton
This is very true. KDE is very community oriented, while GNOME is better for corporations. Simply that.
Simple defaults has been fedoras thing for a long time.
So has been KDE’s for a long time now. Even more so in Plasma 6.
“Simple by default, powerful when needed” - KDE
GNOME meanwhile: “Get things done with ease, comfort, and control.”
These are just slogans guys
Isnt fedora like the last distro that doesnt symlink /bin and /sbin to /usr/bin?
Explanation please
In the old days distros used to separate the location of binaries in several places like
/bin/sbin/usr/binand/usr/sbinthere was this idea that system binaries would go in/sbinwhile the rest in/binand the similar dirs in/usrwere so that you could mount a separate drive to store more binaries. This is from a time where storage was an issue.These days distros usually just symlink all those locations to
/usr/binwith the exception of fedora, which still keeps some split.However it seems they will finally merge the remaining dirs in fedora 41: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Unify_bin_and_sbin
Interesting! This sounds actually useful for transparency, but fine?
Look, we knew Fedora wasn’t going to drop Gnome. Gnome is almost entirely a Redhat project, it’s there for the paying corporate market so it doesn’t confuse the drones by offering “choices”, and Fedora is the proving ground of any changes that might affect said drones. I can’t even argue with the logic.
Lots of Plasma-Fedora distros out there, like the spin and Nobara/bazzite that frankly are better starting places for most power users anyway, since you don’t have to get around the repo/codec issues yourself.
Look, we knew Fedora wasn’t going to drop Gnome. Gnome is almost entirely a Redhat project, it’s there for the paying corporate market so it doesn’t confuse the drones by offering “choices”, and Fedora is the proving ground of any changes that might affect said drones. I can’t even argue with the logic.
The project leader could just be honest about that instead of making BS up.
Not to mention Fedora KDE from the Fedora project
Yah, that’s what I meant by “the spin”. Can’t say I’ve used it recently, and I imagine it has the same lack of non-free repos as the parent, so the others are less trouble and work fine. Heck, Nobara’s had V6 included for a few weeks now.
When I installed F39, it at least promoted and made opting into the most reasonable nonfree repositories. So at least recently they’ve gotten a bit more practical on that situation.
Only the GNOME edition has the onboarding dialog where you enable “3rd party repos”.
They are currently adding it to the KDE welcome dialog but that one is for sure more ignorable.
I used to use Gnome all the time but I have to install a bunch of extensions for it to be usable. This one addon, I think it was called window list, is the most important and invaluable one of them all. There is no way I can use Gnome without it and I don’t understand how other people have the patience to deal with not having that. The number of times I updated Gnome and found out window list was so out of date the only way I could get it working was if I download the source code and fix the issue myself, is too damn high. That addon should be part of Gnome by default.
Now I use cinnamon or kde depending on which one works better in that respective distro’s repository. Some installations of your favorite desktop environment come with better configs than others. For example last time I tried KDE on Ubuntu, it was a broken buggy annoying mess to the point it was was less functional than Windows 11’s ui. On Arch, KDE is the epitome optimization and polish. On Arch, cinnamon is respectably borked out of the box. Cinnamon on Ubuntu usually only comes with a few bugs however I rarely end up finding a way to fix said bugs.
LXDE is the same across distros usually but I only use it if running Linux on an absolute potato. That lack of a start menu search is awful, I don’t miss those pre-search bar era uis. I need a search bar dammit.
On Arch, KDE is the epitome optimization and polish.
Cannot relate. At all.
Last friday I re-installed Arch with KDE this time instead of GNOME for a change, and in these two and a half days I’ve already encountered more bugs and crashes than I did the entire time I was on GNOME. Kinda regretting the decision already. All that with stock applets and widgets and shit that come bundled with the DE. I don’t want to imagine what things would be like if I started to mess around with third party stuff.
Idk man, EndeavourOS on KDE has been amazing to me, even on Wayland. Even the plasma 5 to 6 upgrade has been ridiculously smooth. I have a feeling arch may not be the most unified distro to judge a DE on… Hope stuff stabilizes for you a bit. That’s no fun. :(
If anything it’s getting worse. Today I (unsuccessfully) spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the bottom panel’s state won’t persist between reboots. I don’t even know what state it’s reverting to. I never pinned Google chrome to that panel yet it appears there on every reboot while all my pins are gone. Some time was also wasted on rebuilding another panel that somehow broke and piled all of its widgets on top of each other and made them unclikable. There’s also something seriously wrong with either the window manager or the compositor or both because on two occasions it sorta fused two windows together, producing a garbled mess that forced me to exit both applications and restart them.
