
RHEL is deprecating KDE - trasz
https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/
======
HuShifang
Does anyone have insights into the possible motivation behind this? I'm an
industry outsider, but I've been a bit baffled by the way that Canonical,
Purism, and now Red Hat are seemingly doubling-down on Gnome and shifting away
from KDE Plasma at precisely the moment that (going by the discourse within my
Linux infosphere, at least) Gnome is approaching a crisis point, stripping
away features as the debt comes due for bad design decisions made (and good,
if painful, design fixes not implemented) years ago, whereas KDE Plasma is
cruising, constantly adding refinements onto an already good foundation.

Or to put it differently: all the Linux experts I read and listen to (many of
whom actually work at Canonical or Red Hat) are talking about how great KDE
Plasma is, and how troubled Gnome Shell is, yet all the companies are
rejecting KDE for Gnome.

What gives? Is this just part of the growing "corporatization" of Linux --
i.e. an investment of resources into a more corporate-controlled project, with
an eye on the bottom-line and optimizing business-consumer support, rather
than into one that's more decentralized in its development and individual-user
targeted (and that would just draw resources from the former)?

~~~
bad_user
Before switching to MacOS I used Linux on my desktop for a decade.

KDE has always been the one with the better foundation, except that ... it
never worked ok.

Every time I tried it, it had a ton of issues that would make me go into this
rabbit hole, trying to fix it via endless configuration options and it never
worked. And the migration from KDE 3 to KDE 4 was a complete clusterfuck.

Whereas Gnome always lacked configuration options, people always complained
about its state, but it kept compatibility and it worked well out of the box.

The Linux desktop never took off due to immaturity. Microsoft did not abandon
Windows, they didn’t rewrite from scratch, every release is basically an
iteration of the previous one and Windows 10 for example is simply an
iteration of Windows 7, which was XP with some lipstick on it. Same can be
said of MacOS.

In open source however people just want to work on the new shiny all the time.
As soon as something with more sex appeal comes along, people move to it.

The desktop Linux is freaking horrible and obviously what people have been
doing in the last two decades doesn’t work. So yes, let’s corporatize it,
let’s make it boring and reliable. Because people want a working desktop, not
freaking widgets.

Speaking of desktop widgets, this is yet another example of immaturity. Do you
know how many times per week I see my MacOS desktop? Never. My apps are always
on and I restart my laptop like once per month, otherwise it’s in standby all
the time. Such reliably is unheard of with the Linux desktop.

~~~
adbge
> My apps are always on and I restart my laptop like once per month, otherwise
> it’s in standby all the time. Such reliably is unheard of with the Linux
> desktop.

Bullshit. I'm at 42 days on a ThinkPad running Void Linux.

> 19:19:22 up 42 days, 19:53, 1 user, load average: 2.37, 0.98, 0.56

~~~
paavoova
So do you not use FDE? I'd think that to protect data at rest, especially on a
laptop, it's good practice to power down whenever you're away. Otherwise keys
are just sitting there in memory.

~~~
michaelmrose
It's actually possible to suspend io to the encrypted data and remove the keys
from ram and prompt for the passphrase at resume to unlock.

Check out go-luks-suspend

------
rdebeasi
To clarify, this is related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux the distro, not Red
Hat the company. Fedora 29 (released a few days ago) has a KDE spin, and the
project has made no mention of discontinuing that.
[https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/download/index.html](https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/download/index.html)

Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat (but not on RHEL or Fedora).

~~~
mindcrime
_and the project has made no mention of discontinuing that._

...yet.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
The KDE spin is community-maintained, so it's not like Red Hat can yank
funding from it or something.

------
qwerty456127
Meanwhile KDE5 is, IMHO, the only reasonable modern classic desktop for Linux
(XFCE, LXDE, LXQt and Mate are also classic desktops but these are not really
modern i.e. they are more Win95-like while KDE5 is more Win7/Unity-like and
more), every else is a way too "special" and GNOME3 is the most weird one.
From what I know about GNOME3 (from experience of attempting to use it and
some reading/watching trying to "get it") it would be great to use on a tablet
but looks and feels rather clumsy on a laptop.

~~~
sunaurus
As someone who landed on Gnome 3 quite a few years ago and hasn't looked back,
I'm really curious: why do you feel it would be great to use on a tablet?

