24 ms·

RHEL is deprecating KDE

312 points by trasz 8y ago

j0hnM1st 8y ago
what about Fedora?
- ddavis 8y ago
  Fedora 29 still has a KDE spin
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ihuman 8y ago
How come they are removing the golang package, and forcing people to use the go toolset instead? Will this affect CentOS?
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  Go produces static binaries, so it isn't really needed for production environments would be my guess. Devs tend to install upstream tools instead of the out of date RHEL tools too.
  - jake_the_third 8y ago
    > Devs tend to install upstream tools instead of the out of date RHEL tools too. and system administrators tend to install packaged tools instead of upstream tools that aren't tested to play well with the rest of the system. Perhaps installing directly from upstream makes sense for Go, but the servers I maintain either run distro-packed software or custom software. Too many bad experiences with upstream packages to trust on production.
    - Skunkleton 8y ago
      That was my point. If you are deploying a golang based application, there is nothing to install other than the binary produced by the dev team.
    - ulzeraj 8y ago
      Go applications do not need golang itself installed like a python or ruby. You can create the binaries on any machine and just ship the executable and it’s assets if applicable. The binary is static and contains everything it needs to run. Using grafana and influxdb as an example which might be familiar to sysadmins those packages do not need golang installed.
  - cyphar 8y ago
    This isn't true. Yes, Go packages are all statically compiled into a single binary (so you don't have a separate .so for each import path) but the actual binaries haven't been statically linked by default (or at all in some cases) for a very long time. For instance -- Go has to link to glibc, and glibc doesn't provide proper support for static compilation (you _can_ do it but it's not actually supported in the RHEL sense by glibc upstream). And even when you force Go (through several magic incantations) to give you a static binary, networking and similar code will still use NSS (which uses dlsym and thus still requires dynamic libraries on the host to be installed).
HuShifang 8y ago
Does anyone have insights into the possible motivation behind this? I'm an industry outsider, but I've been a bit baffled by the way that Canonical, Purism, and now Red Hat are seemingly doubling-down on Gnome and shifting away from KDE Plasma at precisely the moment that (going by the discourse within my Linux infosphere, at least) Gnome is approaching a crisis point, stripping away features as the debt comes due for bad design decisions made (and good, if painful, design fixes not implemented) years ago, whereas KDE Plasma is cruising, constantly adding refinements onto an already good foundation. Or to put it differently: all the Linux experts I read and listen to (many of whom actually work at Canonical or Red Hat) are talking about how great KDE Plasma is, and how troubled Gnome Shell is, yet all the companies are rejecting KDE for Gnome. What gives? Is this just part of the growing "corporatization" of Linux -- i.e. an investment of resources into a more corporate-controlled project, with an eye on the bottom-line and optimizing business-consumer support, rather than into one that's more decentralized in its development and individual-user targeted (and that would just draw resources from the former)?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- superflyguy 8y ago
  Who cares? Let's just pick one - any - and standardise on that one so we can maybe move towards a consistent look and feel. They're all sort of the same; just different enough to be annoying and frighten any occasional/non-technical is away. Gnome is good enough? That'll do, let's use that then.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - growse 8y ago
    > They're all sort of the same I think the poster's point is that they're not. One has apparently been well designed to be able to scale to new features, and the other one appears not to have been.
based2 8y ago
https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/
- lucb1e 8y ago
  A few words of what is behind that link would be nice
  - ddavis 8y ago
    It's a small post (by a KDE dev) describing why it's not surprising to see RH dropping KDE
  - zymhan 8y ago
    It's literally a URL to the same blog as this post. Use your brain a little.
    - lars_francke 8y ago
      That's not very helpful or nice. The link to this submission was changed. It did point at the Red Hat 7.6 release notes. The question is a valid one.
rdebeasi 8y ago
To clarify, this is related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux the distro, not Red Hat the company. Fedora 29 (released a few days ago) has a KDE spin, and the project has made no mention of discontinuing that. https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/download/index.html https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/download/index.html Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat (but not on RHEL or Fedora).
- mindcrime 8y ago
  and the project has made no mention of discontinuing that. ...yet.
  - AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
    The KDE spin is community-maintained, so it's not like Red Hat can yank funding from it or something.
- narwally 8y ago
  Somewhat off topic, but what's the reaction at Red Hat been about the IBM deal? I live in North Carolina and have been looking for jobs lately; I had been seriously considering Red Hat before the deal was announced, but I'm not sure what to think. I was hoping to go somewhere that offered more stability than a startup, but with the uncertainty around what IBM's plans are, I'm not sure that's the case for Red Hat at the moment.
mindcrime 8y ago
Wow... and "fuck you", Red Hat. After 20+ years of being a loyal RH / Fedora / CentOS user, I guess I finally get to switch to a different distro. Anybody have any recommendations for a RPM based distro with good KDE support?
- ddavis 8y ago
  OpenSUSE
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    Oh yeah, wow, I'd almost forgotten about them. I haven't touched SUSE in probably 15 years. Guess it's time to give it another look.
    - sgt 8y ago
      Best bet is probably Ubuntu.
      - scaryclam 8y ago
        Though if RPM is a requirement, Ubuntu isn't going to work.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Fedora changes nothing about its KDE spin.
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    Today. But it's not hard to see the writing on the wall. If the mothership isn't interested in KDE, it's hard to believe that Fedora will continue to put any energy into it. Maybe the volunteer community keeps it alive, but one can't really be optimistic about Fedora KDE in light of this.
    - 8y ago
tannhaeuser 8y ago
They also seem to drop Ansible and making it available as subscription/product only?
- DelightOne 8y ago
  What’s the difference?
- snuxoll 8y ago
  They're just moving it to a separate channel (repository), any active RHEL subscription will also have access to the ansible channel.
  - makomk 8y ago
    I wonder how this affects CentOS users though.
    - jabl 8y ago
      ansible is in EPEL, last I checked.
    - snuxoll 8y ago
      The version of Ansible that Red Hat packages in the "Ansible Engine" channel is available in the configmanagement repository on the CentOS mirrors, alternatively one can install a newer version of Ansible from EPEL.
qplex 8y ago
I saw screenshots of KDE 1.0 desktops [0] in a local computer magazine. I thought it looked very cool and wanted to try it on my machine. This was many years ago. I'm not sure if KDE was ever very popular, but these days it seems to be hard to find anyone who actually uses it. [0] https://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/ganroth.jpg https://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/ganroth.jpg
- tapoxi 8y ago
  Oddly enough there seems to be an EU/US split with KDE and GNOME. SUSE has long been a KDE backer.
  - toyg 8y ago
    Not that odd: Qt, the toolkit KDE is built on, originated in Europe at Trolltech. There has always been a pretty clear split where European companies (like SuSE) built on KDE/QT/C++ and American companies went with GNOME/GTK/C.
    - h1d 8y ago
      What does it matter if Trolltech originated in Europe? I didn't know that until now.
      - Symbiote 8y ago
        The comment [1] could be relevant. I use KDE, if I introduce someone to Linux they're likely to use KDE as well. If significant "influencers" use KDE, like universities and people writing software for the public sector, then many casual users will follow. SUSE is German, Mandrake (Mandriva) was French, both defaulted to KDE. When I first used Linux, it was easy to find a magazine with an installation CD for one of these. Presumably there was some sponsorship, or simply network effect. Also, Gnome's top menu bar felt like it was trying to imitate Mac OS, which has always been less common in Europe than North America. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18367356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18367356
      - 8y ago
n1vz3r 8y ago
And this is another example where FOSS ecosystem shines. While corporations like RedHat may reduce support and maintenance costs by shrinking their packages base, I'm more than confident in KDE's future because there are plenty other distros (including Fedora) that will continue to include it. Edit: spelling