I think I’ll call this one a failure and go back to gnome as soon as I can. This really is not a good experience. Maybe in another two years I’ll try KDE again. Last time I tried KDE it was much worse, so they’re clearly getting better.
What in the world… I use KDE everywhere, we even use it many workstations at work and I’ve seen no such thing it’s been smooth sailing. I hope whatever’s causing this is nothing too serious because that’s NOT normal… :(
I guess it’s just a roll of the dice on how borked the config files in the repository package were that month.
Have you tried Trinity instead of LXDE?
With Q4OS for example.
Is Trinity using… maintained software? I will try it in a moment, but the KDE Plasma people only really maintain what is in Plasma today. There are tons of abandonware like Konqueror (which Trinity supposedly uses?). Falkon is hardly maintained, Amarok was resurrected.
Lots of great software, interesting, unique. But I dont know if I would use it for actual work.
I honestly don’t know about that.
Can you maybe recommend something that is similar but might be still updated? I really like how KDE used to look back then but I missed out on it. The way most new desktops copy the flat look of Windows and Mac OS annoys me. I want the details back and like my window has sides and shadows.
I agree a lot. Had Vista and XP machines in the past.
Then mainly used Win10 and KDE Plasma was a solid upgrade.
But they really copied the Win10 look which is atrocious. I agree that WinXP and 7 and the era where way better.
There are themes for everything though. Its just theming. I dont know if all apps support it and have never dealt with it, as Breeze works pretty well with Adwaita and Electron apps too.
I think there are Kvantum themes for this?
Glad to read we are thinking alike about these things.
I see there are some nice themes at the place you’ve linked. If those work with KDE Plasma, that would certainly be interesting to give a try.
I’ll have a look at that.
I looked but couldnt find it.
Tbh I like some of the more modern things, and they are for sure easier to unify. When theming like that, you also need a GTK3 theme, a GTK4 color scheme, a firefox theme etc.
And many of these toolkits dont support big themes anymore, just swapping colors.
Or LXQt which is the variant they switched to mainly. Like, both are maintained but the Qt one is the one getting all the fixes, Wayland support etc.
Thanks for reminding me about LXQt. Back then it didn’t really have all the features that LXDE used to have, but it does seem to have matured a bit.
I just tried it and it lacks some basic stuff like drag to edge for resizing. The apps are really minimalist though and it should really run everywhere.
I’m glad Fedora comes with the most usable no-bs/out-of-the-way (in my subjective experience) DE by default. Yes I do run it with Tweaks and a few extensions, but otherwise I have no need for extensive customization for customization’s sake (which seems so many ppls problem with GNOME, smth that I couldn’t find more irrelevant), since everything about its UI/UX is so intuitive. I understand if people don’t like its opinionated workflow, but it’s just right for me personally…
I don’t get the proposal either way bc Fedora has always been the spearhead of vanilla GNOME and there is an official KDE spin iirc
I don’t really get what people mean when describing Gnome or any DE as “out of the way”. I’ve never felt like KDE was “in my way”.
I really couldn’t find a better way to describe how it feels to use gnome. I am used almost all tiling window managers through the years. I always got lost in configuring my setup. I know I didn’t have to, but there was almost another step of optimization that was available to me. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, of course. I have been using gnome o arch for the past few years, a plank/dock extension, a system tray, and a clipboard manager. That’s it, there is nothing to fiddle with, to distract me. It is entirely personal. I just can’t stop myself from trying to optimize my desktop/workflow if there are still ways to optimize it. Before gnome I was using my WM/DE and then the applications necessary for my actual work. Now, the DE is “out of the way” and I just do what I actually have to do. But again, this is entirely personal.
This is very similar to my experience tho I have skipped most of my ricing/customization phase with Gnome bc I just didn’t feel the need to do much about it bar a few extensions
I mean not having a clipboard manager is pretty bad, even Win11 has that.
Or you can run OpenSuSE which comes with one of the best Kde versions by default.
It’s another enterprise type distribution that’s rock solid. It also has a rolling version.
1lso it’s based in Europe, which some see as a plus.
I plan on switching to Slowroll once it’s matured, but I think I’ll stay with Gnome :p
Slowroll does sound like a great model for versioning and patching software.
But for the actual package management I dont want to use anything but rpm-ostree. The immutable OpenSUSE variants are a joke and dont offer any real benefits over Tumbleweed to my knowledge (after having researched them).
Fedora may offer that “more stable package set” when sticking to the old release, currently F39. Not its still less seemless.
I also really like the GNOME workflow and try to recreate it currently, but the missing menu is kinda making that hard.
