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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is not April fools. The submitter did want to mess with people, though.
Funnily enough, leading the proposal is Joshua Strobl, the lead dev of the budgie DE. More here https://joshuastrobl.social/@me/112197620423915344
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.
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
I might use XFCE… but PLEASE GO KDE… I CANNOT EXPLAIN MY LOATHING OF GNOME
oh I can explain mine, Bad performance, lacking features, devs who don’t care about problems that effect the user.
I felt that way before meeting a GNOME dev. Their target audience is the whole world of users who either don’t already have a computer or don’t know how to use one. They don’t want people customizing their apps. They don’t want a calculator named anything other than “Calculator”. They’re target audience is the 2B users that we don’t currently interact with.
I mean that’s fine, but when people complain about text being too blurry and not sharp enough, their response was something along the lines of sharpness not being the sole metric for performance…
who the fuck does that? and they do this shit all the time
I too hate Gnome with an unreasonable passion.
So I just don’t use it.
If others want to subject themselves to it, well, I’m not one to kink shame.
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.
The Fedora Project currently maintains 10 desktop-oriented spins (excluding GNOME since it’s the default), so they’re not going to be abandoning one of the most popular DEs in use. GNOME is going to be maintained regardless of their default choice of DE.
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.