- pjmlp 8y ago
  If there aren't enough people willing to sacrifice their free time and income, the source code might be available but it won't grow by itself.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Not everything needs to grow. Every time I use Windows 10 I feel glad I kept 7 on my desktop.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Me not, as I was highly disapointed Loghorn was successfully sabotaged by WinDev and enjoy to see the improvements that UWP has been gaining throughout each W10 release. Something we could have gotten sooner if those guys actually worked together.
Fzzr 8y ago
I was more interested to see that it dropped btrfs. I wonder what pushed them away from it, in the end.
- 8fingerlouie 8y ago
  Most likely the fact that they’re running ancient kernel versions (RHEl 7.6, released Oct 30 2018 uses Linux 3.10, which was released in June 2013) , and have to support them for 10-20 years. RHEL 6 uses kernel version 2.6.32, released in 2011, and will be supported until 2020. With a moving target like Btrfs, which may have plenty of showstopper bugs left in it yet, it’s just not feasible to keep backporting these new features to a an old kernel version. Once Btrfs stops getting major patches, and is considered stable, I guess it could eventually make its way back.
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    Redhat have added new filesystem support after a .0 release. For example, they added XFS to the kernel (without xfsprogs) in RHEL 5.2 and added the tools to the base repo in 5.4, then officially supported it in 5.6.
    - 8fingerlouie 8y ago
      But XFS is stable. The expected amount of patches to be backported is relatively small, both the amount and size of individual patches. Btrfs is still very much a moving target, with large patches every release.
      - ILMostro7 8y ago
        XFS is stable but incomplete. Hopefully there will come a time when fs shrinking is possible, for example.
    - nickysielicki 8y ago
      XFS is a conceptually simple journaling file system, comparing that to the crazy corner cases that can exist within btrfs snapshots and volumes and subvolumes and redundancy is not reasonable. A few years back btrfs had a lot of momentum, but other projects have matured since then and it just doesn't make as much sense as it used to. btrfs was meant to be ZFS without the license problems, but ZoL has gotten significantly better, and for some legal reasons that are fuzzy, Canonical now supports and ships ZoL in Ubuntu. lvm/dmraid performance has gotten better and integration with LVM and other software has improved, to the point that having a standardized interface for managing your storage (Like ZFS and BTRFS have) is no longer such a big deal. Between lvm/dmraid and how much effort they've done to make it simple to use lvm storage for libvirt/openstack/etc., I see no reason why they'd ever support btrfs in RHEL. They would spend more in engineers than they would ever get back in support.
kuwze 8y ago
On an unrelated note, is KDE or Gnome better for high DPI screens?
- dmytrish 8y ago
  It depends. Gnome only allows integer scaling by default (1x, 2x) and fractional scaling is hidden behind an experimental flag in the Gnome registry. If you only need 2x, it's a perfect solution. KDE readily exposes fractional scaling (1x, 1.1x, 1.2x, ...) and it mostly works as intended, but with occasional artifacts: some raster icons looks torn, sometimes there are weird graphical artefacts between text lines in Konsole/Kate/etc (which is rather annoying), it only scales Qt apps well and needs nerdy manual tweaks for others (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, xterm). I can't use Gnome on my XPS 13 because I need around 1.3x (and prefer a customized KDE anyway), so I have to put up with this.
  - dave7 8y ago
    > but with occasional artifacts: some raster icons looks torn, sometimes there are weird graphical artefacts between text lines in Konsole/Kate/etc (which is rather annoying) ... I have to put up with this. Frustratingly I can not remember the exact procedure to sort this out (and it's only been a year since I had to do it!), but I can tell you it is possible to get KDE resizing everything perfectly without any of these artefacts. It is something like this: KDE system setting -> Display & Monitors -> Scaling, leave set to 1 In /etc/sddm.conf, add: [XDisplay] ServerArguments=-dpi 125 KDE system settings -> Fonts -> Force Font DPI set to 125 KDE system settings -> Icons -> some tweaks in here I think The 125 change as preferred of course. There may be other settings I am forgetting. But I could absolutely not deal with those corruption in Konsole, KWrite, Okular etc and now I have it absolutely perfect.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    For what it's worth, at home I use KDE on a single 4K screen with scaling set to 2×, and there are no normal-user problems. I use Kubuntu, and Firefox, Chrome and LibreOffice scale correctly. GIMP looks a little small. I can get half-size or double-size apps if I start something from the CLI, or with X forwarding or similar. export GDK_SCALE=2 usually solves it. One small and obscure KDE utility program was broken with a HiDPI screen, but I filed a bug and it was fixed a few days later.
Iolaum 8y ago
I think this may be related to nvidia cards having problematic support in KDE under Wayland.
- narwally 8y ago
  I've recently switched to KDE with a Nvidia card, and haven't had too many issues. I did have to mess with the vsync settings to get rid of some screen tearing in fullscreen apps, but I've had the same issue on Windows 10 in the past. The fractional scaling worked great for me out of the box and was the main reason I made the switch.
sctb 8y ago
We've reverted the title from the submitted “Red Hat drops KDE support”. Readers can decide for themselves which aspects of the article are relevant; Python 2 has also been deprecated, for example.
- tln 8y ago
  Python 2 was deprecated in RHEL 7.5 at least, maybe earlier[0] The news the submitter thought was interesting is about 90% down an excruciatingly long webpage... maybe linking instead to a story specifically about this news would be better?[1][2] Here's the release note tidbit: "KDE has been deprecated KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE), which has been provided as an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment has been deprecated. A future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the default GNOME desktop environment." [0] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.5_release_notes/chap-red_hat_enterprise_linux-7.5_release_notes-deprecated_functionality https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... [1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde... [2] https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/
  - sctb 8y ago
    OK, we've gone with #2. Thanks!
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  Python 2 is an old, soon to be unsupported version of a language that got a new major version many years ago. KDE is a modern desktop environment that kicks GNOME in its ass. There's a subtle difference :D
bubblethink 8y ago
Sadly, there is no money in desktop. I wonder if anyone has numbers, but I doubt any of customers of enterprise distros specifically pay or care about the desktop side of things. And without sufficient incentives, this is the natural progression of desktop related things on linux. Canonical also pivoted away from desktop/mobile.
- randomsearch 8y ago
  Here’s a suggestion: you bring together a small team of great Linux developers. You pick one laptop that is commercially available, eg Lenovo or a Dell or a Chromebook. You then put all your efforts into making an awesome dev distro for that laptop only. You resell it with the distro pre-installed and configured, and 12 months free support. Could you make money selling it to coders? The go-to dev laptop for non-Mac users?
  - wmf 8y ago
    Nope, people would just bitch about how they refuse to buy it because it isn't exactly to their liking. Just check out any Purism or System76 thread.
- n1vz3r 8y ago
  I would prefer to paraphrase that "There is no money in supporting large number of desktop environments". And open source model allows to cut some costs by adopting project that is actively developed and supported by someone else. RedHat actively sponsors Gnome; it is reasonable for them to save some money by dropping KDE support. Canonical toyed with half-baked Unity and less-than-half-baked-Mir, and then saved money by completely "outsourcing" their DE to RedHat (by using Gnome). But it doesn't mean any of those projects is dead. It would mean projects will change less, become more stable, or even stagnate if there's not enough user base or developer interest. There are examples of software I use (Openbox or Shutter come to the mind) which doesn't change more or less for years. Maybe it's not the worst thing. Corporate money is driver of change, but it is often change for the sake of change - Gnome 2/3 switch or Systemd are most evident examples of that.
ty_a 8y ago
Sendmail is deprecated. That was the first Unix service I ever learned to configure. This is kind of the same feeling I got when I heard music I grew up listening to on the classic rock station.
- jhallenworld 8y ago
  Remember the first time you had to edit the rewrite rules?
  - cestith 8y ago
