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Fedora KDE Desktop Spin Promoted to Same Tier as Gnome-Based Fedora Workstation

93 points by binkHN 2y ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
I hope they know what they're doing. New users are already confused which to pick and KDE shouldn't draw resources from Workstation.
- _mlbt 2y ago
  Frankly, if you get too confused by which version of Fedora to pick, you probably shouldn't be running Fedora. Fedora is very user friendly, until it isn't. It's my favorite desktop Linux distro, however, the bleeding edge nature of it can definitely bite you sometimes. Fedora is the only distro I've ever used that irreparably corrupted the filesystem with just normal usage. There was no interruption to power or me running any software from outside of the official repos, just a kernel panic out of nowhere and a failed fsck on reboot. To be fair, this was several versions ago, back when it was still Fedora "Core" and I've had only minor, but fixable issues since. Another issue for newbies is that the vast majority of third party software and tutorials that you'll find on the internet assume an Ubuntu or Debian system that you need the expertise to sometimes "translate" into Fedora/Red Hat.
  - Yasuraka 2y ago
    Was it on btrfs by any chance? I've burned my fingers once on it and recommend xfs ever since, no issues so far.
    - binkHN 2y ago
      Why xfs over the more popular ext4?
      - bityard 2y ago
        Not who you are replying to, but I used XFS extensively in production workloads because at the time it had a few features I needed that ext4 didn't have. (I want to say one of them was support for 64-bit inodes? I don't really recall now.) And most importantly no waiting for the system to fsck on a large or slow filesystem that was unmounted uncleanly by a power or system failure. At the time, XFS was also a bit faster than ext4 but I'm not sure if that's still true. The differences between the two are fewer these days but it's still a great general-purpose workhorse filesystem.
      - Yasuraka 2y ago
        xfs is high performance and also rock-solid, I picked it for servers and like to be consistent in my experience, I never shrink volumes and to be frank I am a bit of a hipster/eternal contrarian.
      - bravetraveler 2y ago
        reflinks, cheap/easy dedupe in a sense.
    - _mlbt 2y ago
      It was ext3 if I remember correctly. I usually stick to the default file system unless I have a really good reason to do otherwise.
      - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
        btrfs has been the default on Fedora for a while. Ext4 was the default before that. So if it was ext3 days that's been a long time ago.
      - spwa4 2y ago
        I switched to Reiserfs and actually stuck with it until ... never had the data loss issues.
    - IWeldMelons 2y ago
      Can relate fedora borked my btrfs twice. I do not use either anymore. Debian+ext4 or Freebsd+zfs depending on purpose.
    - Melonai 2y ago
      Interesting..! I've had something very similar happen on Fedora running btrfs, too.. No hardware failures (drive was great, still run it to this day a year later), no kernel panics, the partition just stopped booting out of the blue, with the rescue shell also being completely broken. I think I almost managed to get some of my files back, but after an error on my part it corrupted itself to the degree where the only answer you could find online was something like "just give up, no one can help you now :(". Lost a bunch of important data and still a bit mad about it, but at least now I'm back on NixOS with ext4 with no issues so far!
  - creatonez 2y ago
    > back when it was still Fedora "Core" This was an extremely long time ago.
- criddell 2y ago
  I spent way too much time trying to figure out which desktop environment is the one I should use. 25 years ago, it was something I cared a lot about. For me today, I don't think it really matter because they are equivalent. Frankly, all modern operating system desktop environments are good enough. I can install applications, launch applications, configure wifi, reboot, etc... What I need day-to-day is a pretty short list. The real determining factor is application support and that is what determines where I'm going to be working.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    As a Linux user for ~25+ years (family PC ran Red Hat) I've learned not to stray from the beaten path. This is why I like defaults. It's usually the most tested.
isodev 2y ago
Awesome! I much prefer KDE over GNOME and with all recent enhancements to Plasma this is a very welcome change (short of KDE being the default).
Y_Y 2y ago
I was in Burger King this week and was pleased to see that their drink dispenser machine was running KDE. Presumably due to some technical issue the taskbar was visible with some entry for their custom touchscreen sugar water emitting application. I wonder if they'll switch to using Silverblue now and get a more reliable setup.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  > technical issue > KDE Sounds about right
- _benj 2y ago
  Yeah! Some time ago I saw in a taco bell screen an Ubuntu boot screen, looked like something where wrong on the booting process, but was fascinated to see that the drive through screen was on Linux… I wouldn’t have chosen Ubuntu for that… but that’s just me :-)
  - _mlbt 2y ago
    Ubuntu is actually a fantastic choice for those sorts of applications. Develop against the latest LTS (or the one in development if it will be released before your finished product is) and you'll have support for years.
    - _benj 2y ago
      fair enough. I would have picked something more minimal but LTS is indeed a big advantage!
_benj 2y ago
That is great news! I moved to KDE about a year ago and was blown away by how refined and customizable the experience is. Won’t be moving away from Void but I’m glad to see KDE having more mainstream access and support!
