6 ms·

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop from GNOME to KDE

55 points by voxadam 2y ago

whalesalad 2y ago
Hell yeah. KDE is the way. Never understood why all the distros pivoted to Gnome shell.
- gh02t 2y ago
  Gnome at least made sense for Red Hat/Fedora since they are the biggest sponsors of Gnome. I think another part of it was that the migration from KDE 3 to 4 was pretty rough, which also helped drive a lot of distros away from KDE and over to it. Ubuntu also had Unity and when they decided to give that up Gnome was more similar to Unity than KDE was, making it the obvious replacement. And don't forget the old licensing controversies over Qt, which were long settled by then but a lot of people still regarded Qt with suspicion.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >And don't forget the old licensing controversies over Qt, which were long settled by then but a lot of people still regarded Qt with suspicion. I think a lot of users today weren't even born when the QT controversy was happening yet they keep bringing it up like it's an active showstopper. I think this piece of lore keeps getting repeated so often everywhere, that people forget where it came from and assume it must be a current issue if people still keep bringing it up.
    - gh02t 2y ago
      Agreed, it hasn't been a real issue in what, decades? I've been using Linux for a really long time but even for me I think Qt had switched to GPL a couple years before I first used KDE (exact memory fuzzy). But I definitely recall people bringing it up and using it as a reason to avoid KDE even in the KDE4/Gnome 3 early days.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >Never understood why all the distros pivoted to Gnome shell AFAIK two reasons. For one, KDE 4 was considered horrible, making everyone switched to Gnome, and due to inertia, they stuck with in instead of going to KDE 5. And some users can be incredibly petty, stubborn and opinionated, just because they tried KDE 4 one time, hated it, and then keep bad mouthing it years later even though they haven't tried KDE 5 and their opinions are out of date, they'll still keep bragging how they tried KDE once and it was shit so nobody should bother with it according to them. Even on HN. All this bad publicity didn't help since other users took it as gospel. And two, the release cadence of Gnome versions was on a fixed calendar basis, meaning distros like Ubuntu and Fedora could plan their own releases to line up with that and always ship their newest distros with the newest Gnome, while KDE wasn't and would update the KDE Gear framework, QT and KDE release at totally different times unallied to any fixed dates, making sync planning for distro releases to ship with it very difficult. The KDE release cycle is more fitting for rolling releases. I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    KDE4 was great. KDE 4.0 was terrible, but everyone ignored the developer advice to wait for 4.3 (which is when KDE 4 became great again) and the concluded all of KDE4 was bad even though it was just the first release.
    - raverbashing 2y ago
      As much as I'm a KDE fan, saying "developer advice" was to wait for 4.3 is very unhelpful (not to call it something else) It would have been much better if 4.3 was called 4.0 as it was supposed to be
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        >As much as I'm a KDE fan, saying "developer advice" was to wait for 4.3 is very unhelpful (not to call it something else) At least they were honest and upfront about it that it's shit and it's gonna be fixed later. Gnome's response in such a case would have usually been "it's not a bug, you're just holding it wrong"[1]. [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
- e3a8 2y ago
  I can't get my head around why Gnome doesn't have an option in settings to prevent laptop going to sleep when lid is closed. In KDE you can configure that and much more regarding laptop behavior when charging vs on battery. Why there is no option on Gnome to ungroup windows in dock/launcher without installing third-party extensions. On KDE it's one click. Not everybody likes to click 2-3 times to open desired window. Gnome's default image viewer can't even crop or resize photos. There is a ton things like this that make KDE far more usable out of the box than Gnome. The only thing that is better on Gnome is HiDPI handling. KDE works kind of OK with wayland on HiDPI screens but some apps have issues with very slow scrolling, e.g. SublimeText and LibreOffice apps
  - leeoniya 2y ago
    > The only thing that is better on Gnome is HiDPI handling. KDE works kind of OK with wayland on HiDPI screens but some apps have issues with very slow scrolling, e.g. SublimeText and LibreOffice apps so that's what's been going on? is there a bug report i can monitor? is a fix coming?
- shrimp_emoji 2y ago
  The reason was sadly greed. KDE was LGPL and flirting with the idea of making money. GNOME was FOSS purist and GPL, making it a safer bet at the time. Then again, maybe Qt is so much better today than GTK because Trolltech is a company that makes money. (It's not even close; projects are fleeing GTK for Qt, and it's the reason why every GTK app is a toy compared to a Qt alternative, like Nautilus vs. Dolphin.)
  - sho_hn 2y ago
    It was the other way around. It was GTK/Gnome with the LGPL licensing, while Qt's open source edition was initially GPL-only, before LGPL was added later on. LGPL means you can write closed source software against the open source toolkit, and yes I think it's fair to say this was a big driver for commercial adoption of GTK in the late 90s to early 00s as it seemed like the better ticket for "serious" closed source software on the Linux software. The irony is of course that today, far more "serious" software (e.g. your Autodesks, Mathematicas, Abletons, etc.) with Linux releases has been developed with Qt and little or perhaps none with GTK since that earlier wave (where maybe the most complex app was Acrobat PDF Reader).
    - shrimp_emoji 2y ago
      > far more "serious" software (e.g. your Autodesks, Mathematicas, Abletons, etc.) with Linux releases has been developed with Qt and little or perhaps none with GTK since that earlier wave (where maybe the most complex app was Acrobat PDF Reader). You have to use Qt if you want anything but trivial desktop software. D: If you've used modern GTK and Qt, it's obvious why.
- DCKing 2y ago