    Remember the first time it was faster to change something directly in the hot mess of a config file than to edit the m4 and regenerate?
gbustomtv5 8y ago
This is a massive list of changes for a service pack. Why push them all into 7.6? What’s going into 8?
- Avshalom 8y ago
  My outside suspicion is that they are (were who knows now with the merger) waiting for Wayland to get to point they felt comfortable supporting it, that or they were waiting for the container ecosystem to stabilize enough that they felt comfortable backing their horse. Although with the merger I'd assume it's going to be a bit longer regardless.
  - wmf 8y ago
    Holding back a server OS (face it, that's what RHEL is) for good Wayland support makes no sense. But figuring out their Docker/CoreOS/Atomic/OpenShift strategy before RHEL 8 would make sense.
jeffbax 8y ago
Is it that strange given how long Red Hat seemed to prefer Gnome anyway? Maybe its just that I'm a Mac user, but I feel like I'd want my distro choice to be fairly opinionated and throw its full weight behind things like Desktop Env rather than splitting resources. There's plenty of good KDE-first distros like OpenSUSE and Kubuntu, though I guess if you're in a corporate environment and can't choose distro maybe that is the main pain point.
danilocesar 8y ago
Lots of packages required by users but not strategic to Red Hat are provided by EPEL folks. I hope that's the case for KDE in the future.
- ILMostro7 8y ago
  Indeed; probably will be. Recently, yum has also included the copr plugin for using thirdparty repos, albeit a much lesser option than EPEL.
ilovecaching 8y ago
I really like Gnome and think KDE is way too bloated visually. On the other hand, Gnome is literally a dumpster fire of resource use. On some of my machines it would instantly shoot to 30-60% cpu. It uses a metric ton of RAM. That's why I recommend sway! the amazing wayland tiling windows manager. It's nice to look at, easy to use, and it uses like less hz than my wrist watch.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kungtotte 8y ago
  Anything other than Gnome or KDE will use less than half the resources. XFCE, Mate, LXDE/LXQT, etc. while maintaining the whole "environment" part of "desktop environment". There's a huge difference between a tiling WM and a full-blown DE, and people who want the Gnome or KDE experience should absolutely not install sway or any other tiling WM. Signed, a tiling WM user.
  - ohazi 8y ago
    DEs should make it easier to use tiling as a feature rather than having to go all-in with something like i3 or awesome. I use xfce, and it's pretty easy to add sensible keybindings for snap-window-{up, down, left, right, top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right, fullscreen}. That's usually all I want, although occasionally it would be nice to be able to quickly split by thirds. This still feels super snappy and productive, and you still get people asking you "whoa, how did you do that!?" But you can also overlap windows without changing modes, and the usual window manipulators are still there when they make sense, or when someone else wants to use your computer. You shouldn't have to throw away the rest of the "normal" DE and relearn how to interact with your computer to get tiling. It should just be a secret superpower for people who know that it's there. I've never understood why it's always one or the other.
    - Symbiote 8y ago
      KDE doesn't have shortcuts defined by default, but in "Global Shortcuts" under "KWin" you can define shortcuts for "Quick Tile Window to the —" and "Maximize Window". There seem to be some plugins or scripts for grid tiling, but I've never investigated. https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin (wow...) found via https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/87hutr/kde_making_plasma_512_look_like_a_tiling_window/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/87hutr/kde_making...
ILMostro7 8y ago
"It's a good thing" -Martha Stewart KDE is a beautiful, bloated rootkit, IMHO. There are countless of issues still open from years ago that never get addressed by developers. LXQT has potential, but even that suffers from some of the same issues with respect to KDE. e.g https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=120706 https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=120706
danceparty 8y ago
I find it odd there's so much emotion about KDE vs Gnome in RHEl/CentOS. RHEL is an 'enterprise' distro, which means in theory professionals are using it inside of their application of choice, and almost never interacting in a meaningful way with the DE. They need almost no customization and only the simplest file manipulation tools, and the ability to open the programs they do their work in. If you want to use it at home, you can just install KDE yourself, why expect rhel to support it? Source: Former sysadmin for ~5k CentOS desktop users (using gnome)
qwerty456127 8y ago
Meanwhile KDE5 is, IMHO, the only reasonable modern classic desktop for Linux (XFCE, LXDE, LXQt and Mate are also classic desktops but these are not really modern i.e. they are more Win95-like while KDE5 is more Win7/Unity-like and more), every else is a way too "special" and GNOME3 is the most weird one. From what I know about GNOME3 (from experience of attempting to use it and some reading/watching trying to "get it") it would be great to use on a tablet but looks and feels rather clumsy on a laptop.
- sunaurus 8y ago
  As someone who landed on Gnome 3 quite a few years ago and hasn't looked back, I'm really curious: why do you feel it would be great to use on a tablet? To me, it doesn't seem that great on a tablet. A major part of what makes Gnome 3 amazing for me is how easily I can navigate between workspaces or move windows between my screens and workspaces using keyboard shortcuts, but tablets don't even have physical keyboards. The whole "switch workspaces instead of windows" workflow of Gnome 3 is great on desktops where people multi-task and have complex contexts on each workspace, but to me it seems that this workflow would be a lot less useful with a single screen, and even more useless with a tiny tablet screen.
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    Aren't workspaces really useful when your physical screen space is limited (when it's not limited much I can hardly get it why won't you just arrange everything you need on your physical screens and just minimize/unminimize apps that you don't need all the time, KDE does this with just WindowsButton+number and it still has activities too although I never found this feature useful on a modern PC with 2 reasonably big screens)? Aren't huge window decorations great for touch screens? As for lack of keyboard - introducing a panel of touchscreen buttons for all the necessary shortcuts or using gestures may probably do the job.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  BTW, for those who had only tried KDE years ago (i.e. KDE4 and/or older and/or earliest KDE5 releases) and didn't really like it (e.g. default KDE look&feel had always felt mediocre to me and reliability of KDE4 and early KDE5 was bad), today KDE5 looks and feels much much better (to me at least, I dunno about default themes/settings in other distros but in Manjaro it's delicious and makes an awesome replacement for Unity (R.I.P.) after some tweaking).
ageofwant 8y ago
Once I started using i3 all of this drama just went away. I don't use Gnome or KDE, and neither should you.
- aerique 8y ago
  Yes, all these people talking about Gnome and KDE as if they're the only thing in town. DEs are a pox on Linux.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    I have to ask, why do you think having a cohesive, logically laid out and consistent desktop environment is a "pox on Linux"? Is it too user-friendly?
    - aerique 8y ago
      Nice straw man.
Jedd 8y ago
ITT we see myriad anecdotes and personal grudges & preferences presented as objective analysis and review. TFA notes that RHEL hasn't really done much for the KDE community in quite a while, so this is a bit of a non-story in terms of on-going support for KDE proper (as distinct from KDE on RHEL). TFA also notes it may just be The Register being The Register -- any article that suggests IBM bought RHEL to bury the RHEL drops KDE support story is clearly attempting humour. Keep in mind that getting Python 3 running on RHEL7 is a non-trivial exercise, fraught with sharp edges and inspiring many vocalised expletives -- so RHEL officially (not) supporting something isn't necessarily an indicator of, well, anything.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  > Keep in mind that getting Python 3 running on RHEL7 is a non-trivial exercise What? Install EPEL, install Python. Done. Does get older version, but it's RHEL.
  - Jedd 8y ago
    Running, not just installing. EPEL is straightforward, as you note (frustration aside that it's a bit of fiddling your average user shouldn't need to do). But the sharp edges pop up later - root installed pip packages not accessible by non root accounts, pip3 mess, challenges / breakages if you're also running various things that choke on python3 being present (puppet is one example).
Mikeb85 8y ago