- binkHN 2y ago
  I did the same, but did it on Debian Testing. Big mistake. KDE is not well supported on Debian. I too have seen the light in the Void and migrated about a month ago; better experience all around, including a modern KDE.
  - mkesper 2y ago
    KDE runs very smoothly on Debian stable. Had it running on testing also, but sid/testing can break from time to time...
    - binkHN 2y ago
      It was less about the smoothness and a lot more about upstream patches for bugs rarely ever making it downstream.
      - pabs3 2y ago
        Debian testing updates to the latest stable KDE releases quite frequently, larger releases like KDE 6 take longer, but thats already in experimental and will be in unstable/testing after the Qt transition finishes.
  - bityard 2y ago
    I had the exact opposite experience. I starting using KDE 5 for both work and personal use about 6 months before bookworm became stable and have been extremely happy with it ever since. And I say this as someone who is typically very critical of the roughshod nature of Linux desktop environments. (Namely: every time we have something good, a person or team comes along and wants to rewrite it in their image. Hopefully the KDE devs can stay the course this time and adhere to evolutionary rather than revolutionary growth.)
4ad 2y ago
AFAICT there are no technical implications for this action, so nothing changed, really.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ddtaylor 2y ago
I use both and I enjoy the simplicity of Gnome recently and some of the polish, but the constant decisions and weird stuff from Gnome as developers and as an organization send me running every time. Almost anything you want to do in Gnome touches a spec or design that someone made there and has some obscure thing that kills it entirely for practical use but they won't change their spec or designs foe bizarre and nearly political reasons. It's their project and they are free to do what they want. But, contrast this with my time as a KDE developer or user and it's night and day. The KDE people want to get everything done by any means possible and we will clean it up to get it shippable. We have moved entire code bases and specs to do it. Ever since Valve got involved that aspect only improved IMO. My bet has been on KDE for a bit now, even if it's not my current daily driver.
- kwanbix 2y ago
  I’ve always wanted to like GNOME—it’s polished and has an undeniable appeal—but I just can’t get behind its UI metaphor. For my workflow, simplicity is key. That’s why I prefer desktops like XFCE, Budgie, or Cinnamon (edit: or KDE). Even MATE with the "Redmond" skin feels more intuitive to me. Why? It comes down to how I manage my work. I often set up one browser window per project or topic, labeled accordingly (e.g., Project1, Project2). I even have a window called MAIN for my daily essentials like Mail, Calendar, WhatsApp, and Signal. With a macOS-style UI, I only get one taskbar icon for all these windows, making it difficult to find what I need quickly. On the other hand, with the classic Win95-style interface, I can easily and intuitively spot my open projects at a glance. No guessing, just muscle memory. Just my thoughts—your mileage may vary. Curious if anyone else feels the same way?
  - bityard 2y ago
    I feel exactly the same way. Back when KDE was a bit messier and perhaps buggier, I tried to muddle along with GNOME for a number of years. Lots of little daily annoyances especially around the file management windows, multiple screens, audio configuration, etc. I prefer focus-follows-mouse, which required some kind of add-on plus changing a hidden setting somewhere and it still never worked properly. Switched to KDE two years ago and ALL of those things just worked out of the box. And everything else, is easy to customize without jumping through any hoops.
whalesalad 2y ago
KDE is like 100x better than Gnome. This is great.
rychco 2y ago
Interestingly, I've tried KDE multiple times on different devices & each time there's a Wifi issue that's not present in any other linux desktop. Even the steam deck's default steamos has this issue in desktop mode. I suspect it's something related to my wireless router, but non-KDE desktops work perfectly fine so I'm mildly confused.
tristan957 2y ago
This is a true testament to the maturity and popularity of the Plasma desktop. Congrats to the KDE community! Plasma is an awesome desktop environment and really serves a great purpose! - A Fedora Workstation user
bravetraveler 2y ago
Glad to see KDE get better positioning! The Fedora project generally does good work, very hopeful
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
unethical_ban 2y ago
I got into *nix around 2005. BSD and Ubuntu, I was an Ubuntu dabbler for more than a decade. I actually liked unity. But recently I installed Fedora 40 KDE and it is fantastic. The UI is powerful but quite navigable. Features are fleshed out and accessible. Laptop and Wi-Fi features are top notch. Claude.ai helped me figure out SELinux and Fedora design details that are nice to know as a power user. I'm all in on fedora at the moment.
mixmastamyk 2y ago
I tried kde many times in the past and gave up. It finally seems to be getting a polished look however. The one thorn left in my side is the context menu in konsole. Can anyone explain why it is such a mess and/or how I could edit it down to something manageable?
yu3zhou4 2y ago
Slightly tangent - how reliable is Kubuntu nowadays, compared to vanilla Ubuntu?
scarfaceneo 2y ago
Libadwaita is a horrible design language. It wastes so much space, the disparity between gtk3/4 hurts the eyes and you pretty much depend on extensions for the most basic of things. KDE is the superior DE by far
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