To me, it doesn't seem that great on a tablet. A major part of what makes
Gnome 3 amazing for me is how easily I can navigate between workspaces or move
windows between my screens and workspaces using keyboard shortcuts, but
tablets don't even have physical keyboards. The whole "switch workspaces
instead of windows" workflow of Gnome 3 is great on desktops where people
multi-task and have complex contexts on each workspace, but to me it seems
that this workflow would be a lot less useful with a single screen, and even
more useless with a tiny tablet screen.

~~~
qwerty456127
Aren't workspaces really useful when your physical screen space is limited
(when it's not limited much I can hardly get it why won't you just arrange
everything you need on your physical screens and just minimize/unminimize apps
that you don't need all the time, KDE does this with just WindowsButton+number
and it still has activities too although I never found this feature useful on
a modern PC with 2 reasonably big screens)? Aren't huge window decorations
great for touch screens? As for lack of keyboard - introducing a panel of
touchscreen buttons for all the necessary shortcuts or using gestures may
probably do the job.

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

Source: Former sysadmin for ~5k CentOS desktop users (using gnome)

------
ilovecaching
I really like Gnome and think KDE is way too bloated visually. On the other
hand, Gnome is literally a dumpster fire of resource use. On some of my
machines it would instantly shoot to 30-60% cpu. It uses a metric ton of RAM.

That's why I recommend sway! the amazing wayland tiling windows manager. It's
nice to look at, easy to use, and it uses like less hz than my wrist watch.

~~~
kungtotte
Anything other than Gnome or KDE will use less than half the resources. XFCE,
Mate, LXDE/LXQT, etc. while maintaining the whole "environment" part of
"desktop environment".

There's a huge difference between a tiling WM and a full-blown DE, and people
who want the Gnome or KDE experience should absolutely not install sway or any
other tiling WM.

Signed, a tiling WM user.

~~~
ohazi
DEs should make it easier to use tiling as a feature rather than having to go
all-in with something like i3 or awesome.

I use xfce, and it's pretty easy to add sensible keybindings for snap-
window-{up, down, left, right, top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right,
fullscreen}. That's usually all I want, although occasionally it would be nice
to be able to quickly split by thirds.

This still feels super snappy and productive, and you still get people asking
you "whoa, how did you do that!?" But you can also overlap windows without
changing modes, and the usual window manipulators are still there when they
make sense, or when someone else wants to use your computer.

You shouldn't have to throw away the rest of the "normal" DE and relearn how
to interact with your computer to get tiling. It should just be a secret
superpower for people who know that it's there. I've never understood why it's
always one or the other.

~~~
Symbiote
KDE doesn't have shortcuts defined by default, but in "Global Shortcuts" under
"KWin" you can define shortcuts for "Quick Tile Window to the —" and "Maximize
Window".

There seem to be some plugins or scripts for grid tiling, but I've never
investigated.

[https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-
Kwin](https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin) (wow...) found via
[https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/87hutr/kde_making...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/87hutr/kde_making_plasma_512_look_like_a_tiling_window/)

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

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

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

~~~
8fingerlouie
Most likely the fact that they’re running ancient kernel versions (RHEl 7.6,
released Oct 30 2018 uses Linux 3.10, which was released in June 2013) , and
have to support them for 10-20 years.

RHEL 6 uses kernel version 2.6.32, released in 2011, and will be supported
until 2020.

With a moving target like Btrfs, which may have plenty of showstopper bugs
left in it yet, it’s just not feasible to keep backporting these new features
to a an old kernel version.

Once Btrfs stops getting major patches, and is considered stable, I guess it
could eventually make its way back.

~~~
LinuxBender
Redhat have added new filesystem support after a .0 release. For example, they
added XFS to the kernel (without xfsprogs) in RHEL 5.2 and added the tools to
the base repo in 5.4, then officially supported it in 5.6.

~~~
nickysielicki
XFS is a conceptually simple journaling file system, comparing that to the
crazy corner cases that can exist within btrfs snapshots and volumes and
subvolumes and redundancy is not reasonable. A few years back btrfs had a lot
of momentum, but other projects have matured since then and it just doesn't
make as much sense as it used to. btrfs was meant to be ZFS without the
license problems, but ZoL has gotten significantly better, and for some legal
reasons that are fuzzy, Canonical now supports and ships ZoL in Ubuntu.
lvm/dmraid performance has gotten better and integration with LVM and other
software has improved, to the point that having a standardized interface for
managing your storage (Like ZFS and BTRFS have) is no longer such a big deal.

Between lvm/dmraid and how much effort they've done to make it simple to use
lvm storage for libvirt/openstack/etc., I see no reason why they'd ever
support btrfs in RHEL. They would spend more in engineers than they would ever
get back in support.