Not surprising. KDE has always been a bit too complicated whilst not offering a particularly great nor modern interface. I know it can be changed to perform more like Gnome, but there's so many options that it just becomes a pain. Gnome Shell has nice defaults, the extensions are super easy to install if you do want to change something, it looks good and it's efficient to find apps or switch apps. I've personally always liked the Shell interface and I imagine with the proliferation of smart phones, Windows 10 and other modern interfaces, most users are just fine with the new paradigm (versus the start button from Windows 95). Gnome is stable, easy to use, nice looking and makes a great default. For the enterprise, I can't imagine how anyone would want to deal with something like KDE.
csdreamer7 8y ago
Chris on Coder Radio has talked about the different DEs before. His explanation of it I still think is one of the better ones. KDE just has a higher cognitive load. You have the control menu, you have drop downs, you could have a button on the bottom, GNOME apps are just simpler. You have all this busyness in the menus while GNOME apps can be just simpler to get into, use, and find things. Not to say GNOME is going in the right direction. I use Cinnamon on Manjaro for a reason. Client Side Decorations have been horrible for some apps. Like gedit, the UI is so horrible GNOME can't even get people to maintain it and had to put out a public call. While Cinnamon's Xed editor looks like old gedit and works great. But overall, GNOME apps are just easier to use.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  You know that Chris from Coder Radio is now a firm KDE/Plasma enthusiast?
readitone 8y ago
There is reasons behind existence of Ubunutu Mate: The new Gnome is UX hell. So congratulations:))
squirrelicus 8y ago
I just don't understand DEs. I run Openbox with dmenu and no DE. It's stupid fast, lean, easy to customize, and you only get what you ask for. Really good for running Linux VMs to do work while the company demands Windows or OSX on the metal.
- spindle 8y ago
  You really don't understand? I also (like you) don't use a DE, and I'm very happy that way, but in order to get to that I had to learn some stuff from scratch. It seems obvious to me that almost everyone who comes from MacOS and Windows needs a DE, at least at first (and forever if they don't like learning stuff). ETA: Also, I don't know any non-DE setups that have a hope of being usable on shared computers, even though I'm sure there could be one in principle.
  - squirrelicus 8y ago
    I suppose you're right, for shared systems I absolutely get it. For techie workstations though...
    - jraph 8y ago
      I get people who prefer not running desktop environments but I just like the convenience of using one. Every need I haven't anticipated is fulfilled. Integration of everything is here out of the box. I can tweak anything I would want to tweak but it turns out the default configuration usually pleases me. And it's fast and never gets in my way. Actually it's faster than no desktop environment: I have to use an USB key? Just plug it in, and it's mounted, I just need to click on the notification at the bottom right of the screen to open the file manager. I have a nice eject button to. No need to set this up myself or to launch mount commands. I can sill use commands if I want to. I would argue that outside of desktop environments, it's fast to do what I don't need to do in a desktop environment. I don't use a tiling window manager because my windows are always full screen anyway (or side by side), but I guess it would be possible to just run a tiling window manager instead of kwin in plasma or xfwm4 on xfce. (Gnome 3 may be different). The session is a bit slow to boot and that could be improved, but that's just a few seconds once in a while. I say all this knowing how to use a GNU/Linux system without a desktop environment perfectly well.
picacho 8y ago
As an user, without being influenced/trolled and making own judgement, make life easier and happier with linux + kde on opensuse :-)
stockkid 8y ago
I don't see any advantages of using a desktop environment over using a tiling window manager like i3wm. Therefore debates such as Gnome VS KDE never really makes sense to me. What are some reasons to use a desktop environment rather than i3?
melbourne_mat 8y ago
KDE is an extreme distraction and a waste of developer man hours. Not just for the people who made it, but also for those who wrote apps for it. Imagine how much better the Gnome ecosystem would be if all that effort was channeled there instead? Even a fork of the Gnome ecosystem would be better than a completely different API. As a user, Gnome works just fine. Get over yourselves KDI guys. Sometimes you just have to walk away!
- jraph 8y ago
  Gnome came after (this was a good move, KDE was then based on non free software). I used gnome 2 and really liked it, i switched to kde before gnome 3 and now I just like KDE apps and Plasma more (and I regularly try gnome 3 out of curiosity). Imagine how much more wonderful KDE would be if gnome developers worked on KDE instead. I guess it's a matter of taste and personal experiences. I sure would appreciate that most of the work could be shared but the world is not perfect and the ability to explore and try different things in different ecosystems is valuable too.
- Jonnax 8y ago
  Generally the opinion is that KDE is the superior experience. Your complaints are like an American saying that their 110v electricity is good and everyone should switch to it. But it can't even boil a kettle in a reasonable time.
  - narwally 8y ago
    I made the switch recently and have been very pleased. I love the customizability of it. Instead of having to Go back in forth between Gnome Shell/Unity/Cinnamon/etc. to find a desktop that works for me, I can get a very similar experience to any of those environments just by tweaking some settings and using the right plugins. Right now I have a setup that feels very similar to macOS just by adding a dock, using the Global Menu panel plugin, changing some keybindings, and installing Albert to replace Spotlight. Now I barely have any context switching issues moving back and forth from my Macbook and my desktop. It's a much nicer experience to the KDE I tried 4-5 years ago.
zelly 8y ago
The great thing about free software is you can install whatever you want regardless of whether Corporation X decided it’s still cool or not.
- kungtotte 8y ago
  It's not just that it's free software, it's that it's designed to be modular. Haiku is free software too but their desktop environment is tightly integrated into the system because that's the experience they're building towards.
checkyoursudo 8y ago
An interesting twist on KDE is to replace kwin with i3 as the window manager. If you like both KDE and a tiling wm then it's pretty neat.
- narwally 8y ago
  That sounds like an interesting combination. I used to exclusively use tiling window managers (switched between i3 and Xmonad a few time), but ever since I took the time to really learn to live inside emacs I've used it like a TWM. It was really nice for when I had to use a mac for work, but these days I've been using KDE neon, so will definitely have to try out i3 with it.
Vogtinator 8y ago
Why does this link to blogspam instead of the actual announcement?
- Symbiote 8y ago
  The "blogspam" is from the KDE developer who started Kubuntu and now maintains KDE Neon.
lbeltrame 8y ago
One note since I see many people talking about "KDE": the term does not refer to the DE anymore since many years, and instead refers to the community behind it. In fact, the DE is just Plasma, while Applications (like dolphin, ark, etc.) and Frameworks (the underlying libraries) aren't tied to a specific DE.
AzzieElbab 8y ago
Funny I have never seen rhel running on a desktop, I was surprised to hear they had Gui. As far as kde vs gnome, kde lets me shrink those enormous title bars, window control icons and borders, gnome does not. So, fk gnome. Spending 80% of my time in xmonad anyway
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I never imagined to see such comment regarding Red-Hat, still remember the days before RPM was even an idea. Then again the day they decided there was no money to be made on the desktop could only lead to this.
  - AzzieElbab 8y ago
    Why? I am not being negative. Never met anyone running redhat desktop, that is all. Servers is another matter entirely.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Exactly because of that, back in the old days Red-Hat had a strong presence among Linux desktops. It was all about Red-Hat vs SuSE, and Madrake was built on top of Red-Hat compiled for Pentium with stronger focus on desktop users, using KDE. Now Mandrake is gone, people keep forgetting SuSE is still around, and there are Linux users that never seen a Red-Hat desktop.
      - AzzieElbab 8y ago
        I guess I wasn't into Linux back then. Unix workstations were still around and I had access to some
badrabbit 8y ago
This is because RHEL is an enterprise distro,mostly for servers. RHEL and even centos and fedora don't care as much as debian or ubuntu about independent individuals' desktop experience.
ishbits 8y ago
Gnome has been really pissing me off lately. Simple things, like adding app that start on login need a "Tweak" tool? How silly is that. With the upgrade to Fedora 29 I thought I'd try KDE. Its got a lot of the features I miss from Gnome - and a tray, and not so fat title bar. But its really unstable in various ways. In particular, forgetting many settings after a reboot. One display having a background, the other not. Anyways, back to Gnome. At least whats their is stable. I plan to give XFCE a shot. But might be time to take the i3 dive.

