this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 7 months ago (3 children)

In the end I don't care whether the "default" Fedora is KDE or GNOME, as long as the spin of the other DE is maintained well. Except for the ootb experience which is better on the GNOME version with setup steps for proprietary drivers and whatnot, the KDE spin feels like a first-class citizen.

But KDE just makes more sense for most users I feel. Currently you start wondering where your tray icons went (for example) when switching from a non-Linux OS. For gaming, KDE is simply more mature with built-in Wayland VRR support for example.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, it would make much more sense to switch to KDE for distributions like Ubuntu. Fedora never sold itself as a distribution targeting new Linux users coming from other operating systems. Therefore at least that point shouldn't be the reason to use KDE. Also distributions aren't just for new users and should not decide too much because of that. On top of that, a user is new for a very short period of time anyway. I digress...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Whether it makes sense for Ubuntu I'm not sure, but I don't think that it would make less sense on Fedora either way.

Fedora is a "batteries included" distro the way I see it, and besides, I don't see how KDE likely feeling more familiar for, say, Windows users makes it a worse choice for experienced Linux users.

A big part of what should be the default DE for a given distro is obviously very subjective, so I'd actually be surprised if they really changed the default because of this proposal. It has valid points and I'd say KDE is on average more appealing to the very broad target audience that Fedora aims to have, although as I said: that's just my opinion/gut feeling.

As long as KDE support stays at least as good as it has been so far in Fedora, I'll be happy.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Slowly more and more distros are looking over to a KDE future. GNOME devs being so incredibly hard to work with and this feeling of a huge community that is KDE and with how polished Plasma 6 is becoming, many distros are finally looking to at least give Plasma a try as a default. GNOME is well polished but there are so many extremely important and urgently needed features that KDE already implemented that are not even being discussed for GNOME. Many distros are getting fed up with how slow GNOME is into advancing their desktop. They take 2 years to change a few buttons around. And now that Plasma 6 has a 6-month fixed release schedule, it finally aligns with what distros want.

First Valve shocked the corporate distro world by choosing the seemengly less stable KDE as their default for the Steam Deck, which proved to be an amazing choice after all. Then recently, Nobara Linux, one of the most used Fedora distros, also switched to KDE as the default. And now Fedora is discussing into switching the main distro too. Qt6 is also a really flexible and promising framework and developers seem to have more fun working with it than with GTK4.

Recent switchers from Windows also largely prefer KDE instead of the minimalist approach, macOS-like GNOME. And linux has been gaining a lot of popularity and market share recently, and I could bet that a lot of these new users are not on GNOME, at least not on vania GNOME.

A great example is KDE having hit a HUGE record of bug reporting and feedback submissions, which means that more people than ever are using KDE actively and actually trying to help the project somehow. KDE has also been having a huge presence in social networks like YouTube and TikTok (especially because of its fun and interesting features that make GNOME look plain and a bit boring, needless to say GNOME vanilla wont convince a Windows user to switch...) which might speed up its adoption too.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Is this an April Fool? I trust nothing posted on 1 April!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Man, why do people publish serious announcements on April 1st? Between the XZ backdoor that almost pwned all of Linux, a Silksong update, Bellular News taking some absolutely degenerate stance with games "journalism", and this, I don't know what the fuck to believe.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

Well then, it's an interesting proposal because it would be nice to see a major player default to KDE. I don't see it happening though.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

timezones are always crazy on 1 April. My initial assumption was it's a joke. It would be awesome though! More people should use or at least try KDE.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I personally don't see the Fedora team breaking away from Gnome just yet, but he makes some good points.

Starting in 2025, KDE Plasma’s release cycle switches to a semi-annual cadence that lines up with Fedora Linux releases, enabling a tight interlock of development and integration between Fedora and KDE.

This is the key change that might make such a move viable, imo. One of the key benefits of Gnome to point release distros, and Fedora in particular, is the predictable 6-month release cycle. If KDE achieve the same, then it will make the proposition a lot more attractive.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I'll believe that when I see it. Redhat is fully invested in Gnome.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Red Hat doesn't have influence over the development of Fedora, that's the job of FESCo. Red Hat owns the trademark and is one of the sponsors of the Fedora Project, but their interest is solely in enterprise applications (a task that is not suitable for Fedora), not in consumer desktop platforms. I've already discussed this at length here and here if you'd like more detail; there's no point in rewriting it.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This is not April fools. The submitter did want to mess with people, though.

https://joshuastrobl.social/@me/112197672362783955

[–] Matty_r 28 points 7 months ago

You have my vote. The out of the box experience would be polished and I have no doubt would be done very well.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 7 months ago

Funnily enough, leading the proposal is Joshua Strobl, the lead dev of the budgie DE. More here https://joshuastrobl.social/@me/112197620423915344

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (6 children)

In theory, I would love to use KDE and use Gnome only with many plugins and tweaks (like IMHO the majority of Gnome users out there, see Ubuntu desktop).