  In 2014, the Debian project cited accessibility [1] as a main reason to offer Gnome as the default desktop. Since that was over 9 years ago, a lot could have changed. However, observing that Gnome is generally the most well funded Linux desktop, and is sponsored by/the default for Red Hat Enterprise Linux [2] that has large incentives to meet government accessibility regulations, there's a good chance it is still ahead. [1]: https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/tasksel/-/commit/dce99f5f8d84e4c885e6beb4cc1bb5bb1d9ee6d7 https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/tasksel/-/commit/dce... (they cited systemd integration too, but that situation has probably changed a lot since then) [2]: It is also the default on other enterprise Linux vendors, such as Ubuntu (albeit customized) and even major KDE supporter SUSE uses Gnome Classic mode as the default for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
  - NekkoDroid 2y ago
    There generally has been a major regression for both GNOME and KDE with regards to accessability with the switch to Wayland IIRC. Mostly due to the strict separation of apps and not being able to snoop eachothers windows by default. Tho there have been major works sponsored/supported by GNOME/STF to improve the entire accessibility stack used in the Linux userspace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9psDfEFf9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9psDfEFf9c
netfl0 2y ago
No
byproxy 2y ago
Having used both on a regular basis, I hope they stick with GNOME. KDE is highly-configurable, which brings about a level of fun, but otherwise somewhat unpolished and at least a bit more buggy.
- zaat 2y ago
  I use Fedora with Gnome on laptops since Fedora 17, when Fedora 39 were released I installed one of my VMs to KDE because I wanted to differentiate that specific VM. The experience was so good that I swapped all my VMs and the laptop. It is also working good for me with Wayland, which have not been my experience with Gnome at all. On my desktop I use sway, coming from i3, and it is mostly working OK. Every time I tried Gnome and Wayland I had ocean of issues and after couple of days reverted to Gnome with X.
  - shrimp_emoji 2y ago
    I had Wayland issues on KDE. KDE recently switched everyone on Arch to Wayland (the new default), making it my first brush with Wayland, and maaan... I'm impressed with how performant Wayland is (it's as smooth with composition and no screen tearing as X11 is without composition and with screen tearing -- and the key input latency is palpably less than in X11), but there's been one little problem: total system freezes periodically. Mouse, keyboard, sound, everything. A totalitarian kind of freeze -- the kind only possible with Wayland's design. :p And the periods were once every day. Then, after a few days, twice every day. Then once every 15 minutes! Then once every 5 minutes!! As I tried to look up how to switch it back to X11, as though angry with me and wanting to stop me, it started crashing faster!!! (I figured out it was the little gear icon at the sign-in screen that allows you to switch KDE back to X11.) So I'm sticking with X11 for now. :p I'm also exploring WMs like dwm and OpenBox to see if I can have something leaner that won't threaten to kick me off of X11 anytime soon.
    - zaat 2y ago
      So this was my exact experience with Gnome on Wayland, but add to it list of applications that simply didn't work (BTW this might be what cause those freezes that you experience - some software that run in the background and try to do something which Wayland doesn't find acceptable.) But with KDE 5 I didn't experience any of that, and now with Sway I also don't. Could be luck. With both KDE and Sway I use different scaling on each monitor and it smooth and perfect.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
XFCE would actually be best of all.
- throwaway38375 2y ago
  Agreed! I find XFCE to strike the best balance between simplicity, performance, and features.
skeletal88 2y ago
Would be great, KDE is the way to go, gnome is trying to force it's ideason the users too much
- mouse_ 2y ago
  Gnome has been making a lot of improvements and implied apologies lately. Adding a real tray by default, proper font rendering on fractional scaling,... Well maybe that's the two big ones for now, but those were also my two biggest gripes about their desktop.
  - simion314 2y ago
    Really? GNOME has now a Tray and non GNOME apps are supported now? What happen ? did the big ego guys left and they can now implement standards ?
  - asoneth 2y ago
    Curious what you mean by "real tray by default"? Notifications? Background apps? One of the AppIndicator shell extensions? Something else?
maven29 2y ago
Gnome has better UI, and KDE has the better UX is how I see it. For something you spend hours every day on, you definitely reach a skill-ceiling very quickly with Gnome and end up reaching for the CLI very often.
jterrys 2y ago
>Based on what we know, a switch to Plasma for Fedora Workstation in Fedora 42 (or any release in the foreseeable future) seems vanishingly unlikely. On the other hand, more prominence for the Plasma spin (or, probably, edition) is something we are likely to see—perhaps even well before a year goes by. Shame. Definitely prefer KDE over Gnome. Gnome has a lot of weird "gnome"-isms and design choices that makes it come out looking like discount Fischer-Price MacOS
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- brink 2y ago
  I prefer Gnome. It's simple, it's to the point, and it stays out of the way. My focus should be my work, not my DE.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >and it stays out of the way. Funny because Gnome's defaults are so not what I want, that it really doesn't stay out of my way, on the contrary, it keeps frustrating me, and the worst part is that it's really not easy to change it to your liking. Had to use Ubuntu Gnome at work and it made me pull my hair out. At least with KDE, IceWM, XFCE, OpenBox, etc. there's gonna be some setting or at least a config file to change what bothers me, instead of looking for the 20th extension which either is out of date and doesn't work on Wayland, or will break at the next Gnome update. Gnome is only good if what's out of the box fits you like a glove, and then it's VERY good. Otherwise, forget about it, it's like trying to run a marathon in a shoe that doesn't fit you: it will be very painful. And I'm too old and set in my ways to completely overhaul my workflow and usage patterns to a new DE paradigm, the way Gnome expects of me, instead of sticking to those DEs/WMs I know already work for me. YMMV.