I like workspaces and want to use them. But I also like a bottom bar where I can add all the small things I need. Not much, but currently CPU load and temps, weather, workspace indicator, a few spacers, rest default.
I like the powerful apps where there are no alternatives on GNOME. Dolphin (the absolute best, cant use anything else, pcmanfm-qt is bearable), Kate/Kwrite, Okular, Gwenview.
GNOME literally ships Loupe, which doesnt have a single editing function. Use GIMP for the rest?? For rotating or cropping images?
While I really like the workflow, there are sooo many things (like a clipboard manager) missing that it is not worth it for me.
the Gnome devs are undeniably metaphorically tweakers on heroin tho
What proposal?
To make KDE Plasma the new default Desktop environment for future Fedora Workstation releases in place of Gnome.
Yeah that was never going to happen
Thanks
I’m glad Fedora has GNOME as default. The KDE spin appears to be well-maintained enough for those interested to enjoy it.
Fedora atomic with kde (kionite) has been amazing on my laptop so far (recently moved from mint)
Same for me. KDE is so much better than Cinnamon. For Filemanagement, pcmanfm-qt (from LXQt) is the next best option. It is minimal, can be installed anywhere etc. Nemo lacks so many needed features.
For package management, a CLI upgrade from some old version of Mint to the current one worked kind of. But all the GUI stuff failed. I wrote a post about that.
And the desktop changed not a single bit. So many things that are missing, it is simply so traditional.
But they wana change the default to kde, I readed from a news recently
No the many KDE devs want the appreciation for their work, through Fedora offering the KDE variant as second workstation.
There will be 2 workstations. And I agree, even though I would prefer uBlue Kinoite as Workstation :D
Use Bazzite or Aurora if you want an amazing, Fedora Silverblue/Universal Blue-based KDE experience, it’s much better than normal Fedora anyway
How does Bazzite differ from Kinoite? I use the latter but have been hearing about the former for a while now, and was curious what exactly sets it apart from what I use and what benefits I’d have switching to it.
Gaming.
if you game on Linux you wanna go with bazzite, games “just work” on there without any tweaking or fixing or patching. And in the rare case you do need to patch a game like gmod, they have a built in script for it like
ujust fix-gmodIf I have my setup working on Nobara now, would it still be worth the effort to switch (again)? I imagine I could basically keep my home directory as-is, including pipewire setup, game configs etc.?
No, if it’s working for you, why bother? Unless you’re the adventurous distro hopper, stick to what’s working for you. I’d only take the time to switch my home to bazzite if Nobara started causing problems.
“Gaming” i.e. Windows emulation for GPU heavy stuff.
It is not gaming, it is running Windows software on Linux.
what?
I find it odd to call it “gaming on Linux” as its simply running Windows software
There’s no emulation. Worst case scenario, the game is using Microsoft’s proprietary DirectX graphics API, so we translate those calls to Vulkan or OpenGL with DXVK. That’s simply out of our control since we cannot see or modify the code, but everything else is running on Linux.
Intel actually uses DXVK on Windows for better compatibility and performance for their Arc GPU’s.
Funny, thanks for the info.
By default it uses KDE instead of GNOME, you have the choice though. It makes some stuff easier for new users. Bazzite is also optimized for gaming and in some areas tries to mimic the Steam Deck experience pretty closely. It also includes all the Universal Blue goodness like ujust (basically a collection of scripts that is very helpful for quickly installing and setting up various things on your system). It also includes some quality-of-life improvements in the Terminal. You could compare it to Nobara, but built on top of Fedora Atomic (Kinoite). Check out their website for more information: https://bazzite.gg/
Bazzite is based on Kinoite but adds A TON of rpms to the base.
Rather than using WINE through Flatpak (Bottles, Lutris, Cartridges + ProtonUpQt) it is on the system. This has some performance benefits and makes using it way easier, but you now run random Windows software unsandboxed. If it wants to it can do whatever it wants.
And some more.
https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/?tab=readme-ov-file#about--features
True that. Even though Ptyxis is not needed on Kinoite as Konsole profiles do literally that.
Oh I never really noticed. Excited to try it out.
I just wish their websites reflected to show all their available spins. It feels like you have to go out of your way to get to the spins site because the main page only shows Gnome.
I get that Gnome is RedHat’s main thing, but like at least make a button that says “See other excellent DEs”. The only thing they have is a button for alt downloads that shows stuff for net install and rawhide.
I get that Gnome is RedHat’s main thing, but like at least make a button that says “See other excellent DEs”.
SUSE only supports Gnome on SLED but the big DEs are treated equally on openSUSE.
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