Update: the proposal has now been formally announced on the devel mailing list and Fedora Discussions. I have been assured by the main author of the proposal itself that this is very much not an April Fools joke, but of course, there’s still the very real possibility we’re being led on here. Still, I’m taking the risk and treating this as a serious change proposal for Fedora, even though it’s likely to cause some controversy in the wider Fedora community. The proposal is written by Joshua Strobl, the lead developer of Budgie.
Yes, this is a change proposal to make KDE the default desktop environment of Fedora Workstation. The reasoning is that KDE is more approachable for new users than GNOME, it supports standards better, the industry seems to be making moves to KDE (see the Steam Deck), and so on. KDE also has more advanced features people have come to expect from a desktop, like HDR, VRR, and more, and it’s the more advanced Wayland desktop.
The important note here is that in the highly unlikely event this proposal would be accepted, it’s not like current Fedora GNOME users will be ‘upgraded’ to KDE when Fedora 42 gets released. The idea is to promote the current Fedora Plasma spin to the main Fedora Workstation release, and demote the Fedora GNOME release to a mere Fedora spin, like KDE is now.
While I would personally support this change, it’s pretty much 100% unlikely this change proposal will make it through. Red Hat and Fedora are entirely GNOME-first, and no matter how much I believe that’s misguided when looking at the state of the two primary open source desktops today, that’s not going to change. Still, it’s an interesting discussion point, if only to highlight that the frustrations with GNOME run a lot deeper than people seem to think.
Would be so nice if this got accepted. But the Gnome insanity runs too deep.
Ok so I know GNOME has the philosophy they’re going for with respect to their interface principles, and locking things down a bit with libadwaita.
But as someone who dabbles in Linux only occasionally, I’d be grateful to know more about what people are frustrated about with GNOME and what is insane within the project.
It’s popular to complain about GNOME, probably because this is what most people use. If everyone moved to KDE, they’d complain about KDE.
Gnome works just fine. We have a lot of Ubuntu technical desktops. Somehow we manage to get work done just fine.
>Somehow we manage
That is exactly the problem… the desktop experience should acutally be good and also configurable and also powerful for those that need it, not just something that you manage to work around.
I use Fedora MATE because it looks and works like the old RHEL6 desktop. I strongly dislike GNOME but I don’t think GNOME being the default for Fedora matters as long as the other desktops are available via the Fedora Spins site.
What I would like is for Red Hat to make all the better alternative desktops available for easy installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, instead of coercing Red Hat users into GNOME. By “coercing” I mean making installation of alternative desktops unnecessarily difficult by not including them in the official repositories.
I mean the fact that Gnome has spent 20+ years dumbing down the interface to the point where KDE is more approachable… is a riot.
I am a fan of KDE and I concur with the author’s opinion that it’s the better desktop for people switching from other operating systems. But it is a personal choice and I suspect the users who make up Fedora’s base probably already prefer gnome, why bother them with changes they didn’t ask for? Despite my preference I think what’s most important is listening to your users. Too many operating systems have been guilty of pushing major changes that nobody was asking for and as a user this is quite frustrating (ie windows 8, gnome 3, unity, etc). They don’t grab many headlines, but many of us actually appreciate projects that don’t try to follow fads or make waves.
The seems wrong. Wayland development has been gnome first and some features have been broken on KDE. Debian stable doesn’t have the latest KDE release though, so maybe all the issues have been fixed upstream. I am really eager to see these make it into stable! Alas, recent news illustrates why is why it’s not great practice to use the testing/staging version of a distro for non-testing use cases…
https://www.osnews.com/story/139064/backdoor-in-upstream-xz-liblzma-leading-to-ssh-server-compromise/
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I totally laughed when I saw that. I wasn’t sure if this was some kind of automatic flare or had been applied to me explicitly. I’ve been outed as a verbose guy, haha. It’s in ironic contrast to my real life where I talk very little.
Yeah, KDE had some major wayland issues for a long long time. It seems to be solved now? Its no longer randomly posting my clipboard into different files. KDE was also guilty of following fads, the whole cashew, the kde active mobile first ui and the crazy dream of a KDE tablet. The UI was great, the underpinnings stunk.
Bill Shooter of Bull,
My main system is debian stable and I’m not keen to install a new DE outside the repos. I hope things are getting fixed though and that debian stable incorporates them sooner than later.
Yeah, I was thinking of XFCE actually. It’s not the desktop most people will prefer, but it’s kind of refreshing to have a usable desktop that doesn’t try to push changes all the time.
I think it’s referring to KDE’s general willingness to implement “Poke hole in Wayland security to allow X11 applications to continue having Win32-equivalent functionality pending a proper solution being agreed upon” checkboxes.
(eg. There’s a “Focus Stealing Prevention”-esque setting for controlling the trade-off between security and functionality when it comes to global hotkeys bound by XWayland apps.)
Agreed on the Wayland support, my impression is Gnome is ahead on Wayland pretty much across the board. For what it’s worth, I actually like Gnome and it has been my daily driver for at least the last four years. Before that I was a KDE fanboy though, so who knows, maybe I’ll switch back 😀
Set the default to LXQt, you cowards.
They’re both 100% fine Desktop Environments. I did recently switch back to KDE after a lot of previous frustrations with it from 4 -5. It is much nicer than ever. Its approaching KDE 3 like stability/usefulness. There is nothing wrong per-se with gnome and its UI. Over the holiday season, I tested both on a small human that’s used to Ipads and chrome books, seemed to prefer gnome.
I wish there more distros with a KDE first experience. Of course you can always install it, but it always feels a bit out of place in the mainstream distros.
> Red Hat and Fedora are entirely GNOME-first
No, not true. Red Hat engineering is 90% Macs. Red Hat UX is 100% Macs. That’s why Gnome looks very much like a Mac OS clone.
Red Hat Engineering is 90% Macs? Is this a true stat? Any supporting evidence?
I agree. It’s time for KDE to fully shine and for GNOME to take a step back and to sort itself out and try to reclaim the desktop crown in the future. That is if that is still one of the GNOME project main goals. Otherwise it’s rather OK, just like other Linux desktop environments, for GNOME to stay GNOME, just not as it is not, on where we should somehow pretend that forcing GNOME over KDE for desktop computing is a good thing. It’s not it’s a bad thing. Both Fedora and Ubuntu should push for KDE to be their main desktop environment and to offer GNOME as a spin.