In practice, KDE has still too many unsolved problems:

  • For years now, I try KDE from stable mainstream distros in standard VMs, always something from the vanilla KDE setup segfaults within the first 30min w/o me even starting to customize it. It seems this is not only a personal anecdote, but the experience of a lot of people trying KDE. (Gnome in these VMs runs stable w/o any segfaults, these VMs sometimes are running for days)
  • KMail ... even the KDE community themselves point out all the trouble with KMail: It works, until it doesn't, no support for GMail OOTB, etc ... This problems with KMail are known/reported/experienced for years now, w/o being fixed. Thunderbird/Evolution work OOTB and stable for my needs since a decade by now
  • Online-Accounts for Gnome works on every distribution OOTB for me, for all my professional/private needs. Again, in theory Dolphin is a much better file manager than Nautilus, in practice I can remote mount everything in Nautilus

In summary: I am not a big fan of Gnomes UI and would much prefer KDE, but in practice Gnome works stable, lets me setup my online accounts/connectivity and email and simply works. The KDE community ignored too many of this issues for too long (stability) and is still ignoring the widely known issues with KMail (fix it, dump it or at least communicate it is not ready for general use). I lost trust that these issues will ever be fixed by now. (Was a happy KDE 3.X user back in the day.)

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I believe these problems would be sorted out pretty quickly if big player like Fedora really switched. We can only dream for now...

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How are you running the VMs, with VirtualBox? I can't say I've run a DE on a VM very often, but it's always been under libvirt and I've not seen segfaults. I don't disbelieve you, but I wonder if its the hypervisor.

Not sure why you're fixating on Kmail; Thunderbird works fine on KDE and is the preferred choice across most distros IME. I'd use it before Outlook even if it were available on Linux.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago

Given that Fedora is a distro that aims to be on the frontier of new features and technologies, the inclusion of KDE seems like a much better fit than Gnome.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Dang, I finally started liking gnome over kde because of fedora

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (3 children)

you could just use the gnome fedora spin, this is just about making it not the default.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago

If this is real, this is actually a good idea. Even things like multi monitor management work a lot better on KDE imho

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (14 children)

I don't like KDE at all. Too busy, terrible-looking right click menu on the desktop (some lines long, some short). It's that stuff that give me OCD. I like cleanliness in the UI.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Lol, that's what makes me hate GNOME. If I wanted the bare minimum I'd just start a raw display server with only 1 program in it.

But my brain has no issue with dozens of things happening at once (ADHD).

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago

Hmm... my right click menu looks uniform. Could be your theme.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (5 children)

GNOME always seemed like an odd choice considering how little customization is available. It feels like a prescriptive approach, you will use your computer the way GNOME feels is appropriate, whereas KDE tries to accommodate however you want to use your computer.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Back in the Gnome 2 days this wasn't as much the case. Plus KDE was kind of a mess back then so the main choices were Gnome or XFCE which had fewer features. When Gnome 3 came around the devs switched hard to a much more opinionated approach, leading to Gnome 2 forks like Cinnamon since KDE was still very underpolished. It's a bit regrettable that all that effort was poured into Gnome forks instead of improving KDE especially considering how great it is now.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago

Unfortunate date to publish a proposal on...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Don't think so as they asked for "Workstation KDE" and "Workstation GNOME" > Issue tagged with: changes, f42 I think Fedora was doing a lot of work on KDE anyways.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I might use XFCE... but PLEASE GO KDE... I CANNOT EXPLAIN MY LOATHING OF GNOME

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (3 children)

oh I can explain mine, Bad performance, lacking features, devs who don't care about problems that effect the user.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I'd be against this, despite using Plasma on one of my systems and having an overall positive view of the project. Although admittedly I do slightly prefer Gnome because consistency is something I'm really anal about.

Gnome just feels a lot more stable and consistent. It works well, has a good release cadence (although KDE is making steps to improve theirs), and most people who use Fedora are happy with it.

Critically, Gnome has good accessibility features, and they're improving rapidly at the moment. I think good accessibility features are imperative for a workstation distro.

I've also never really heard any Fedora Plasma Spin users complain about the quality of Fedora's work, or it being called a "Spin" instead of workstation. It's already treated with pretty much the same level of care as Gnome is, so what would this achieve, other than months of bickering and a bit of confusion?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

As long as a gnome spin stays maintained. I've been using gnome for 8 years and I really don't want to switch distros again.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

why would they post this on April first this is amazing

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Can someone ELI5 why this even matters/is such a big deal? Does the default DE have its tentacles so deep in the distro that it can't be changed by users to suit their preferences?

I run i3 on Debian, and...well, actually, there is no "and," I just installed the WM I wanted and that was it. And as I recall the installer asked what DE/WM I wanted to install anyway.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago

OOB experience matters a LOT.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

It matters since a top 3 distro will identify with KDE Plasma desktop. This is not very common.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Its a huge deal. If X desktop is the default, it shows that the distro developers and maintainers usually test and optimize more and better for that specific DE so your experience with the default DE will always be more stable and polished than non-official ones. Extra GUI tools that the distro makes usually are also better tailored to the default distro. Like Manjaro and all of their locale, kernel and other packages that are integrated inside the KDE settings. Or popOS and all of their utilities being integrated into Cosmic. Etc etc. More money and dev time is invested into the default DE.

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[–] onlinepersona 12 points 7 months ago

That is going to be quite the debate. I'm sure it'll be healthy (only half joking).

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (5 children)

I like the UX KDE gives over Gnome. It feels way more like a personal computer, something that you can modify and do multiple tasks with.

Gnome is a lot more limited in functionality, but it's also a lot more stable. KDE is buggy and has a tendency to crap the bed a few minutes after startup, which never happened to me with Gnome.

It's a though decision, but lately I've been thinking of switching back to Gnome.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

I will happily use any desktop environment that allows me to bring up a summary of all active windows by pressing the super key. That's just too ingrained in me now. I even find myself mindlessly doing it on Windows.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

Kde has you covered. MOD + w by default and you can switch it in settings to MOD only.

You can even have hot corner like gnome does.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

Good proposal

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