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).
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.
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.
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
If this is real, this is actually a good idea. Even things like multi monitor management work a lot better on KDE imho
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.
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).
Hmm… my right click menu looks uniform. Could be your theme.
I like KDE’s conformance to open standards, which is better than GNOME’s, and pace of development. However you’re absolutely right that the UI on KDE is inconsistent, messy, and buggy as hell. GNOME is still my go to because it’s just so polished, but I’m looking forward to COSMIC this year for that nice tiling workflow
I’ve said it before, I don’t really like KDE or GNOME because they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum.
GNOME seems to have a very vivid ideal of beauty, and that ideal is “empty windows that don’t do anything.” Open up a utility app, Big window with lots of empty space with a few buttons crammed in the top bar and not enough options to do what you actually need to do.
KDE feels a lot more amateurish in that…things don’t line up as well, the spacing between elements is off a lot, and the whole experience is BUSY! Lots of UI elements everywhere. A basic utility will have more options than you knew what to do with just in case. It’s hideous the way the control panel at a nuclear power plant is hideous.
So I use Cinnamon. Which Gnome is trying very hard to corrupt, but for now it works while still being comfortable and comprehensible.
I was reading this whole thing thinking “this is why I use Cinnamon.” I like that I can customize Cinnamon without it being ridiculous.
That said, the best Cinnamon experience is on Mint. Fedora’s spin is crappy. So I don’t really have any teeth in the game.
Yeah basically if you want to use Cinnamon, use Mint. It’s the showcase distro.
I agree with you.
If forced to use either of the two, I’m going with KDE in almost all circumstances.
If I recall correctly, the desktop right click menu was one of the things they fixed in Plasma 6, actually.
Similar here. I have switched to xfce after struggling with gnome and kde.
Same here. I can’t stand the lack of cleanliness in UI. In Plasma, within 5 mins of usage, I can already notice imperfections everywhere.
If only it looked bad but performed well, I might still take it. No matter how many times I try, it’s just not stable for me to daily drive.
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I also never had an issue with Gnome… 🤷♂️
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