    - jterrys 2y ago
      I think Gnome's defaults appeal to people who don't want to work with GUIs but have to. For a lot of people it's a comfortably simple container for a terminal, web interface, or GUI driven config management tool and nothing else. Then they log off, and go back to their polished MacOS or Windows machines to play games or watch movies.
forgotpwd16 2y ago
And proposal will remain. Red Hat is a big GNOME contributor.
- zaat 2y ago
  And are not on the list of KDE patrons.
  - sho_hn 2y ago
    Both Red Hat and Fedora have sponsored KDE also in recent years, FWIW, e.g. the Akademy flagship conference. But what I really want to say is that Red Hat's contributions to Gnome are not that large recently. I often see comments along the lines of "this should be easy for Gnome, they have Red Hat backing them", and it's really underestimating how self-sufficient the Gnome community is and how many legs it has to stand on, because it's really not "all Red Hat".
    - zaat 2y ago
      I haven't deeply researched the finance, but bottom of https://www.gnome.org/ https://www.gnome.org/ says Hosted by Red Hat, and Red Hat's logo is on the carousel of GNOME supporters. Meanwhile on the end of https://kde.org/ https://kde.org/ home page there's a list of patrons which have SUSE and Canonical but not Red Hat.
      - sho_hn 2y ago
        Yup, but you'll also find e.g. Fedora on lists like https://akademy.kde.org/2022/sponsors/ https://akademy.kde.org/2022/sponsors/ (and Red Hat was on there not so long ago too, iirc) so it's not completely out of the blue that the communities are involved with each other :-)
looopTools 2y ago
Having used both, I would be really sad if they switch to KDE. Based on my experience KDE cannot be considered stable. Additionally I feel Gnome have better UI and UX compared to KDE
- codewiz 2y ago
  If you tried KDE a while ago and found it too buggy or unstable, I suggest you give it another try now that Plasma 6 is out. A ton of work went into visual design, usability, consistency and productivity.
jxdxbx 2y ago
I've never given KDE a shot (only used Gnome and XFCE) but...not that Linux needs more fragmentation...System 76's Cosmic Desktop (don't make us use all caps please) is very interesting. FWIW, I like that Gnome is more "opinionated" than KDE.
scutrell 2y ago
GNOME is my perfect DE. I love how it actively tries to stay out of my way. I have no interest in KDE. It looks a little too much like Windows for me, and my time is limited, so I'm looking for out-of-the-box solutions and as little configuration as I can get away with.
dingi 2y ago
I hope they won't go ahead with this. Having used both, Gnome's UI/UX is just better than KDE's.
spicyusername 2y ago
I have to agree with the feature owners who propose simply updating the website to better communicate what the options are, but not actually change anything fundamental about Fedora releases. Although, amusingly, the website basically already does that. It seems we as an industry just can not help ourselves with constantly nitpicking things that could just be left alone. Gnome has been the default for ages now. Anyone who uses Fedora regularly is aware of the spins, is aware of KDE, and could, or would, use an alternate desktop environment, should they be so inclined to do so. Changing the default would just create work and not fundamentally solve any problem. Having a robust default out-of-the-box experience is critical, and gnome already provides that.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > It seems we as an industry just can not help ourselves with constantly nitpicking things that could just be left alone. Gnome has been the default for ages now. Anyone who uses Fedora regularly is aware of the spins, is aware of KDE, and could, or would, use an alternate desktop environment, should they be so inclined to do so. On the contrary - anyone already used to Fedora is of course probably used to the spins and can pick whatever they want. But for new users coming from Windows, the defaults are everything, and the default of GNOME is needlessly confusing.
bayindirh 2y ago
While I don't expect Fedora to switch to KDE, as someone who drives KDE daily from 3.5 days, I don't think current KDE 5.x family deserves the "a steaming, bug infested pile of crap" sentiment. Yes, its default setup looks like Windows. Yes, 4.0 to 4.2 was the dark days (and the devs openly said that they're considered tech previews, back in the day). However, when some spends some time with it and tunes it one's liking, it becomes a third hand. Dolphin handles tons of protocols and have features that makes 10+ applications unnecessary. Some of the "effects" are actually usability improvements, which are indispensable when someone starts to use them. People may not like it, it may not be space efficient as some GNOME themes or macOS, but that thing works, doesn't crash, and improves productivity. And, you don't change settings every day. I'm opening settings app so rarely that most of the settings either changed or evolved over time. I don't know what's where. I just use it the way I installed and tuned god knows when. Plus KDE ecosystem has some of the best tools in its class. Did anyone give a good run to KATE and Konsole recently?
- sspiff 2y ago
  I don't use KDE (anymore), but I do use Konsole and gave Kate another shot about a year ago. Konsole is the best multitabbed terminal in my experience on Linux. I tried more "modern" or fashionable ones, but Konsole works great all of the time on all of my systems and it supports all the features I want (including graphical output using sixel, which is something I use in my own prototype tools all the time). Kate is fine now that it has LSP integration, but it still can't compete with something like the VSCode ecosystem for plugins and first-party support from software frameworks and programming language teams. So I've since gone back to using VS Codium.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    I agree that Konsole is an unsung hero and is a great workhorse. The best thing about Konsole is it's a framework to begin with. So tools like Yakuake can just import Konsole as a "unit" and build upon it. I don't expect KATE to compete with VSCod{ium,e}. I expect it to be a code and git aware text editor and it fills that role perfectly. As a funny side note, at least for Golang, KATE's LSP integration works way better than more expensive tools like BBEdit. For bigger projects I skip this free-looking-proprietary-Microsoft-thing and use Eclipse IDE instead.