312 points by trasz 8y ago

j0hnM1st 8y ago

what about Fedora?

ddavis 8y ago
Fedora 29 still has a KDE spin

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ihuman 8y ago

How come they are removing the golang package, and forcing people to use the go toolset instead? Will this affect CentOS?

Skunkleton 8y ago
Go produces static binaries, so it isn't really needed for production environments would be my guess. Devs tend to install upstream tools instead of the out of date RHEL tools too.
- jake_the_third 8y ago
  > Devs tend to install upstream tools instead of the out of date RHEL tools too. and system administrators tend to install packaged tools instead of upstream tools that aren't tested to play well with the rest of the system. Perhaps installing directly from upstream makes sense for Go, but the servers I maintain either run distro-packed software or custom software. Too many bad experiences with upstream packages to trust on production.
  - Skunkleton 8y ago
    That was my point. If you are deploying a golang based application, there is nothing to install other than the binary produced by the dev team.
  - ulzeraj 8y ago
    Go applications do not need golang itself installed like a python or ruby. You can create the binaries on any machine and just ship the executable and it’s assets if applicable. The binary is static and contains everything it needs to run. Using grafana and influxdb as an example which might be familiar to sysadmins those packages do not need golang installed.
- cyphar 8y ago
  This isn't true. Yes, Go packages are all statically compiled into a single binary (so you don't have a separate .so for each import path) but the actual binaries haven't been statically linked by default (or at all in some cases) for a very long time. For instance -- Go has to link to glibc, and glibc doesn't provide proper support for static compilation (you _can_ do it but it's not actually supported in the RHEL sense by glibc upstream). And even when you force Go (through several magic incantations) to give you a static binary, networking and similar code will still use NSS (which uses dlsym and thus still requires dynamic libraries on the host to be installed).

HuShifang 8y ago

Does anyone have insights into the possible motivation behind this? I'm an industry outsider, but I've been a bit baffled by the way that Canonical, Purism, and now Red Hat are seemingly doubling-down on Gnome and shifting away from KDE Plasma at precisely the moment that (going by the discourse within my Linux infosphere, at least) Gnome is approaching a crisis point, stripping away features as the debt comes due for bad design decisions made (and good, if painful, design fixes not implemented) years ago, whereas KDE Plasma is cruising, constantly adding refinements onto an already good foundation. Or to put it differently: all the Linux experts I read and listen to (many of whom actually work at Canonical or Red Hat) are talking about how great KDE Plasma is, and how troubled Gnome Shell is, yet all the companies are rejecting KDE for Gnome. What gives? Is this just part of the growing "corporatization" of Linux -- i.e. an investment of resources into a more corporate-controlled project, with an eye on the bottom-line and optimizing business-consumer support, rather than into one that's more decentralized in its development and individual-user targeted (and that would just draw resources from the former)?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
superflyguy 8y ago
Who cares? Let's just pick one - any - and standardise on that one so we can maybe move towards a consistent look and feel. They're all sort of the same; just different enough to be annoying and frighten any occasional/non-technical is away. Gnome is good enough? That'll do, let's use that then.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- growse 8y ago
  > They're all sort of the same I think the poster's point is that they're not. One has apparently been well designed to be able to scale to new features, and the other one appears not to have been.

based2 8y ago

https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/

lucb1e 8y ago
A few words of what is behind that link would be nice
- ddavis 8y ago
  It's a small post (by a KDE dev) describing why it's not surprising to see RH dropping KDE
- zymhan 8y ago
  It's literally a URL to the same blog as this post. Use your brain a little.
  - lars_francke 8y ago
    That's not very helpful or nice. The link to this submission was changed. It did point at the Red Hat 7.6 release notes. The question is a valid one.

rdebeasi 8y ago

To clarify, this is related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux the distro, not Red Hat the company. Fedora 29 (released a few days ago) has a KDE spin, and the project has made no mention of discontinuing that. https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/download/index.html https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/download/index.html Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat (but not on RHEL or Fedora).

mindcrime 8y ago
and the project has made no mention of discontinuing that. ...yet.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  The KDE spin is community-maintained, so it's not like Red Hat can yank funding from it or something.
narwally 8y ago
Somewhat off topic, but what's the reaction at Red Hat been about the IBM deal? I live in North Carolina and have been looking for jobs lately; I had been seriously considering Red Hat before the deal was announced, but I'm not sure what to think. I was hoping to go somewhere that offered more stability than a startup, but with the uncertainty around what IBM's plans are, I'm not sure that's the case for Red Hat at the moment.

mindcrime 8y ago

Wow... and "fuck you", Red Hat. After 20+ years of being a loyal RH / Fedora / CentOS user, I guess I finally get to switch to a different distro. Anybody have any recommendations for a RPM based distro with good KDE support?

ddavis 8y ago
OpenSUSE
- mindcrime 8y ago
  Oh yeah, wow, I'd almost forgotten about them. I haven't touched SUSE in probably 15 years. Guess it's time to give it another look.
  - sgt 8y ago
    Best bet is probably Ubuntu.
    - scaryclam 8y ago
      Though if RPM is a requirement, Ubuntu isn't going to work.
TomMarius 8y ago
Fedora changes nothing about its KDE spin.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  Today. But it's not hard to see the writing on the wall. If the mothership isn't interested in KDE, it's hard to believe that Fedora will continue to put any energy into it. Maybe the volunteer community keeps it alive, but one can't really be optimistic about Fedora KDE in light of this.
  - 8y ago

tannhaeuser 8y ago

They also seem to drop Ansible and making it available as subscription/product only?

DelightOne 8y ago
What’s the difference?
snuxoll 8y ago
They're just moving it to a separate channel (repository), any active RHEL subscription will also have access to the ansible channel.
- makomk 8y ago
  I wonder how this affects CentOS users though.
  - jabl 8y ago
    ansible is in EPEL, last I checked.
  - snuxoll 8y ago
    The version of Ansible that Red Hat packages in the "Ansible Engine" channel is available in the configmanagement repository on the CentOS mirrors, alternatively one can install a newer version of Ansible from EPEL.

qplex 8y ago

I saw screenshots of KDE 1.0 desktops [0] in a local computer magazine. I thought it looked very cool and wanted to try it on my machine. This was many years ago. I'm not sure if KDE was ever very popular, but these days it seems to be hard to find anyone who actually uses it. [0] https://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/ganroth.jpg https://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/ganroth.jpg

tapoxi 8y ago
Oddly enough there seems to be an EU/US split with KDE and GNOME. SUSE has long been a KDE backer.
- toyg 8y ago
  Not that odd: Qt, the toolkit KDE is built on, originated in Europe at Trolltech. There has always been a pretty clear split where European companies (like SuSE) built on KDE/QT/C++ and American companies went with GNOME/GTK/C.
  - h1d 8y ago
    What does it matter if Trolltech originated in Europe? I didn't know that until now.
    - Symbiote 8y ago
      The comment [1] could be relevant. I use KDE, if I introduce someone to Linux they're likely to use KDE as well. If significant "influencers" use KDE, like universities and people writing software for the public sector, then many casual users will follow. SUSE is German, Mandrake (Mandriva) was French, both defaulted to KDE. When I first used Linux, it was easy to find a magazine with an installation CD for one of these. Presumably there was some sponsorship, or simply network effect. Also, Gnome's top menu bar felt like it was trying to imitate Mac OS, which has always been less common in Europe than North America. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18367356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18367356
    - 8y ago

n1vz3r 8y ago

And this is another example where FOSS ecosystem shines. While corporations like RedHat may reduce support and maintenance costs by shrinking their packages base, I'm more than confident in KDE's future because there are plenty other distros (including Fedora) that will continue to include it. Edit: spelling

pjmlp 8y ago
If there aren't enough people willing to sacrifice their free time and income, the source code might be available but it won't grow by itself.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Not everything needs to grow. Every time I use Windows 10 I feel glad I kept 7 on my desktop.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Me not, as I was highly disapointed Loghorn was successfully sabotaged by WinDev and enjoy to see the improvements that UWP has been gaining throughout each W10 release. Something we could have gotten sooner if those guys actually worked together.