~~~
LinuxBender
You are probably right in terms of dev and support overhead. I would imagine
that should they decide to add it, the process would be similar to XFS; in
that, they would add support for it in the kernel and call it "experimental"
like they did with XFS in 5.2.

XFS is a fairly simple filesystem. That said, the issues they had were
integrating it in VFS. There are still some bugs at that layer today, albeit
minor ones. In 5.x, most of the issues were race conditions in VFS and raid
controllers (sas bus resets and such). XFS itself is actually very mature but
any time they add a new FS, the VFS layer requires a lot of work.

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

~~~
jhallenworld
Remember the first time you had to edit the rewrite rules?

~~~
cestith
Remember the first time it was faster to change something directly in the hot
mess of a config file than to edit the m4 and regenerate?

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

~~~
aerique
Yes, all these people talking about Gnome and KDE as if they're the only thing
in town. DEs are a pox on Linux.

~~~
KozmoNau7
I have to ask, why do you think having a cohesive, logically laid out and
consistent desktop environment is a "pox on Linux"?

Is it _too_ user-friendly?

~~~
aerique
Nice straw man.

------
n1vz3r
And this is another example where FOSS ecosystem shines. While corporations
like RedHat may reduce support and maintenance costs by shrinking their
packages base, I'm more than confident in KDE's future because there are
plenty other distros (including Fedora) that will continue to include it.

Edit: spelling

~~~
pjmlp
If there aren't enough people willing to sacrifice their free time and income,
the source code might be available but it won't grow by itself.

~~~
icebraining
Not everything needs to grow. Every time I use Windows 10 I feel glad I kept 7
on my desktop.

~~~
pjmlp
Me not, as I was highly disapointed Loghorn was successfully sabotaged by
WinDev and enjoy to see the improvements that UWP has been gaining throughout
each W10 release.

Something we could have gotten sooner if those guys actually worked together.

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

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

~~~
randomsearch
Here’s a suggestion: you bring together a small team of great Linux
developers. You pick one laptop that is commercially available, eg Lenovo or a
Dell or a Chromebook. You then put all your efforts into making an awesome dev
distro for that laptop only. You resell it with the distro pre-installed and
configured, and 12 months free support.

Could you make money selling it to coders? The go-to dev laptop for non-Mac
users?

~~~
wmf
Nope, people would just bitch about how they refuse to buy it because it isn't
_exactly_ to their liking. Just check out any Purism or System76 thread.

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

------
csdreamer7
Chris on Coder Radio has talked about the different DEs before. His
explanation of it I still think is one of the better ones.

KDE just has a higher cognitive load. You have the control menu, you have drop
downs, you could have a button on the bottom, GNOME apps are just simpler. You
have all this busyness in the menus while GNOME apps can be just simpler to
get into, use, and find things.

Not to say GNOME is going in the right direction. I use Cinnamon on Manjaro
for a reason.

Client Side Decorations have been horrible for some apps. Like gedit, the UI
is so horrible GNOME can't even get people to maintain it and had to put out a
public call. While Cinnamon's Xed editor looks like old gedit and works great.

But overall, GNOME apps are just easier to use.

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

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

~~~
Skunkleton
Go produces static binaries, so it isn't really needed for production
environments would be my guess. Devs tend to install upstream tools instead of
the out of date RHEL tools too.

~~~
jake_the_third
> Devs tend to install upstream tools instead of the out of date RHEL tools
> too.

and system administrators tend to install packaged tools instead of upstream
tools that aren't tested to play well with the rest of the system.

Perhaps installing directly from upstream makes sense for Go, but the servers
I maintain either run distro-packed software or custom software.