93 points by binkHN 2y ago

I hope they know what they're doing. New users are already confused which to pick and KDE shouldn't draw resources from Workstation.

_mlbt 2y ago
Frankly, if you get too confused by which version of Fedora to pick, you probably shouldn't be running Fedora. Fedora is very user friendly, until it isn't. It's my favorite desktop Linux distro, however, the bleeding edge nature of it can definitely bite you sometimes. Fedora is the only distro I've ever used that irreparably corrupted the filesystem with just normal usage. There was no interruption to power or me running any software from outside of the official repos, just a kernel panic out of nowhere and a failed fsck on reboot. To be fair, this was several versions ago, back when it was still Fedora "Core" and I've had only minor, but fixable issues since. Another issue for newbies is that the vast majority of third party software and tutorials that you'll find on the internet assume an Ubuntu or Debian system that you need the expertise to sometimes "translate" into Fedora/Red Hat.
- Yasuraka 2y ago
  Was it on btrfs by any chance? I've burned my fingers once on it and recommend xfs ever since, no issues so far.
  - binkHN 2y ago
    Why xfs over the more popular ext4?
    - bityard 2y ago
      Not who you are replying to, but I used XFS extensively in production workloads because at the time it had a few features I needed that ext4 didn't have. (I want to say one of them was support for 64-bit inodes? I don't really recall now.) And most importantly no waiting for the system to fsck on a large or slow filesystem that was unmounted uncleanly by a power or system failure. At the time, XFS was also a bit faster than ext4 but I'm not sure if that's still true. The differences between the two are fewer these days but it's still a great general-purpose workhorse filesystem.
    - Yasuraka 2y ago
      xfs is high performance and also rock-solid, I picked it for servers and like to be consistent in my experience, I never shrink volumes and to be frank I am a bit of a hipster/eternal contrarian.
    - bravetraveler 2y ago
      reflinks, cheap/easy dedupe in a sense.
  - _mlbt 2y ago
    It was ext3 if I remember correctly. I usually stick to the default file system unless I have a really good reason to do otherwise.
    - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
      btrfs has been the default on Fedora for a while. Ext4 was the default before that. So if it was ext3 days that's been a long time ago.
    - spwa4 2y ago
      I switched to Reiserfs and actually stuck with it until ... never had the data loss issues.
  - IWeldMelons 2y ago
    Can relate fedora borked my btrfs twice. I do not use either anymore. Debian+ext4 or Freebsd+zfs depending on purpose.
  - Melonai 2y ago
    Interesting..! I've had something very similar happen on Fedora running btrfs, too.. No hardware failures (drive was great, still run it to this day a year later), no kernel panics, the partition just stopped booting out of the blue, with the rescue shell also being completely broken. I think I almost managed to get some of my files back, but after an error on my part it corrupted itself to the degree where the only answer you could find online was something like "just give up, no one can help you now :(". Lost a bunch of important data and still a bit mad about it, but at least now I'm back on NixOS with ext4 with no issues so far!
- creatonez 2y ago
  > back when it was still Fedora "Core" This was an extremely long time ago.
criddell 2y ago
I spent way too much time trying to figure out which desktop environment is the one I should use. 25 years ago, it was something I cared a lot about. For me today, I don't think it really matter because they are equivalent. Frankly, all modern operating system desktop environments are good enough. I can install applications, launch applications, configure wifi, reboot, etc... What I need day-to-day is a pretty short list. The real determining factor is application support and that is what determines where I'm going to be working.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  As a Linux user for ~25+ years (family PC ran Red Hat) I've learned not to stray from the beaten path. This is why I like defaults. It's usually the most tested.

