It’s a big day for Fedora users such as myself – and especially for Fedora KDE users, also such as myself. Fedora 40 has been released today, and while the main focus is always on the GNOME release – although not everyone is happy about that – the various other spins, in Fedora parlance, have also seen major updates. Most prominently among them is the KDE spin, which ships with KDE’s recent megarelease, KDE Plasma 6.
Starting at the top, Fedora 40 Workstation comes with the latest GNOME release, 46, which we covered when it was released earlier this year. It also comes with IPV4 Address Conflict Detection to resolve duplicate IPV4 addresses in the same physical network, and the PyTorch machine learning framework is now in the Fedora software repositories for easier installation and implementation by developers – a harbinger of what’s to come.
The KDE spin comes, as already mentioned, with KDE Plasma 6, and inherits the non-GNOME improvements and fixes as well, of course. There’s also countless other spins covering pretty much every desktop environment and window manager under the sun, and Fedora 40 is also the first release to implement the new naming scheme for Fedora’s various immutable editions – the Atomic Desktops.
Good job to Fedora camp. Especially after it was said Ubuntu 24.04 won’t come with KDE Plasma 6, that was such a strange and sloppy decision.
While I’m disappointed Plasma6 won’t be part of Ubuntu 24.04, it’s understandable. It was released literally a day before the 24.04 feature freeze, and I would hope Ubuntu would be a little bit conservative with LTS releases.
It shouldn’t be too long before KDE Neon re-bases on 24.04. and when that happens you can get LTS stability with the current Plasma 6
I usually understand such things but in case of KDE Plasma 6 and Ubuntu 24.04 i was rather shocked they made such decision. They basically obsoleted a LTS release before releasing it. That is when it comes to KDE side of things.
I feel that part of the blame for Plasma 6 not being included lies with KDE and how they structure/time their releases.
Fedora only needs to support a release for 6 months. So can include something that is new off the line and just wait for the next release with fixes for v41.
Ubuntu don’t have that luxury, they have to support this DE for the next decade and any/all compatibility issues that go alongside that.
If KDE wanted plasma 6 to be part of that release KDE have to release in a timeline where it aligns (and Ubuntu published Years in advance).
This lack of alignment has kept it out of Ubuntu LTS but also regularly means it doesn’t align with other distro release cycles.
Compare/contrast that with gnome, which has a 6 month release cycle that predictably includes it in ever Fedora version and Every Ubuntu version (lts and interim)
Adurbe,
You may be right. This is especially unfortunate because KDE 6 was supposed to contain fixes for wayland. Everyone’s so anxious to get past this, yet Ubuntu 24 could end up causing more delays for LTS users. It’s not any kind of malice but just very unfortunate timing.
It’s difficult for KDE to align major releases around Ubuntu (Or Gnome, the way Ubuntu does). They depend on QT, which has its own release schedule.
KDE Neon is based on Ubuntu LTS. I’m not sure how long it will take for them to move from the previous LTS to the current one, but for Ubuntu users its probably a pretty good option.
> Fedora only needs to support a release for 6 months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux
“Fedora Linux has a relatively short life cycle: Each version is usually supported for at least 13 months, where version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2 is released and with approximately 6 months between most versions.[21] Fedora users can upgrade from version to version without reinstalling.[22][23]”
Canonical is almost exclusively focusing on commercial and enterprise ventures, they aren’t nearly as “human focused” as they were twenty years ago when they first got started with a themed Debian derivative. They don’t give a shit about what their users want anymore, just their commercial customers and shareholders. The introduction of the proprietary Snap store was a huge red flag, and today when you visit their website the first thing you see is “Modern enterprise open source: Security, support, and managed services from the publisher of Ubuntu.” Not “Ubuntu, the Free operating system for your desktop or laptop” from last decade. They have pivoted completely away from being “by humans, for humans” and gone to the dark side of shareholder interests above all else. They are about as relevant to open source enthusiasts as Microsoft and Apple are.
Red Hat isn’t any better in this regard, in fact they are a bit worse in some respects, but Fedora at least is still mostly user-focused. Whether that continues to be true in the future is anyone’s guess. I don’t use it so it doesn’t affect me, but hopefully for those who do rely on it, it continues to serve them well and avoid being affected by Red Hat’s perplexing decisions surrounding their enterprise operations.
Both Canonical and Red Hat favor enterprise and commercial customers. They are businesses, not NGOs.
Both Canonical and Red Hat default to Gnome.
Both Canonical and Red Hat favor their own “stores”: Canonical prefers the Snap Store, while Fedora prefers FlatHub (the true reason being flatpaks are subsequently available to RHEL commercial customers at zero cost or hassle).
Where’s the difference?
Still one thing never changed and that is you can use Ubuntu (and Fedora) or a flavour in the same way you were able to from the beginning. This has never changed and in my opinion this should be credited as such. OK, one thing did change and that is now they are forcing Snap (and Flatpak). For software, like Firefox, one can again use .deb directly from Mozilla. For other software .deb packages are still more or less available in the same fashion, due to Ubuntu being based on Debian. Bottom line if you installed Ubuntu 4.10 you could, up to and including Ubuntu 24.04, use a modern operating system for free, as in speech and beer. Microsoft or Apple don’t come remotely close to that. On why more people didn’t appreciate Ubuntu in it’s heyday. That would be too long discussion.
Ubuntu came AFTER Fedora and has changed a lot more over its history.
Fedora was introduced by Red Hat explicitly to be the community focused distro in their family. This was done so that RHEL could be the explicitly commercial one.
Ubuntu by contrast started off with Ubuntu being THE community distro ( look up what Ubuntu means ) and day by day Ubuntu becomes an increasingly corporate focused product.
Before Fedora and RHEL, there was only “Red Hat Linux” and, despite it being a much simpler and less commercial time for Linux in general, “Red Hat Linux” struggled much the same as Ubuntu does now with one foot in the community and the other chasing explicitly commercial ambitions. Red Hat “solved” that problem for themselves by creating different distros for different audiences. At least it was solved until people wanted the “for money” version for no money. Red Hat themselves though have always been very clear about the difference in focus between Fedora and RHEL. Fedora does not even want to include proprietary codecs.
I place a lot more faith in Fedora remaining faithful to its community focus than I do Ubuntu.
10 years of support in Ubuntu is pretty attractive though for a lot of use cases. I have not used Ubuntu in years and I have started to dabble in it again for some stuff. There are some upsides to commercial focus too.
We could argue that Ubuntu lost some of its community orienteered appeal from its heyday. Still from availability point of view, people having access to a modern operating system for free, as in speech and beer, this aspect never changed. As for Ubuntu and Fedora forcing some strange things on the users. They are both good at that. From Snap to Flatpack to things like wasting effort on holly wars, when it comes to desktop icons and such. Rather stupid, but OK. The sky isn’t falling and up to this point all of this could be bypassed by end user. Compared to other companies, on where they force a change and you can’t do much about it. For example on Ubuntu 24.04 you can just as easily still run Openbox or GNOME on Wayland. Good luck with that on Microsoft or Apple products. Although Fedora is saying they will somehow forcibly try to remove X11 in the future. Still, it’s much easier to fight stupidity with GNU/Linux, then alternatives. At least for now.
@Geck Agreed
The only thing that prevents me from moving from Gnome to KDE is enterprise SSO. It’s surprising that the KDE community finds time to implement many smaller features but not time or sponsor for such a critical feature for enterprise environments.
Fedora Sway Atomic looks like a neat idea. I think I will give it a spin in a VM.