Fzzr 8y ago

I was more interested to see that it dropped btrfs. I wonder what pushed them away from it, in the end.

8fingerlouie 8y ago
Most likely the fact that they’re running ancient kernel versions (RHEl 7.6, released Oct 30 2018 uses Linux 3.10, which was released in June 2013) , and have to support them for 10-20 years. RHEL 6 uses kernel version 2.6.32, released in 2011, and will be supported until 2020. With a moving target like Btrfs, which may have plenty of showstopper bugs left in it yet, it’s just not feasible to keep backporting these new features to a an old kernel version. Once Btrfs stops getting major patches, and is considered stable, I guess it could eventually make its way back.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  Redhat have added new filesystem support after a .0 release. For example, they added XFS to the kernel (without xfsprogs) in RHEL 5.2 and added the tools to the base repo in 5.4, then officially supported it in 5.6.
  - 8fingerlouie 8y ago
    But XFS is stable. The expected amount of patches to be backported is relatively small, both the amount and size of individual patches. Btrfs is still very much a moving target, with large patches every release.
    - ILMostro7 8y ago
      XFS is stable but incomplete. Hopefully there will come a time when fs shrinking is possible, for example.
  - nickysielicki 8y ago
    XFS is a conceptually simple journaling file system, comparing that to the crazy corner cases that can exist within btrfs snapshots and volumes and subvolumes and redundancy is not reasonable. A few years back btrfs had a lot of momentum, but other projects have matured since then and it just doesn't make as much sense as it used to. btrfs was meant to be ZFS without the license problems, but ZoL has gotten significantly better, and for some legal reasons that are fuzzy, Canonical now supports and ships ZoL in Ubuntu. lvm/dmraid performance has gotten better and integration with LVM and other software has improved, to the point that having a standardized interface for managing your storage (Like ZFS and BTRFS have) is no longer such a big deal. Between lvm/dmraid and how much effort they've done to make it simple to use lvm storage for libvirt/openstack/etc., I see no reason why they'd ever support btrfs in RHEL. They would spend more in engineers than they would ever get back in support.

kuwze 8y ago

On an unrelated note, is KDE or Gnome better for high DPI screens?

dmytrish 8y ago
It depends. Gnome only allows integer scaling by default (1x, 2x) and fractional scaling is hidden behind an experimental flag in the Gnome registry. If you only need 2x, it's a perfect solution. KDE readily exposes fractional scaling (1x, 1.1x, 1.2x, ...) and it mostly works as intended, but with occasional artifacts: some raster icons looks torn, sometimes there are weird graphical artefacts between text lines in Konsole/Kate/etc (which is rather annoying), it only scales Qt apps well and needs nerdy manual tweaks for others (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, xterm). I can't use Gnome on my XPS 13 because I need around 1.3x (and prefer a customized KDE anyway), so I have to put up with this.
- dave7 8y ago
  > but with occasional artifacts: some raster icons looks torn, sometimes there are weird graphical artefacts between text lines in Konsole/Kate/etc (which is rather annoying) ... I have to put up with this. Frustratingly I can not remember the exact procedure to sort this out (and it's only been a year since I had to do it!), but I can tell you it is possible to get KDE resizing everything perfectly without any of these artefacts. It is something like this: KDE system setting -> Display & Monitors -> Scaling, leave set to 1 In /etc/sddm.conf, add: [XDisplay] ServerArguments=-dpi 125 KDE system settings -> Fonts -> Force Font DPI set to 125 KDE system settings -> Icons -> some tweaks in here I think The 125 change as preferred of course. There may be other settings I am forgetting. But I could absolutely not deal with those corruption in Konsole, KWrite, Okular etc and now I have it absolutely perfect.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  For what it's worth, at home I use KDE on a single 4K screen with scaling set to 2×, and there are no normal-user problems. I use Kubuntu, and Firefox, Chrome and LibreOffice scale correctly. GIMP looks a little small. I can get half-size or double-size apps if I start something from the CLI, or with X forwarding or similar. export GDK_SCALE=2 usually solves it. One small and obscure KDE utility program was broken with a HiDPI screen, but I filed a bug and it was fixed a few days later.

Iolaum 8y ago

I think this may be related to nvidia cards having problematic support in KDE under Wayland.

narwally 8y ago
I've recently switched to KDE with a Nvidia card, and haven't had too many issues. I did have to mess with the vsync settings to get rid of some screen tearing in fullscreen apps, but I've had the same issue on Windows 10 in the past. The fractional scaling worked great for me out of the box and was the main reason I made the switch.

sctb 8y ago

We've reverted the title from the submitted “Red Hat drops KDE support”. Readers can decide for themselves which aspects of the article are relevant; Python 2 has also been deprecated, for example.

tln 8y ago
Python 2 was deprecated in RHEL 7.5 at least, maybe earlier[0] The news the submitter thought was interesting is about 90% down an excruciatingly long webpage... maybe linking instead to a story specifically about this news would be better?[1][2] Here's the release note tidbit: "KDE has been deprecated KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE), which has been provided as an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment has been deprecated. A future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the default GNOME desktop environment." [0] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.5_release_notes/chap-red_hat_enterprise_linux-7.5_release_notes-deprecated_functionality https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... [1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde... [2] https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/
- sctb 8y ago
  OK, we've gone with #2. Thanks!
seba_dos1 8y ago
Python 2 is an old, soon to be unsupported version of a language that got a new major version many years ago. KDE is a modern desktop environment that kicks GNOME in its ass. There's a subtle difference :D

bubblethink 8y ago

Sadly, there is no money in desktop. I wonder if anyone has numbers, but I doubt any of customers of enterprise distros specifically pay or care about the desktop side of things. And without sufficient incentives, this is the natural progression of desktop related things on linux. Canonical also pivoted away from desktop/mobile.

randomsearch 8y ago
Here’s a suggestion: you bring together a small team of great Linux developers. You pick one laptop that is commercially available, eg Lenovo or a Dell or a Chromebook. You then put all your efforts into making an awesome dev distro for that laptop only. You resell it with the distro pre-installed and configured, and 12 months free support. Could you make money selling it to coders? The go-to dev laptop for non-Mac users?
- wmf 8y ago
  Nope, people would just bitch about how they refuse to buy it because it isn't exactly to their liking. Just check out any Purism or System76 thread.
n1vz3r 8y ago
I would prefer to paraphrase that "There is no money in supporting large number of desktop environments". And open source model allows to cut some costs by adopting project that is actively developed and supported by someone else. RedHat actively sponsors Gnome; it is reasonable for them to save some money by dropping KDE support. Canonical toyed with half-baked Unity and less-than-half-baked-Mir, and then saved money by completely "outsourcing" their DE to RedHat (by using Gnome). But it doesn't mean any of those projects is dead. It would mean projects will change less, become more stable, or even stagnate if there's not enough user base or developer interest. There are examples of software I use (Openbox or Shutter come to the mind) which doesn't change more or less for years. Maybe it's not the worst thing. Corporate money is driver of change, but it is often change for the sake of change - Gnome 2/3 switch or Systemd are most evident examples of that.

ty_a 8y ago

Sendmail is deprecated. That was the first Unix service I ever learned to configure. This is kind of the same feeling I got when I heard music I grew up listening to on the classic rock station.

jhallenworld 8y ago
Remember the first time you had to edit the rewrite rules?
- cestith 8y ago
  Remember the first time it was faster to change something directly in the hot mess of a config file than to edit the m4 and regenerate?

gbustomtv5 8y ago

This is a massive list of changes for a service pack. Why push them all into 7.6? What’s going into 8?