alphazard 2y ago
I guess this applies more to GNOME than KDE, but why do linux desktop environments look like they were written by people with no taste? I don't exactly know what it is, but they all have an uncanny quality to them. It's really night and day compared to something like macOS. It's not like the community is devoid of good taste, just go look at r/unixporn. There are plenty of people who know how to make things look good. Why aren't their sensibilities represented in either project?
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  Because in the *nix UI space, there are simultaneously too many and too few people working on it. So you can have any of a thousand themes, reflecting years of work, on your desktop environment, but, because no-one is paying top notch graphic designers and UX psychologists, the overall experience is still janky. Maybe ElementaryOS solves this, though I dont have direct experience beyond screenshots.
- asoneth 2y ago
  Perhaps this is a "horses for courses" thing? Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of issues with design choices in both GNOME and macOS (don't get me started on the "flattening" trend to eliminate UI signifiers and affordances) but on the whole it feels like they are at least thoughtful in how they choose to strike a balance between efficiency, learnability, functionality, accessibility, consistency, and aesthetics. I haven't used KDE in a while, but my impression was that it was not far behind. Whereas the majority of r/unixporn screenshots I've seen are gaudy with a focus on aesthetics above other considerations. That may be a good taste for some and I also wonder why someone hasn't made a desktop environment for folks who like that sort of thing, but it's not surprising that the most popular ones have a more mature approach to design.
- forgotpwd16 2y ago
  Checked r/unixporn and it's the same minimalist-low-contrast-muted-color-tiling-wm-but-floating-windows-opened-fest that has always been. Majority of those environments are appealing but lack usability and accessibility. Rather, what you find better in macOS? If you're macOS user then the uncanny quality could just be it appearing similar yet different.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Timber-6539 2y ago
[flagged]
qwery 2y ago
What an odd little thing. I'm struggling to follow the chain of events in this summary. It's an interesting stunt, I guess. By 'stunt' I'm referring to the proposal being written in a deliberately provocative manner with a goal other than the stated one. Reading the "proposal" it's quite clear (to me) that it's not exactly serious. I'm a little bit sorry[0] to say this, but it reads like a fanatical sales pitch. I don't want to pick it apart, because that's not the point. But for one thing, a serious proposal to seriously make this change would justify its claims, by -- for example -- pointing to something like surveys and statistics. I think it's a bit of a shame[1], anyway, because as you read further, the sales-esque tone gives way to an earnest description of things wot KDE did good and the whole thing takes on a noble air, albeit one covered in obnoxiously heavy pens and, well, air fresheners. [0] if this was the idea, it's seriously well done [1] I have no idea if the people involved see it as a success or not
moooo99 2y ago
I'm a huge KDE fan, but I don't think switching from Gnome to KDE for the workstation version would be any good. Instead, I feel like promoting the KDE Spin from something unofficially feeling to an officially prominently listed alternative would be better. Both are very modern and mature DEs with different kinds of strengths and weaknesses.
dralley 2y ago
I do like GNOME quite a bit, but with caveats. The fact that you need extensions for something as simple as dock functionality is insane. The number of basic settings that have to be touched with gsettings because they don't have a GUI option is frustrating. The fact that all my extensions get broken for a month after every single release is downright infuriating. Some apps like the task monitor are so over-simplified as to be downright inferior to e.g. the KDE or MacOS task monitor in every way. The libadawaita theming changes are extremely annoying, as the DE apps don't obey the same theme as my other apps. With that said, when it works, it's my favorite desktop experience. I'll try out COSMIC as a replacement eventually.
btreecat 2y ago
I used to really love Gnome. But with the recent editions of the main Desktops, I find Gnome less appealing than XFCE and both less interesting than KDE Plasma. When I first tinkered with KDE 3/3.5 it felt like it was _a lot_ of stuff and much of it unstable. Now it's my daily driver and while the transition to wayland has not been as smooth as I would have prefer, I chalk it up to my nvidia card as my amd APU machine doesn't have the same issues (but also doesn't run all the same software either).
rcarmo 2y ago
I hope this doesn’t happen. GNOME, even with all its failings, is a lot easier on the eyes and mind than KDE’s 90s inspired UX and seemingly infinite amount of weird corners.
jrepinc 2y ago
I sure hope they switch to KDE Plasma as a default. It would make a lot of sense. KDE Plasma is just more configurable and customizable and all this out of the box. It also provides much more features out of the box and is more powerful. And despite all the power, features and flexibility it uses a lot less system resources. Also by default it is much more close by layout/look/feel/behaviour to the most widely used proprietary desktop so it makes transition to GNU/Linux much easier. And when you get used to that default it is easy to make it something completely of your own without hurdles. Also it works a lot better with Wayland, especially when you have multiple monitors. In short KDE Plasma currently is not only the best DE on GNU/Linux but also the best compared to any other proprietary alternative. And the final very important thing in favour of KDE Plasma being the default is that the community is much much more friendly and open to user input and also to collaboration with other desktop environments and working on common desktop Linux standards that make those desktops interoperable. Yeah KDE Plasma should be the default desktop environment on Fedora.