isodev 2y ago

Awesome! I much prefer KDE over GNOME and with all recent enhancements to Plasma this is a very welcome change (short of KDE being the default).

Y_Y 2y ago

I was in Burger King this week and was pleased to see that their drink dispenser machine was running KDE. Presumably due to some technical issue the taskbar was visible with some entry for their custom touchscreen sugar water emitting application. I wonder if they'll switch to using Silverblue now and get a more reliable setup.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
> technical issue > KDE Sounds about right
_benj 2y ago
Yeah! Some time ago I saw in a taco bell screen an Ubuntu boot screen, looked like something where wrong on the booting process, but was fascinated to see that the drive through screen was on Linux… I wouldn’t have chosen Ubuntu for that… but that’s just me :-)
- _mlbt 2y ago
  Ubuntu is actually a fantastic choice for those sorts of applications. Develop against the latest LTS (or the one in development if it will be released before your finished product is) and you'll have support for years.
  - _benj 2y ago
    fair enough. I would have picked something more minimal but LTS is indeed a big advantage!

_benj 2y ago

That is great news! I moved to KDE about a year ago and was blown away by how refined and customizable the experience is. Won’t be moving away from Void but I’m glad to see KDE having more mainstream access and support!

binkHN 2y ago
I did the same, but did it on Debian Testing. Big mistake. KDE is not well supported on Debian. I too have seen the light in the Void and migrated about a month ago; better experience all around, including a modern KDE.
- mkesper 2y ago
  KDE runs very smoothly on Debian stable. Had it running on testing also, but sid/testing can break from time to time...
  - binkHN 2y ago
    It was less about the smoothness and a lot more about upstream patches for bugs rarely ever making it downstream.
    - pabs3 2y ago
      Debian testing updates to the latest stable KDE releases quite frequently, larger releases like KDE 6 take longer, but thats already in experimental and will be in unstable/testing after the Qt transition finishes.
- bityard 2y ago
  I had the exact opposite experience. I starting using KDE 5 for both work and personal use about 6 months before bookworm became stable and have been extremely happy with it ever since. And I say this as someone who is typically very critical of the roughshod nature of Linux desktop environments. (Namely: every time we have something good, a person or team comes along and wants to rewrite it in their image. Hopefully the KDE devs can stay the course this time and adhere to evolutionary rather than revolutionary growth.)