Avshalom 8y ago
My outside suspicion is that they are (were who knows now with the merger) waiting for Wayland to get to point they felt comfortable supporting it, that or they were waiting for the container ecosystem to stabilize enough that they felt comfortable backing their horse. Although with the merger I'd assume it's going to be a bit longer regardless.
- wmf 8y ago
  Holding back a server OS (face it, that's what RHEL is) for good Wayland support makes no sense. But figuring out their Docker/CoreOS/Atomic/OpenShift strategy before RHEL 8 would make sense.

jeffbax 8y ago

Is it that strange given how long Red Hat seemed to prefer Gnome anyway? Maybe its just that I'm a Mac user, but I feel like I'd want my distro choice to be fairly opinionated and throw its full weight behind things like Desktop Env rather than splitting resources. There's plenty of good KDE-first distros like OpenSUSE and Kubuntu, though I guess if you're in a corporate environment and can't choose distro maybe that is the main pain point.

danilocesar 8y ago

Lots of packages required by users but not strategic to Red Hat are provided by EPEL folks. I hope that's the case for KDE in the future.

ILMostro7 8y ago
Indeed; probably will be. Recently, yum has also included the copr plugin for using thirdparty repos, albeit a much lesser option than EPEL.

ilovecaching 8y ago

I really like Gnome and think KDE is way too bloated visually. On the other hand, Gnome is literally a dumpster fire of resource use. On some of my machines it would instantly shoot to 30-60% cpu. It uses a metric ton of RAM. That's why I recommend sway! the amazing wayland tiling windows manager. It's nice to look at, easy to use, and it uses like less hz than my wrist watch.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kungtotte 8y ago
Anything other than Gnome or KDE will use less than half the resources. XFCE, Mate, LXDE/LXQT, etc. while maintaining the whole "environment" part of "desktop environment". There's a huge difference between a tiling WM and a full-blown DE, and people who want the Gnome or KDE experience should absolutely not install sway or any other tiling WM. Signed, a tiling WM user.
- ohazi 8y ago
  DEs should make it easier to use tiling as a feature rather than having to go all-in with something like i3 or awesome. I use xfce, and it's pretty easy to add sensible keybindings for snap-window-{up, down, left, right, top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right, fullscreen}. That's usually all I want, although occasionally it would be nice to be able to quickly split by thirds. This still feels super snappy and productive, and you still get people asking you "whoa, how did you do that!?" But you can also overlap windows without changing modes, and the usual window manipulators are still there when they make sense, or when someone else wants to use your computer. You shouldn't have to throw away the rest of the "normal" DE and relearn how to interact with your computer to get tiling. It should just be a secret superpower for people who know that it's there. I've never understood why it's always one or the other.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    KDE doesn't have shortcuts defined by default, but in "Global Shortcuts" under "KWin" you can define shortcuts for "Quick Tile Window to the —" and "Maximize Window". There seem to be some plugins or scripts for grid tiling, but I've never investigated. https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin (wow...) found via https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/87hutr/kde_making_plasma_512_look_like_a_tiling_window/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/87hutr/kde_making...

ILMostro7 8y ago

"It's a good thing" -Martha Stewart KDE is a beautiful, bloated rootkit, IMHO. There are countless of issues still open from years ago that never get addressed by developers. LXQT has potential, but even that suffers from some of the same issues with respect to KDE. e.g https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=120706 https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=120706

danceparty 8y ago

I find it odd there's so much emotion about KDE vs Gnome in RHEl/CentOS. RHEL is an 'enterprise' distro, which means in theory professionals are using it inside of their application of choice, and almost never interacting in a meaningful way with the DE. They need almost no customization and only the simplest file manipulation tools, and the ability to open the programs they do their work in. If you want to use it at home, you can just install KDE yourself, why expect rhel to support it? Source: Former sysadmin for ~5k CentOS desktop users (using gnome)

qwerty456127 8y ago

Meanwhile KDE5 is, IMHO, the only reasonable modern classic desktop for Linux (XFCE, LXDE, LXQt and Mate are also classic desktops but these are not really modern i.e. they are more Win95-like while KDE5 is more Win7/Unity-like and more), every else is a way too "special" and GNOME3 is the most weird one. From what I know about GNOME3 (from experience of attempting to use it and some reading/watching trying to "get it") it would be great to use on a tablet but looks and feels rather clumsy on a laptop.

sunaurus 8y ago
As someone who landed on Gnome 3 quite a few years ago and hasn't looked back, I'm really curious: why do you feel it would be great to use on a tablet? To me, it doesn't seem that great on a tablet. A major part of what makes Gnome 3 amazing for me is how easily I can navigate between workspaces or move windows between my screens and workspaces using keyboard shortcuts, but tablets don't even have physical keyboards. The whole "switch workspaces instead of windows" workflow of Gnome 3 is great on desktops where people multi-task and have complex contexts on each workspace, but to me it seems that this workflow would be a lot less useful with a single screen, and even more useless with a tiny tablet screen.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  Aren't workspaces really useful when your physical screen space is limited (when it's not limited much I can hardly get it why won't you just arrange everything you need on your physical screens and just minimize/unminimize apps that you don't need all the time, KDE does this with just WindowsButton+number and it still has activities too although I never found this feature useful on a modern PC with 2 reasonably big screens)? Aren't huge window decorations great for touch screens? As for lack of keyboard - introducing a panel of touchscreen buttons for all the necessary shortcuts or using gestures may probably do the job.
qwerty456127 8y ago
BTW, for those who had only tried KDE years ago (i.e. KDE4 and/or older and/or earliest KDE5 releases) and didn't really like it (e.g. default KDE look&feel had always felt mediocre to me and reliability of KDE4 and early KDE5 was bad), today KDE5 looks and feels much much better (to me at least, I dunno about default themes/settings in other distros but in Manjaro it's delicious and makes an awesome replacement for Unity (R.I.P.) after some tweaking).

ageofwant 8y ago

Once I started using i3 all of this drama just went away. I don't use Gnome or KDE, and neither should you.

aerique 8y ago
Yes, all these people talking about Gnome and KDE as if they're the only thing in town. DEs are a pox on Linux.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  I have to ask, why do you think having a cohesive, logically laid out and consistent desktop environment is a "pox on Linux"? Is it too user-friendly?
  - aerique 8y ago
    Nice straw man.

Jedd 8y ago

ITT we see myriad anecdotes and personal grudges & preferences presented as objective analysis and review. TFA notes that RHEL hasn't really done much for the KDE community in quite a while, so this is a bit of a non-story in terms of on-going support for KDE proper (as distinct from KDE on RHEL). TFA also notes it may just be The Register being The Register -- any article that suggests IBM bought RHEL to bury the RHEL drops KDE support story is clearly attempting humour. Keep in mind that getting Python 3 running on RHEL7 is a non-trivial exercise, fraught with sharp edges and inspiring many vocalised expletives -- so RHEL officially (not) supporting something isn't necessarily an indicator of, well, anything.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
> Keep in mind that getting Python 3 running on RHEL7 is a non-trivial exercise What? Install EPEL, install Python. Done. Does get older version, but it's RHEL.
- Jedd 8y ago
  Running, not just installing. EPEL is straightforward, as you note (frustration aside that it's a bit of fiddling your average user shouldn't need to do). But the sharp edges pop up later - root installed pip packages not accessible by non root accounts, pip3 mess, challenges / breakages if you're also running various things that choke on python3 being present (puppet is one example).