55 points by voxadam 2y ago

whalesalad 2y ago

Hell yeah. KDE is the way. Never understood why all the distros pivoted to Gnome shell.

gh02t 2y ago
Gnome at least made sense for Red Hat/Fedora since they are the biggest sponsors of Gnome. I think another part of it was that the migration from KDE 3 to 4 was pretty rough, which also helped drive a lot of distros away from KDE and over to it. Ubuntu also had Unity and when they decided to give that up Gnome was more similar to Unity than KDE was, making it the obvious replacement. And don't forget the old licensing controversies over Qt, which were long settled by then but a lot of people still regarded Qt with suspicion.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >And don't forget the old licensing controversies over Qt, which were long settled by then but a lot of people still regarded Qt with suspicion. I think a lot of users today weren't even born when the QT controversy was happening yet they keep bringing it up like it's an active showstopper. I think this piece of lore keeps getting repeated so often everywhere, that people forget where it came from and assume it must be a current issue if people still keep bringing it up.
  - gh02t 2y ago
    Agreed, it hasn't been a real issue in what, decades? I've been using Linux for a really long time but even for me I think Qt had switched to GPL a couple years before I first used KDE (exact memory fuzzy). But I definitely recall people bringing it up and using it as a reason to avoid KDE even in the KDE4/Gnome 3 early days.
Rinzler89 2y ago
>Never understood why all the distros pivoted to Gnome shell AFAIK two reasons. For one, KDE 4 was considered horrible, making everyone switched to Gnome, and due to inertia, they stuck with in instead of going to KDE 5. And some users can be incredibly petty, stubborn and opinionated, just because they tried KDE 4 one time, hated it, and then keep bad mouthing it years later even though they haven't tried KDE 5 and their opinions are out of date, they'll still keep bragging how they tried KDE once and it was shit so nobody should bother with it according to them. Even on HN. All this bad publicity didn't help since other users took it as gospel. And two, the release cadence of Gnome versions was on a fixed calendar basis, meaning distros like Ubuntu and Fedora could plan their own releases to line up with that and always ship their newest distros with the newest Gnome, while KDE wasn't and would update the KDE Gear framework, QT and KDE release at totally different times unallied to any fixed dates, making sync planning for distro releases to ship with it very difficult. The KDE release cycle is more fitting for rolling releases. I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.
- bluGill 2y ago
  KDE4 was great. KDE 4.0 was terrible, but everyone ignored the developer advice to wait for 4.3 (which is when KDE 4 became great again) and the concluded all of KDE4 was bad even though it was just the first release.
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    As much as I'm a KDE fan, saying "developer advice" was to wait for 4.3 is very unhelpful (not to call it something else) It would have been much better if 4.3 was called 4.0 as it was supposed to be
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >As much as I'm a KDE fan, saying "developer advice" was to wait for 4.3 is very unhelpful (not to call it something else) At least they were honest and upfront about it that it's shit and it's gonna be fixed later. Gnome's response in such a case would have usually been "it's not a bug, you're just holding it wrong"[1]. [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
e3a8 2y ago
I can't get my head around why Gnome doesn't have an option in settings to prevent laptop going to sleep when lid is closed. In KDE you can configure that and much more regarding laptop behavior when charging vs on battery. Why there is no option on Gnome to ungroup windows in dock/launcher without installing third-party extensions. On KDE it's one click. Not everybody likes to click 2-3 times to open desired window. Gnome's default image viewer can't even crop or resize photos. There is a ton things like this that make KDE far more usable out of the box than Gnome. The only thing that is better on Gnome is HiDPI handling. KDE works kind of OK with wayland on HiDPI screens but some apps have issues with very slow scrolling, e.g. SublimeText and LibreOffice apps
- leeoniya 2y ago
  > The only thing that is better on Gnome is HiDPI handling. KDE works kind of OK with wayland on HiDPI screens but some apps have issues with very slow scrolling, e.g. SublimeText and LibreOffice apps so that's what's been going on? is there a bug report i can monitor? is a fix coming?
shrimp_emoji 2y ago
The reason was sadly greed. KDE was LGPL and flirting with the idea of making money. GNOME was FOSS purist and GPL, making it a safer bet at the time. Then again, maybe Qt is so much better today than GTK because Trolltech is a company that makes money. (It's not even close; projects are fleeing GTK for Qt, and it's the reason why every GTK app is a toy compared to a Qt alternative, like Nautilus vs. Dolphin.)
- sho_hn 2y ago
  It was the other way around. It was GTK/Gnome with the LGPL licensing, while Qt's open source edition was initially GPL-only, before LGPL was added later on. LGPL means you can write closed source software against the open source toolkit, and yes I think it's fair to say this was a big driver for commercial adoption of GTK in the late 90s to early 00s as it seemed like the better ticket for "serious" closed source software on the Linux software. The irony is of course that today, far more "serious" software (e.g. your Autodesks, Mathematicas, Abletons, etc.) with Linux releases has been developed with Qt and little or perhaps none with GTK since that earlier wave (where maybe the most complex app was Acrobat PDF Reader).
  - shrimp_emoji 2y ago
    > far more "serious" software (e.g. your Autodesks, Mathematicas, Abletons, etc.) with Linux releases has been developed with Qt and little or perhaps none with GTK since that earlier wave (where maybe the most complex app was Acrobat PDF Reader). You have to use Qt if you want anything but trivial desktop software. D: If you've used modern GTK and Qt, it's obvious why.
DCKing 2y ago
In 2014, the Debian project cited accessibility [1] as a main reason to offer Gnome as the default desktop. Since that was over 9 years ago, a lot could have changed. However, observing that Gnome is generally the most well funded Linux desktop, and is sponsored by/the default for Red Hat Enterprise Linux [2] that has large incentives to meet government accessibility regulations, there's a good chance it is still ahead. [1]: https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/tasksel/-/commit/dce99f5f8d84e4c885e6beb4cc1bb5bb1d9ee6d7 https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/tasksel/-/commit/dce... (they cited systemd integration too, but that situation has probably changed a lot since then) [2]: It is also the default on other enterprise Linux vendors, such as Ubuntu (albeit customized) and even major KDE supporter SUSE uses Gnome Classic mode as the default for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
- NekkoDroid 2y ago
  There generally has been a major regression for both GNOME and KDE with regards to accessability with the switch to Wayland IIRC. Mostly due to the strict separation of apps and not being able to snoop eachothers windows by default. Tho there have been major works sponsored/supported by GNOME/STF to improve the entire accessibility stack used in the Linux userspace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9psDfEFf9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9psDfEFf9c

