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.
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).
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.
Ah i see kde has fixed the issue where dropdowns had broken behavior when scrolling https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/-/commit/f6ca218607ff7e5d5066eb3224154c3256cb9516 this was my main blocker why i couldn’t use it when i tried it around 2020. Maybe i could give it another try?
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! 🙌
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.
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.
This is not April fools. The submitter did want to mess with people, though.
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
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.
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.)
I believe these problems would be sorted out pretty quickly if big player like Fedora really switched. We can only dream for now…
I agree, it would give KDE a boost.
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.
I run my VMs with QEmu or VMware.
My fixation on KMail is simple, that I want to have an email client which is truly integrated in my DE and uses mostly the same libs. (Running Evolution btw.).
If I just run KDE as an application starter, I honestly rather use Xfce or even more minimal. The whole selling point of an DE (for me) is that things are integrated.
I’m sure kmail used to work (a number of years ago). But something happened to it and I never managed to get it to work again. I tried again recently and no luck.
Of course Thunderbird worked immediately on a basic Imap account.
And don’t even get me started on Google integration. Although Google probably shares the blame (or is responsible for most of it) given the hoops they make you jump through to (very reluctantly) allow anything to talk to their apps.
Merkuro Mail might fix some of KMail’s issues. It still uses the same backend though, and isn’t really stable yet.
I know you mean good, but exactly this is the problem: Fix known issues with KMail or with KMails backend? - Nope. Write a new E-Mail client which someday, in the far future might work and have all the features we need? Let’s go!
IMHO Evolution had the benefit, that it initially was written by Ximian and brought up to be good enough™. Honestly, I don’t see anyone investing this time, money and energy in a new KDE email client (or in KMail).
Building KDE on gnome is not feasible
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.
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
Ye true
Yes please
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.
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.
Gnome 2 was great and I wish MATE got more attention
Having a company behind software means you can pay to have your bugs fixed. Big distros want that stability for their corporate customers. It’s no secret or anything. KDE has sponsors, but doesn’t have a direct relationship with a huge contractor like RH. Same reasoning for systemd.
Politics, basically.
I wonder if the Gnome team’s cavalier aditude towards agreed upon standards is related to Redhat’s influence 🤔 It’s totally possible the devs are just high on their own fumes due to being the default for so long.
Whoever pays the band decides what they play.
This is the advantage to GNOME. I know that all I need to make a Linux desktop work the way I want is to install GNOME and GSconnect. I really like default GNOME, adwaita, and the actually usable out-of-the-box experience. Sure there’s a learning curve but that’s true of every desktop and I really hate the context menu hell that KDE imported over from Windows.
Not to mention there are still a lot of amateur mistakes over at KDE like the recent themes fiasco.
People who want the customizability of KDE will use the KDE spin or a distro that ships it by default. People downloading a massively popular distro like Fedora should get something as maximally functional as possible out of the box, and with all the stuff they’ve been adding recently, GNOME is more and more polished almost to a macOS point. I just recently found the built-in RDP, SSH, and filesharing toggles in the settings menu, and they’re easy enough that I’d actually call GNOME quite beginner friendly at this point.