Mikeb85 8y ago

Not surprising. KDE has always been a bit too complicated whilst not offering a particularly great nor modern interface. I know it can be changed to perform more like Gnome, but there's so many options that it just becomes a pain. Gnome Shell has nice defaults, the extensions are super easy to install if you do want to change something, it looks good and it's efficient to find apps or switch apps. I've personally always liked the Shell interface and I imagine with the proliferation of smart phones, Windows 10 and other modern interfaces, most users are just fine with the new paradigm (versus the start button from Windows 95). Gnome is stable, easy to use, nice looking and makes a great default. For the enterprise, I can't imagine how anyone would want to deal with something like KDE.

csdreamer7 8y ago

Chris on Coder Radio has talked about the different DEs before. His explanation of it I still think is one of the better ones. KDE just has a higher cognitive load. You have the control menu, you have drop downs, you could have a button on the bottom, GNOME apps are just simpler. You have all this busyness in the menus while GNOME apps can be just simpler to get into, use, and find things. Not to say GNOME is going in the right direction. I use Cinnamon on Manjaro for a reason. Client Side Decorations have been horrible for some apps. Like gedit, the UI is so horrible GNOME can't even get people to maintain it and had to put out a public call. While Cinnamon's Xed editor looks like old gedit and works great. But overall, GNOME apps are just easier to use.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
You know that Chris from Coder Radio is now a firm KDE/Plasma enthusiast?

readitone 8y ago

There is reasons behind existence of Ubunutu Mate: The new Gnome is UX hell. So congratulations:))

squirrelicus 8y ago

I just don't understand DEs. I run Openbox with dmenu and no DE. It's stupid fast, lean, easy to customize, and you only get what you ask for. Really good for running Linux VMs to do work while the company demands Windows or OSX on the metal.

spindle 8y ago
You really don't understand? I also (like you) don't use a DE, and I'm very happy that way, but in order to get to that I had to learn some stuff from scratch. It seems obvious to me that almost everyone who comes from MacOS and Windows needs a DE, at least at first (and forever if they don't like learning stuff). ETA: Also, I don't know any non-DE setups that have a hope of being usable on shared computers, even though I'm sure there could be one in principle.
- squirrelicus 8y ago
  I suppose you're right, for shared systems I absolutely get it. For techie workstations though...
  - jraph 8y ago
    I get people who prefer not running desktop environments but I just like the convenience of using one. Every need I haven't anticipated is fulfilled. Integration of everything is here out of the box. I can tweak anything I would want to tweak but it turns out the default configuration usually pleases me. And it's fast and never gets in my way. Actually it's faster than no desktop environment: I have to use an USB key? Just plug it in, and it's mounted, I just need to click on the notification at the bottom right of the screen to open the file manager. I have a nice eject button to. No need to set this up myself or to launch mount commands. I can sill use commands if I want to. I would argue that outside of desktop environments, it's fast to do what I don't need to do in a desktop environment. I don't use a tiling window manager because my windows are always full screen anyway (or side by side), but I guess it would be possible to just run a tiling window manager instead of kwin in plasma or xfwm4 on xfce. (Gnome 3 may be different). The session is a bit slow to boot and that could be improved, but that's just a few seconds once in a while. I say all this knowing how to use a GNU/Linux system without a desktop environment perfectly well.

picacho 8y ago

As an user, without being influenced/trolled and making own judgement, make life easier and happier with linux + kde on opensuse :-)

stockkid 8y ago

I don't see any advantages of using a desktop environment over using a tiling window manager like i3wm. Therefore debates such as Gnome VS KDE never really makes sense to me. What are some reasons to use a desktop environment rather than i3?

melbourne_mat 8y ago

KDE is an extreme distraction and a waste of developer man hours. Not just for the people who made it, but also for those who wrote apps for it. Imagine how much better the Gnome ecosystem would be if all that effort was channeled there instead? Even a fork of the Gnome ecosystem would be better than a completely different API. As a user, Gnome works just fine. Get over yourselves KDI guys. Sometimes you just have to walk away!

jraph 8y ago
Gnome came after (this was a good move, KDE was then based on non free software). I used gnome 2 and really liked it, i switched to kde before gnome 3 and now I just like KDE apps and Plasma more (and I regularly try gnome 3 out of curiosity). Imagine how much more wonderful KDE would be if gnome developers worked on KDE instead. I guess it's a matter of taste and personal experiences. I sure would appreciate that most of the work could be shared but the world is not perfect and the ability to explore and try different things in different ecosystems is valuable too.
Jonnax 8y ago
Generally the opinion is that KDE is the superior experience. Your complaints are like an American saying that their 110v electricity is good and everyone should switch to it. But it can't even boil a kettle in a reasonable time.
- narwally 8y ago
  I made the switch recently and have been very pleased. I love the customizability of it. Instead of having to Go back in forth between Gnome Shell/Unity/Cinnamon/etc. to find a desktop that works for me, I can get a very similar experience to any of those environments just by tweaking some settings and using the right plugins. Right now I have a setup that feels very similar to macOS just by adding a dock, using the Global Menu panel plugin, changing some keybindings, and installing Albert to replace Spotlight. Now I barely have any context switching issues moving back and forth from my Macbook and my desktop. It's a much nicer experience to the KDE I tried 4-5 years ago.

zelly 8y ago

The great thing about free software is you can install whatever you want regardless of whether Corporation X decided it’s still cool or not.

kungtotte 8y ago
It's not just that it's free software, it's that it's designed to be modular. Haiku is free software too but their desktop environment is tightly integrated into the system because that's the experience they're building towards.

checkyoursudo 8y ago

An interesting twist on KDE is to replace kwin with i3 as the window manager. If you like both KDE and a tiling wm then it's pretty neat.

narwally 8y ago
That sounds like an interesting combination. I used to exclusively use tiling window managers (switched between i3 and Xmonad a few time), but ever since I took the time to really learn to live inside emacs I've used it like a TWM. It was really nice for when I had to use a mac for work, but these days I've been using KDE neon, so will definitely have to try out i3 with it.

Vogtinator 8y ago

Why does this link to blogspam instead of the actual announcement?

Symbiote 8y ago
The "blogspam" is from the KDE developer who started Kubuntu and now maintains KDE Neon.

lbeltrame 8y ago

One note since I see many people talking about "KDE": the term does not refer to the DE anymore since many years, and instead refers to the community behind it. In fact, the DE is just Plasma, while Applications (like dolphin, ark, etc.) and Frameworks (the underlying libraries) aren't tied to a specific DE.

AzzieElbab 8y ago

Funny I have never seen rhel running on a desktop, I was surprised to hear they had Gui. As far as kde vs gnome, kde lets me shrink those enormous title bars, window control icons and borders, gnome does not. So, fk gnome. Spending 80% of my time in xmonad anyway

pjmlp 8y ago
I never imagined to see such comment regarding Red-Hat, still remember the days before RPM was even an idea. Then again the day they decided there was no money to be made on the desktop could only lead to this.
- AzzieElbab 8y ago
  Why? I am not being negative. Never met anyone running redhat desktop, that is all. Servers is another matter entirely.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Exactly because of that, back in the old days Red-Hat had a strong presence among Linux desktops. It was all about Red-Hat vs SuSE, and Madrake was built on top of Red-Hat compiled for Pentium with stronger focus on desktop users, using KDE. Now Mandrake is gone, people keep forgetting SuSE is still around, and there are Linux users that never seen a Red-Hat desktop.
    - AzzieElbab 8y ago
      I guess I wasn't into Linux back then. Unix workstations were still around and I had access to some

badrabbit 8y ago

This is because RHEL is an enterprise distro,mostly for servers. RHEL and even centos and fedora don't care as much as debian or ubuntu about independent individuals' desktop experience.

ishbits 8y ago

Gnome has been really pissing me off lately. Simple things, like adding app that start on login need a "Tweak" tool? How silly is that. With the upgrade to Fedora 29 I thought I'd try KDE. Its got a lot of the features I miss from Gnome - and a tray, and not so fat title bar. But its really unstable in various ways. In particular, forgetting many settings after a reboot. One display having a background, the other not. Anyways, back to Gnome. At least whats their is stable. I plan to give XFCE a shot. But might be time to take the i3 dive.