netfl0 2y ago

byproxy 2y ago

Having used both on a regular basis, I hope they stick with GNOME. KDE is highly-configurable, which brings about a level of fun, but otherwise somewhat unpolished and at least a bit more buggy.

zaat 2y ago
I use Fedora with Gnome on laptops since Fedora 17, when Fedora 39 were released I installed one of my VMs to KDE because I wanted to differentiate that specific VM. The experience was so good that I swapped all my VMs and the laptop. It is also working good for me with Wayland, which have not been my experience with Gnome at all. On my desktop I use sway, coming from i3, and it is mostly working OK. Every time I tried Gnome and Wayland I had ocean of issues and after couple of days reverted to Gnome with X.
- shrimp_emoji 2y ago
  I had Wayland issues on KDE. KDE recently switched everyone on Arch to Wayland (the new default), making it my first brush with Wayland, and maaan... I'm impressed with how performant Wayland is (it's as smooth with composition and no screen tearing as X11 is without composition and with screen tearing -- and the key input latency is palpably less than in X11), but there's been one little problem: total system freezes periodically. Mouse, keyboard, sound, everything. A totalitarian kind of freeze -- the kind only possible with Wayland's design. :p And the periods were once every day. Then, after a few days, twice every day. Then once every 15 minutes! Then once every 5 minutes!! As I tried to look up how to switch it back to X11, as though angry with me and wanting to stop me, it started crashing faster!!! (I figured out it was the little gear icon at the sign-in screen that allows you to switch KDE back to X11.) So I'm sticking with X11 for now. :p I'm also exploring WMs like dwm and OpenBox to see if I can have something leaner that won't threaten to kick me off of X11 anytime soon.
  - zaat 2y ago
    So this was my exact experience with Gnome on Wayland, but add to it list of applications that simply didn't work (BTW this might be what cause those freezes that you experience - some software that run in the background and try to do something which Wayland doesn't find acceptable.) But with KDE 5 I didn't experience any of that, and now with Sway I also don't. Could be luck. With both KDE and Sway I use different scaling on each monitor and it smooth and perfect.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

XFCE would actually be best of all.

throwaway38375 2y ago
Agreed! I find XFCE to strike the best balance between simplicity, performance, and features.

skeletal88 2y ago

Would be great, KDE is the way to go, gnome is trying to force it's ideason the users too much

mouse_ 2y ago
Gnome has been making a lot of improvements and implied apologies lately. Adding a real tray by default, proper font rendering on fractional scaling,... Well maybe that's the two big ones for now, but those were also my two biggest gripes about their desktop.
- simion314 2y ago
  Really? GNOME has now a Tray and non GNOME apps are supported now? What happen ? did the big ego guys left and they can now implement standards ?
- asoneth 2y ago
  Curious what you mean by "real tray by default"? Notifications? Background apps? One of the AppIndicator shell extensions? Something else?

maven29 2y ago

Gnome has better UI, and KDE has the better UX is how I see it. For something you spend hours every day on, you definitely reach a skill-ceiling very quickly with Gnome and end up reaching for the CLI very often.

jterrys 2y ago

>Based on what we know, a switch to Plasma for Fedora Workstation in Fedora 42 (or any release in the foreseeable future) seems vanishingly unlikely. On the other hand, more prominence for the Plasma spin (or, probably, edition) is something we are likely to see—perhaps even well before a year goes by. Shame. Definitely prefer KDE over Gnome. Gnome has a lot of weird "gnome"-isms and design choices that makes it come out looking like discount Fischer-Price MacOS

deleted 2y ago
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brink 2y ago
I prefer Gnome. It's simple, it's to the point, and it stays out of the way. My focus should be my work, not my DE.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >and it stays out of the way. Funny because Gnome's defaults are so not what I want, that it really doesn't stay out of my way, on the contrary, it keeps frustrating me, and the worst part is that it's really not easy to change it to your liking. Had to use Ubuntu Gnome at work and it made me pull my hair out. At least with KDE, IceWM, XFCE, OpenBox, etc. there's gonna be some setting or at least a config file to change what bothers me, instead of looking for the 20th extension which either is out of date and doesn't work on Wayland, or will break at the next Gnome update. Gnome is only good if what's out of the box fits you like a glove, and then it's VERY good. Otherwise, forget about it, it's like trying to run a marathon in a shoe that doesn't fit you: it will be very painful. And I'm too old and set in my ways to completely overhaul my workflow and usage patterns to a new DE paradigm, the way Gnome expects of me, instead of sticking to those DEs/WMs I know already work for me. YMMV.
  - jterrys 2y ago
    I think Gnome's defaults appeal to people who don't want to work with GUIs but have to. For a lot of people it's a comfortably simple container for a terminal, web interface, or GUI driven config management tool and nothing else. Then they log off, and go back to their polished MacOS or Windows machines to play games or watch movies.