Too many bad experiences with upstream packages to trust on production.

~~~
ulzeraj
Go applications do not need golang itself installed like a python or ruby. You
can create the binaries on any machine and just ship the executable and it’s
assets if applicable. The binary is static and contains everything it needs to
run. Using grafana and influxdb as an example which might be familiar to
sysadmins those packages do not need golang installed.

------
ishbits
Gnome has been really pissing me off lately. Simple things, like adding app
that start on login need a "Tweak" tool? How silly is that.

With the upgrade to Fedora 29 I thought I'd try KDE. Its got a lot of the
features I miss from Gnome - and a tray, and not so fat title bar. But its
really unstable in various ways. In particular, forgetting many settings after
a reboot. One display having a background, the other not.

Anyways, back to Gnome. At least whats their is stable.

I plan to give XFCE a shot. But might be time to take the i3 dive.

------
qplex
I saw screenshots of KDE 1.0 desktops [0] in a local computer magazine. I
thought it looked very cool and wanted to try it on my machine. This was many
years ago.

I'm not sure if KDE was ever very popular, but these days it seems to be hard
to find anyone who actually uses it.

[0]
[https://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/ganroth.jpg](https://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/ganroth.jpg)

~~~
tapoxi
Oddly enough there seems to be an EU/US split with KDE and GNOME. SUSE has
long been a KDE backer.

~~~
toyg
Not that odd: Qt, the toolkit KDE is built on, originated in Europe at
Trolltech. There has always been a pretty clear split where European companies
(like SuSE) built on KDE/QT/C++ and American companies went with GNOME/GTK/C.

~~~
h1d
What does it matter if Trolltech originated in Europe? I didn't know that
until now.

~~~
toyg
The closer the company, the more likely the local ecosystem will adopt its
solutions over competitors from afar. Customers get better access to top
hackers and top management, and the network of users can reach critical mass
and influence others: why choose GTK when everyone that could help you in Oslo
knows Qt so well? And the same, _vice-versa_ , in other places.

It’s one of the reason the SF / Portland / NY / Boston / Berlin / London
clusters are so valuable for companies of all sorts: the network effects are
real.

This was even more critical back then, 20 years ago: the internet was in its
infancy (and slow), and flying was much more expensive than it is today.

------
Mikeb85
Not surprising. KDE has always been a bit too complicated whilst not offering
a particularly great nor modern interface. I know it can be changed to perform
more like Gnome, but there's so many options that it just becomes a pain.

Gnome Shell has nice defaults, the extensions are super easy to install if you
do want to change something, it looks good and it's efficient to find apps or
switch apps. I've personally always liked the Shell interface and I imagine
with the proliferation of smart phones, Windows 10 and other modern
interfaces, most users are just fine with the new paradigm (versus the start
button from Windows 95).

Gnome is stable, easy to use, nice looking and makes a great default. For the
enterprise, I can't imagine how anyone would want to deal with something like
KDE.

------
Jedd
ITT we see myriad anecdotes and personal grudges & preferences presented as
objective analysis and review.

TFA notes that RHEL hasn't really done much for the KDE community in quite a
while, so this is a bit of a non-story in terms of on-going support for KDE
proper (as distinct from KDE on RHEL).

TFA also notes it may just be The Register being The Register -- any article
that suggests _IBM bought RHEL_ to bury the _RHEL drops KDE_ support story is
clearly attempting humour.

Keep in mind that getting Python 3 running on RHEL7 is a non-trivial exercise,
fraught with sharp edges and inspiring many vocalised expletives -- so RHEL
officially (not) supporting something isn't necessarily an indicator of, well,
anything.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> Keep in mind that getting Python 3 running on RHEL7 is a non-trivial
> exercise

What? Install EPEL, install Python. Done. Does get older version, but it's
RHEL.

~~~
Jedd
Running, not just installing.

EPEL is straightforward, as you note (frustration aside that it's a bit of
fiddling your average user shouldn't need to do).

But the sharp edges pop up later - root installed pip packages not accessible
by non root accounts, pip3 mess, challenges / breakages if you're also running
various things that choke on python3 being present (puppet is one example).

------
gbustomtv5
This is a massive list of changes for a service pack.

