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.
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…
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.
Fedora is a “batteries included” distro
You obviously don’t have NVIDIA, kudos, but no CUDA… Also, some of us like codecs, etc.
I wasn’t saying everything is included, and sure, proprietary things like Nvidia drivers aren’t included (and I’m aware of the mesa-freeworld packages that replace the bundled ones). I was referring to Fedora being a “complete” experience in a sense that you get a preconfigured desktop environment, an installer where you can say “just install to this drive, I don’t care about anything else” and quite a few preinstalled applications. It’s not like Arch for example, where you manually partition your drives and chroot into your system to install packages and a bootloader just to get up and running.
I was more referring to the need for RPMFusion (batteries), which is a stumbling block for newbs unless they check the what to install after you install Fedora sites etc. I appreciate the purity, but the poor confused person coming from winblows may not…
GNOME 46 has experimental VRR support too
I know, that’s available just now with Fedora 40. And you have to know that the flag exists, it’s not a visible setting until you enable it. With KDE it’s just there (and has been for quite a while).
Is this an April Fool? I trust nothing posted on 1 April!
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.
Why did Bellular news do/say? Haven’t caught up with that debacle yet.
Defended Kotaku sucking up to SBI, downplayed and ignored SBI’s harrassment campaigns and the apparent racism of some of its employees. There’s also some conflict of interest because his company is in bed with SBI. I skimmed through most of the videos, it’s really not worth my time.
According to some comments, he also said some ridiculous things in support of SBI’s witch hunt against a particular Steam user on twitter, but I won’t go wading into that cesspool, so can’t verify.
Thanks for taking the time to summarise it! 🙌
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.
This is not April fools. The submitter did want to mess with people, though.
Please
Funnily enough, leading the proposal is Joshua Strobl, the lead dev of the budgie DE. More here https://joshuastrobl.social/@me/112197620423915344
You have my vote. The out of the box experience would be polished and I have no doubt would be done very well.
Unfortunate date to publish a proposal on…
Dang, I finally started liking gnome over kde because of fedora
you could just use the gnome fedora spin, this is just about making it not the default.
What about upgrades, are they going to switch everyone to KDE?
No you’d just find that your fedora says gnome edition or whatever
I’ll believe that when I see it. Redhat is fully invested in Gnome.
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.
It’s probably not gonna happen, but it’s great that this discussion is happening at all. Maybe it’ll encourage Gnome to improve their customizability, which seems to be the main advantage point of KDE
If this is real, this is actually a good idea. Even things like multi monitor management work a lot better on KDE imho
Yes please
Late April fools joke?
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.
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.
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.
Spot on.
I’ve been using gnome as a “base” DE for years, what that means is I install it, then install my tiling wm and use all the gnome utilities.
I recently had to set up a few new machines and decided to try KDE on a couple and I’m really enjoying it. I haven’t even gotten around to installing a tiling wm because I want to learn a wayland option and that’ll take some time. I haven’t ran into pain points listed here but one thing I like is when I want to do X, there’s usually already something ready to do X for me. Years of gnome and I felt like the devs were always fighting me. I haven’t really used a full gnome setup in a few years though, but I know the “mommy knows best” attitude is still prevalent with the devs.
Install KWin script “Polonium” and you won’t need any TWM anymore.
Polonium
Hm I’m not sure if that’d really give me what I’m looking for. I know its certainly possible to configure KDE and Polonium to get me 90% there but I think I’d rather just have a normal floating setup I can switch to if need be. I’d need to remap a significant amount of keyboard shortcuts that would stop making sense in the context of a full floating DE.
I really just want a very fast app launcher like dmenu, dynamic tiling, and monitor independent workspaces. I have a particular setup using certain alpha keys for my workspace.
I never really enjoyed the experience of tacking things onto an existing DE and having to mess with UI configuration. I’ve been really loving XMonad for a few setups and my ideal wm would be something that’s extremely low power and low fluff. Even if I only eek out 10% more battery life, breaking the 10hr mark is more valuable to me than most bells and whistles.
I’m just really lazy. I could load up my xmonad setup in 20 minutes but I wanted to see the state of wayland and that requires learning a new wm’s configuration quirks.