forgotpwd16 2y ago

And proposal will remain. Red Hat is a big GNOME contributor.

zaat 2y ago
And are not on the list of KDE patrons.
- sho_hn 2y ago
  Both Red Hat and Fedora have sponsored KDE also in recent years, FWIW, e.g. the Akademy flagship conference. But what I really want to say is that Red Hat's contributions to Gnome are not that large recently. I often see comments along the lines of "this should be easy for Gnome, they have Red Hat backing them", and it's really underestimating how self-sufficient the Gnome community is and how many legs it has to stand on, because it's really not "all Red Hat".
  - zaat 2y ago
    I haven't deeply researched the finance, but bottom of https://www.gnome.org/ https://www.gnome.org/ says Hosted by Red Hat, and Red Hat's logo is on the carousel of GNOME supporters. Meanwhile on the end of https://kde.org/ https://kde.org/ home page there's a list of patrons which have SUSE and Canonical but not Red Hat.
    - sho_hn 2y ago
      Yup, but you'll also find e.g. Fedora on lists like https://akademy.kde.org/2022/sponsors/ https://akademy.kde.org/2022/sponsors/ (and Red Hat was on there not so long ago too, iirc) so it's not completely out of the blue that the communities are involved with each other :-)

looopTools 2y ago

Having used both, I would be really sad if they switch to KDE. Based on my experience KDE cannot be considered stable. Additionally I feel Gnome have better UI and UX compared to KDE

codewiz 2y ago
If you tried KDE a while ago and found it too buggy or unstable, I suggest you give it another try now that Plasma 6 is out. A ton of work went into visual design, usability, consistency and productivity.

jxdxbx 2y ago

I've never given KDE a shot (only used Gnome and XFCE) but...not that Linux needs more fragmentation...System 76's Cosmic Desktop (don't make us use all caps please) is very interesting. FWIW, I like that Gnome is more "opinionated" than KDE.

scutrell 2y ago

GNOME is my perfect DE. I love how it actively tries to stay out of my way. I have no interest in KDE. It looks a little too much like Windows for me, and my time is limited, so I'm looking for out-of-the-box solutions and as little configuration as I can get away with.

dingi 2y ago

I hope they won't go ahead with this. Having used both, Gnome's UI/UX is just better than KDE's.

spicyusername 2y ago

I have to agree with the feature owners who propose simply updating the website to better communicate what the options are, but not actually change anything fundamental about Fedora releases. Although, amusingly, the website basically already does that. It seems we as an industry just can not help ourselves with constantly nitpicking things that could just be left alone. Gnome has been the default for ages now. Anyone who uses Fedora regularly is aware of the spins, is aware of KDE, and could, or would, use an alternate desktop environment, should they be so inclined to do so. Changing the default would just create work and not fundamentally solve any problem. Having a robust default out-of-the-box experience is critical, and gnome already provides that.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> It seems we as an industry just can not help ourselves with constantly nitpicking things that could just be left alone. Gnome has been the default for ages now. Anyone who uses Fedora regularly is aware of the spins, is aware of KDE, and could, or would, use an alternate desktop environment, should they be so inclined to do so. On the contrary - anyone already used to Fedora is of course probably used to the spins and can pick whatever they want. But for new users coming from Windows, the defaults are everything, and the default of GNOME is needlessly confusing.

bayindirh 2y ago

While I don't expect Fedora to switch to KDE, as someone who drives KDE daily from 3.5 days, I don't think current KDE 5.x family deserves the "a steaming, bug infested pile of crap" sentiment. Yes, its default setup looks like Windows. Yes, 4.0 to 4.2 was the dark days (and the devs openly said that they're considered tech previews, back in the day). However, when some spends some time with it and tunes it one's liking, it becomes a third hand. Dolphin handles tons of protocols and have features that makes 10+ applications unnecessary. Some of the "effects" are actually usability improvements, which are indispensable when someone starts to use them. People may not like it, it may not be space efficient as some GNOME themes or macOS, but that thing works, doesn't crash, and improves productivity. And, you don't change settings every day. I'm opening settings app so rarely that most of the settings either changed or evolved over time. I don't know what's where. I just use it the way I installed and tuned god knows when. Plus KDE ecosystem has some of the best tools in its class. Did anyone give a good run to KATE and Konsole recently?

sspiff 2y ago
I don't use KDE (anymore), but I do use Konsole and gave Kate another shot about a year ago. Konsole is the best multitabbed terminal in my experience on Linux. I tried more "modern" or fashionable ones, but Konsole works great all of the time on all of my systems and it supports all the features I want (including graphical output using sixel, which is something I use in my own prototype tools all the time). Kate is fine now that it has LSP integration, but it still can't compete with something like the VSCode ecosystem for plugins and first-party support from software frameworks and programming language teams. So I've since gone back to using VS Codium.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  I agree that Konsole is an unsung hero and is a great workhorse. The best thing about Konsole is it's a framework to begin with. So tools like Yakuake can just import Konsole as a "unit" and build upon it. I don't expect KATE to compete with VSCod{ium,e}. I expect it to be a code and git aware text editor and it fills that role perfectly. As a funny side note, at least for Golang, KATE's LSP integration works way better than more expensive tools like BBEdit. For bigger projects I skip this free-looking-proprietary-Microsoft-thing and use Eclipse IDE instead.