Why push them all into 7.6? What’s going into 8?

~~~
Avshalom
My outside suspicion is that they are (were who knows now with the merger)
waiting for Wayland to get to point they felt comfortable supporting it, that
or they were waiting for the container ecosystem to stabilize enough that they
felt comfortable backing their horse.

Although with the merger I'd assume it's going to be a bit longer regardless.

~~~
wmf
Holding back a server OS (face it, that's what RHEL is) for good Wayland
support makes no sense. But figuring out their Docker/CoreOS/Atomic/OpenShift
strategy before RHEL 8 would make sense.

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

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

~~~
pjmlp
I never imagined to see such comment regarding Red-Hat, still remember the
days before RPM was even an idea.

Then again the day they decided there was no money to be made on the desktop
could only lead to this.

~~~
AzzieElbab
Why? I am not being negative. Never met anyone running redhat desktop, that is
all. Servers is another matter entirely.

~~~
pjmlp
Exactly because of that, back in the old days Red-Hat had a strong presence
among Linux desktops.

It was all about Red-Hat vs SuSE, and Madrake was built on top of Red-Hat
compiled for Pentium with stronger focus on desktop users, using KDE.

Now Mandrake is gone, people keep forgetting SuSE is still around, and there
are Linux users that never seen a Red-Hat desktop.

~~~
AzzieElbab
I guess I wasn't into Linux back then. Unix workstations were still around and
I had access to some

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

~~~
snuxoll
They're just moving it to a separate channel (repository), any active RHEL
subscription will also have access to the ansible channel.

~~~
makomk
I wonder how this affects CentOS users though.

~~~
snuxoll
The version of Ansible that Red Hat packages in the "Ansible Engine" channel
is available in the configmanagement repository on the CentOS mirrors,
alternatively one can install a newer version of Ansible from EPEL.

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

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

~~~
dmytrish
It depends. Gnome only allows integer scaling by default (1x, 2x) and
fractional scaling is hidden behind an experimental flag in the Gnome
registry. If you only need 2x, it's a perfect solution.

KDE readily exposes fractional scaling (1x, 1.1x, 1.2x, ...) and it mostly
works as intended, but with occasional artifacts: some raster icons looks
torn, sometimes there are weird graphical artefacts between text lines in
Konsole/Kate/etc (which is rather annoying), it only scales Qt apps well and
needs nerdy manual tweaks for others (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, xterm).

I can't use Gnome on my XPS 13 because I need around 1.3x (and prefer a
customized KDE anyway), so I have to put up with this.

~~~
Symbiote
For what it's worth, at home I use KDE on a single 4K screen with scaling set
to 2×, and there are no normal-user problems. I use Kubuntu, and Firefox,
Chrome and LibreOffice scale correctly. GIMP looks a little small.

I can get half-size or double-size apps if I start something from the CLI, or
with X forwarding or similar. export GDK_SCALE=2 usually solves it.

One small and obscure KDE utility program was broken with a HiDPI screen, but
I filed a bug and it was fixed a few days later.

~~~
rossy
The most annoying aspect of HiDPI KDE for me is that Gwenview doesn't support
it. It might appear to support HiDPI, but if you look closely, it always
renders images with jumbo 2x2 pixels, even when downscaling. Okular used to
have this problem as well, but it's been fixed there.

Apart from that, I've had the same experience as you. Everything seems to work
at 2x scaling, including third-party and GTK+ 3 apps.

~~~
Symbiote
…I hadn't noticed, which is embarrassing as I use Gwenview a lot.

There's a bug report, and the suggested

    
    
      QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=1 gwenview .
    

looks like a good workaround for the moment — I mostly use Gwenview
fullscreen, so the toolbars don't really matter.

[https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373178](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373178)

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

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

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

~~~
kungtotte
It's not just that it's free software, it's that it's designed to be modular.

Haiku is free software too but their desktop environment is tightly integrated
into the system because that's the experience they're building towards.

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

------
j0hnM1st
what about Fedora?

~~~
ddavis
Fedora 29 still has a KDE spin

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

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

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

------
based2
[https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-
kde/](https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/)

~~~
lucb1e
A few words of what is behind that link would be nice

~~~
ddavis
It's a small post (by a KDE dev) describing why it's not surprising to see RH
dropping KDE

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

~~~
tln
Python 2 was deprecated in RHEL 7.5 at least, maybe earlier[0]

The news the submitter thought was interesting is about 90% down an
excruciatingly long webpage... maybe linking instead to a story specifically
about this news would be better?[1][2]

Here's the release note tidbit:

"KDE has been deprecated

KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE), which has been provided as an alternative to the
default GNOME desktop environment has been deprecated. A future major release
of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the
default GNOME desktop environment."