4ad 2y ago

AFAICT there are no technical implications for this action, so nothing changed, really.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ddtaylor 2y ago

I use both and I enjoy the simplicity of Gnome recently and some of the polish, but the constant decisions and weird stuff from Gnome as developers and as an organization send me running every time. Almost anything you want to do in Gnome touches a spec or design that someone made there and has some obscure thing that kills it entirely for practical use but they won't change their spec or designs foe bizarre and nearly political reasons. It's their project and they are free to do what they want. But, contrast this with my time as a KDE developer or user and it's night and day. The KDE people want to get everything done by any means possible and we will clean it up to get it shippable. We have moved entire code bases and specs to do it. Ever since Valve got involved that aspect only improved IMO. My bet has been on KDE for a bit now, even if it's not my current daily driver.

kwanbix 2y ago
I’ve always wanted to like GNOME—it’s polished and has an undeniable appeal—but I just can’t get behind its UI metaphor. For my workflow, simplicity is key. That’s why I prefer desktops like XFCE, Budgie, or Cinnamon (edit: or KDE). Even MATE with the "Redmond" skin feels more intuitive to me. Why? It comes down to how I manage my work. I often set up one browser window per project or topic, labeled accordingly (e.g., Project1, Project2). I even have a window called MAIN for my daily essentials like Mail, Calendar, WhatsApp, and Signal. With a macOS-style UI, I only get one taskbar icon for all these windows, making it difficult to find what I need quickly. On the other hand, with the classic Win95-style interface, I can easily and intuitively spot my open projects at a glance. No guessing, just muscle memory. Just my thoughts—your mileage may vary. Curious if anyone else feels the same way?
- bityard 2y ago
  I feel exactly the same way. Back when KDE was a bit messier and perhaps buggier, I tried to muddle along with GNOME for a number of years. Lots of little daily annoyances especially around the file management windows, multiple screens, audio configuration, etc. I prefer focus-follows-mouse, which required some kind of add-on plus changing a hidden setting somewhere and it still never worked properly. Switched to KDE two years ago and ALL of those things just worked out of the box. And everything else, is easy to customize without jumping through any hoops.

whalesalad 2y ago

KDE is like 100x better than Gnome. This is great.

rychco 2y ago

Interestingly, I've tried KDE multiple times on different devices & each time there's a Wifi issue that's not present in any other linux desktop. Even the steam deck's default steamos has this issue in desktop mode. I suspect it's something related to my wireless router, but non-KDE desktops work perfectly fine so I'm mildly confused.

tristan957 2y ago

This is a true testament to the maturity and popularity of the Plasma desktop. Congrats to the KDE community! Plasma is an awesome desktop environment and really serves a great purpose! - A Fedora Workstation user

bravetraveler 2y ago

Glad to see KDE get better positioning! The Fedora project generally does good work, very hopeful

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

unethical_ban 2y ago

I got into *nix around 2005. BSD and Ubuntu, I was an Ubuntu dabbler for more than a decade. I actually liked unity. But recently I installed Fedora 40 KDE and it is fantastic. The UI is powerful but quite navigable. Features are fleshed out and accessible. Laptop and Wi-Fi features are top notch. Claude.ai helped me figure out SELinux and Fedora design details that are nice to know as a power user. I'm all in on fedora at the moment.

mixmastamyk 2y ago

I tried kde many times in the past and gave up. It finally seems to be getting a polished look however. The one thorn left in my side is the context menu in konsole. Can anyone explain why it is such a mess and/or how I could edit it down to something manageable?

yu3zhou4 2y ago

Slightly tangent - how reliable is Kubuntu nowadays, compared to vanilla Ubuntu?

scarfaceneo 2y ago

Libadwaita is a horrible design language. It wastes so much space, the disparity between gtk3/4 hurts the eyes and you pretty much depend on extensions for the most basic of things. KDE is the superior DE by far

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]