alphazard 2y ago

I guess this applies more to GNOME than KDE, but why do linux desktop environments look like they were written by people with no taste? I don't exactly know what it is, but they all have an uncanny quality to them. It's really night and day compared to something like macOS. It's not like the community is devoid of good taste, just go look at r/unixporn. There are plenty of people who know how to make things look good. Why aren't their sensibilities represented in either project?

kjellsbells 2y ago
Because in the *nix UI space, there are simultaneously too many and too few people working on it. So you can have any of a thousand themes, reflecting years of work, on your desktop environment, but, because no-one is paying top notch graphic designers and UX psychologists, the overall experience is still janky. Maybe ElementaryOS solves this, though I dont have direct experience beyond screenshots.
asoneth 2y ago
Perhaps this is a "horses for courses" thing? Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of issues with design choices in both GNOME and macOS (don't get me started on the "flattening" trend to eliminate UI signifiers and affordances) but on the whole it feels like they are at least thoughtful in how they choose to strike a balance between efficiency, learnability, functionality, accessibility, consistency, and aesthetics. I haven't used KDE in a while, but my impression was that it was not far behind. Whereas the majority of r/unixporn screenshots I've seen are gaudy with a focus on aesthetics above other considerations. That may be a good taste for some and I also wonder why someone hasn't made a desktop environment for folks who like that sort of thing, but it's not surprising that the most popular ones have a more mature approach to design.
forgotpwd16 2y ago
Checked r/unixporn and it's the same minimalist-low-contrast-muted-color-tiling-wm-but-floating-windows-opened-fest that has always been. Majority of those environments are appealing but lack usability and accessibility. Rather, what you find better in macOS? If you're macOS user then the uncanny quality could just be it appearing similar yet different.

deleted 2y ago

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Timber-6539 2y ago

[flagged]

qwery 2y ago

What an odd little thing. I'm struggling to follow the chain of events in this summary. It's an interesting stunt, I guess. By 'stunt' I'm referring to the proposal being written in a deliberately provocative manner with a goal other than the stated one. Reading the "proposal" it's quite clear (to me) that it's not exactly serious. I'm a little bit sorry[0] to say this, but it reads like a fanatical sales pitch. I don't want to pick it apart, because that's not the point. But for one thing, a serious proposal to seriously make this change would justify its claims, by -- for example -- pointing to something like surveys and statistics. I think it's a bit of a shame[1], anyway, because as you read further, the sales-esque tone gives way to an earnest description of things wot KDE did good and the whole thing takes on a noble air, albeit one covered in obnoxiously heavy pens and, well, air fresheners. [0] if this was the idea, it's seriously well done [1] I have no idea if the people involved see it as a success or not

moooo99 2y ago

I'm a huge KDE fan, but I don't think switching from Gnome to KDE for the workstation version would be any good. Instead, I feel like promoting the KDE Spin from something unofficially feeling to an officially prominently listed alternative would be better. Both are very modern and mature DEs with different kinds of strengths and weaknesses.

dralley 2y ago

I do like GNOME quite a bit, but with caveats. The fact that you need extensions for something as simple as dock functionality is insane. The number of basic settings that have to be touched with gsettings because they don't have a GUI option is frustrating. The fact that all my extensions get broken for a month after every single release is downright infuriating. Some apps like the task monitor are so over-simplified as to be downright inferior to e.g. the KDE or MacOS task monitor in every way. The libadawaita theming changes are extremely annoying, as the DE apps don't obey the same theme as my other apps. With that said, when it works, it's my favorite desktop experience. I'll try out COSMIC as a replacement eventually.

btreecat 2y ago

I used to really love Gnome. But with the recent editions of the main Desktops, I find Gnome less appealing than XFCE and both less interesting than KDE Plasma. When I first tinkered with KDE 3/3.5 it felt like it was _a lot_ of stuff and much of it unstable. Now it's my daily driver and while the transition to wayland has not been as smooth as I would have prefer, I chalk it up to my nvidia card as my amd APU machine doesn't have the same issues (but also doesn't run all the same software either).

rcarmo 2y ago

I hope this doesn’t happen. GNOME, even with all its failings, is a lot easier on the eyes and mind than KDE’s 90s inspired UX and seemingly infinite amount of weird corners.

jrepinc 2y ago

I sure hope they switch to KDE Plasma as a default. It would make a lot of sense. KDE Plasma is just more configurable and customizable and all this out of the box. It also provides much more features out of the box and is more powerful. And despite all the power, features and flexibility it uses a lot less system resources. Also by default it is much more close by layout/look/feel/behaviour to the most widely used proprietary desktop so it makes transition to GNU/Linux much easier. And when you get used to that default it is easy to make it something completely of your own without hurdles. Also it works a lot better with Wayland, especially when you have multiple monitors. In short KDE Plasma currently is not only the best DE on GNU/Linux but also the best compared to any other proprietary alternative. And the final very important thing in favour of KDE Plasma being the default is that the community is much much more friendly and open to user input and also to collaboration with other desktop environments and working on common desktop Linux standards that make those desktops interoperable. Yeah KDE Plasma should be the default desktop environment on Fedora.