[0] [https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-
us/red_hat_enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-
us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.5_release_notes/chap-
red_hat_enterprise_linux-7.5_release_notes-deprecated_functionality)

[1]
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde/)

[2] [https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-
kde/](https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/)

~~~
sctb
OK, we've gone with #2. Thanks!

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melbourne_mat
KDE is an extreme distraction and a waste of developer man hours. Not just for
the people who made it, but also for those who wrote apps for it. Imagine how
much better the Gnome ecosystem would be if all that effort was channeled
there instead? Even a fork of the Gnome ecosystem would be better than a
completely different API.

As a user, Gnome works just fine. Get over yourselves KDI guys. Sometimes you
just have to walk away!

~~~
Jonnax
Generally the opinion is that KDE is the superior experience.

Your complaints are like an American saying that their 110v electricity is
good and everyone should switch to it. But it can't even boil a kettle in a
reasonable time.

~~~
narwally
I made the switch recently and have been very pleased. I love the
customizability of it. Instead of having to Go back in forth between Gnome
Shell/Unity/Cinnamon/etc. to find a desktop that works for me, I can get a
very similar experience to any of those environments just by tweaking some
settings and using the right plugins. Right now I have a setup that feels very
similar to macOS just by adding a dock, using the Global Menu panel plugin,
changing some keybindings, and installing Albert to replace Spotlight. Now I
barely have any context switching issues moving back and forth from my Macbook
and my desktop. It's a much nicer experience to the KDE I tried 4-5 years ago.

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

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

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

~~~
spindle
You really don't understand? I also (like you) don't use a DE, and I'm very
happy that way, but in order to get to that I had to learn some stuff from
scratch. It seems obvious to me that almost everyone who comes from MacOS and
Windows needs a DE, at least at first (and forever if they don't like learning
stuff).

ETA: Also, I don't know any non-DE setups that have a hope of being usable on
shared computers, even though I'm sure there could be one in principle.

~~~
squirrelicus
I suppose you're right, for shared systems I absolutely get it. For techie
workstations though...

~~~
jraph
I get people who prefer not running desktop environments but I just like the
convenience of using one. Every need I haven't anticipated is fulfilled.
Integration of everything is here out of the box. I can tweak anything I would
want to tweak but it turns out the default configuration usually pleases me.

And it's fast and never gets in my way.

Actually it's faster than no desktop environment: I have to use an USB key?
Just plug it in, and it's mounted, I just need to click on the notification at
the bottom right of the screen to open the file manager. I have a nice eject
button to. No need to set this up myself or to launch mount commands. I can
sill use commands if I want to.

I would argue that outside of desktop environments, it's fast to do what I
don't need to do in a desktop environment.

I don't use a tiling window manager because my windows are always full screen
anyway (or side by side), but I guess it would be possible to just run a
tiling window manager instead of kwin in plasma or xfwm4 on xfce. (Gnome 3 may
be different).

The session is a bit slow to boot and that could be improved, but that's just
a few seconds once in a while.

I say all this knowing how to use a GNU/Linux system without a desktop
environment perfectly well.

------
ILMostro7
"It's a good thing" -Martha Stewart

KDE is a beautiful, bloated rootkit, IMHO. There are countless of issues still
open from years ago that never get addressed by developers. LXQT has
potential, but even that suffers from some of the same issues with respect to
KDE. e.g
[https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=120706](https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=120706)

------
mindcrime
Wow... and "fuck you", Red Hat.

After 20+ years of being a loyal RH / Fedora / CentOS user, I guess I finally
get to switch to a different distro.

Anybody have any recommendations for a RPM based distro with good KDE support?

~~~
distances
Why RPM specifically? KDE Neon is very stable and ships the desktop as the
developers intended.

~~~
mindcrime
Familiarity. I've been using RH and RH derived distros for 20+ years. I know
my way around RPM/Yum/DNF land better than I know my way around apt land.

