>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
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setting or at least a config file to change what bothers me, instead of looking for the 20th extension which either is out of date and doesn't work on Wayland, or will break at the next Gnome update.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.
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.
>I think Gnome's defaults appeal to people who don't want to work with GUIs but have to.
I feel like this would apply better to stuff like i3, IceWM, OpenBox etc. , no? Gnome is definitely for those who want to use a GUI, not get rid of it, otherwise they would use something a lot more minimalistic instead of something that eats up 1.2+ GB of ram just to launch an app.
>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.
But you can do that with absolutely every WM/DE though.
Speaking only for myself, I did use bspwm for a good while, but ultimately I got tired of maintaining it. I'm looking for something that feels similar but is more out of the box. GNOME is the best I've found for that so far.
Yeah kind of. But configuring them is a chore that not everybody got an appetite for. Plus WMs lack the convenience apps which proper DEs provide out of the box.
the desktops of my formative years were two: MATE and Windows Explorer. because of this, I knew straight away that GNOME wasn't what I wanted, and Ubuntu's decision to adopt GNOME 3 after all the hate that seemingly everybody under the sun had for the desktop (even if I guess this was a problem for Unity too, though I loved it) TOTALLY baffled me.
that being said, I fell in love with Adwaita's design and the GTK headerbar applications for their simplicity and elegance. I so fell in love with it that I begrudgingly decided to switch to GNOME desktop on Ubuntu, just so these applications would feel native.
a few years in, and i'll be real; you're absolutely right about how GNOME expects you to totally overhaul your workflow. that being said I regret to say that now I am fully married to the GNOME workflow and can't even bear to use MATE anymore (other than for brief stark fits of Compiz nostalgia)
I have seen this comment in regards to Gnome a few times across various discussions. Not really sure that this actually means. Gnome shows notifications at top center which is more distracting than notifications in lower right corner. If you want to quickly search and launch something you have to go to overview mode which shows all windows, workspaces, dash, which is very distracting when all you wanted to do was search application.
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.
In recent years, a huge amount of effort went into UI polish, simplification and bug fixing for KDE Plasma.
Nate Graham championed community goals such as "usability and productivity", "consistency", while also focusing developers on high-priority bugs and blogging weekly about the progress: https://pointieststick.com/category/this-week-in-kde/
Right, I definitely don't deny that strides have been made. However, I'm using the latest version of Plasma on my laptop and the "fit and finish" is still not as good as base GNOME, I'd say.
I found Gnomes fit and finish very superficial. Yeah, if you use Gnome standard apps or Gnome circle apps everything fits really nicely. As soon as you dive into extensions, stuff gets wonky and breaks. I find this particularly annoying because Gnome does lack some stuff I really like, where I have to resort to extensions that frequently break between updates.
On KDE you can also use extensions which are equally wonky, but KDE offers so much more out of the box options that I find myself needing far fewer extensions.
Also, KDE is much quicker on implementing stuff like VRR or HDR support which Gnome is still lacking. But at the same time, KDEs implementation is still lacking in some areas. While I personally like the "move (relatively) fast and deliver early results" mentality, being on a semi rolling release like Fedora I'm not stuck with the broken state for very long. In that sense, I can understand why people may be annoyed with partially implemented features when they're stuck with them for a long version lifecycle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Fair point about usability; we're only looking at screenshots of these systems. The screenshots at least meet the bar of a professional mockup, even if the whole experience is vaporware.
I'm not really sure what I find better. That's why the difference is uncanny. A graphic designer could probably pinpoint it.
Maybe it's wasted space? Or the gray in GNOME? It looks like no one knew how big or what color to make things, and just sort of hedged.
I don't think my bias is with macOS since I've also used Windows up until 7 and never found that uncanny. It's just a different aesthetic.
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
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.
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.
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".
I haven't deeply researched the finance, but bottom of 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/ home page there's a list of patrons which have SUSE and Canonical but not Red Hat.
Yup, but you'll also find e.g. Fedora on lists like 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 :-)
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.
>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.
No, these things go back much further than the KDE 4 or Gnome 3 product cycles.
The distro/commercial ecosystem preference for Gnome dates back to earlier times, and comes down mostly to geography and licensing.
Wrt/ licensing, the underlying GTK GUI toolkit had LGPL some years before Qt moved to also having an LGPL option under Nokia ownership. That meant if you were a commercial entity wanting to invest (as, e.g. Sun and Adobe did with GTK at various points), GTK looked like the better bet.
Geography: When the Gnome community initially forked out of the KDE community, the fault line was partially regional, with the core of the KDE community remaining in Europe and the initial Gnome developers being American KDE devs. As a result, for many years (and to this day), if you go to a Linux event in the US, you're more likely to run into a Gnome/GTK person, and therefore things are more likely to happen.
The software industries in the US and Europe also tick quite differently. The US for a long time offered more career paths for young kids in FOSS to graduate into product companies involved with what they were doing before (e.g. Red Hat). KDE/Qt developers have generally graduated into consultancy companies that spend their time on proprietary products instead (with exceptions).
These things have a lot of inertia and long-term effects.
It's interesting to see a bit of a reversal of this trend now, with the latest breed of meaningful new Linux deployments that get to make fresh choices (e.g. Asahi for Apple Silicon or the Steam Deck) generally shipping KDE Plasma instead of Gnome.
> I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.
KDE has had time-based releases and has also been doing LTS releases for about a decade now, ever since the 5.x series.
But your comment still contains some truth; you're probably thinking of the monthly release cadence the KDE Frameworks libs have had vs. the slower Plasma cycle. This has indeed caused some discomfort at distros over the years, and KDE is now making changes to make this easier.
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.
>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].
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
> 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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
[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
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
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.)
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).
> 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.
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