RHEL is deprecating KDE
jriddell.org
jriddell.org
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)?
I think the poster's point is that they're not. One has apparently been well designed to be able to scale to new features, and the other one appears not to have been.
Linus has often pointed out the huge pain that the fragmentation of the ecosystem causes that is often uncritically identified as a choice.
Yes, converging towards standards is almost always a pain point for someone, but the ecosystem overall benefits from having much less ground to cover. And honestly, objectively almost any of the large mature DE's seems to be feature rich enough to use as a starting point.
Maybe KDE was a little too flexible for my tastes, but it sure worked better (most of the time - not always).
I also remember thinking - why the heck is gnome the default?
Haven't used linux as a DE for a few years now though, so no idea what the current status is...
For example, many distros only really differ from their parent in theming, replicated but differently named applications and so forth, which could all be offered in one distribution with less workload, but the same degree of genuine choice.
Same is true for DE's I think. Many of the things that differentiates DE's could probably be offered as configuration within one DE, with less workload but no or very little reduction in diversity.
If you want to get flamed to death, mention the word "configuration" on a Gnome mailing list.
There are people who think that things could just be configuration options, and then there are people who insist that the default configuration should be right, and that too much configuration is detrimental to the user experience (because it's hard/complex/time-consuming) and to development time (if you have two sets of two configuration options, that means you have four configuration to tests, and so on). It's not like these folks don't have a point, either.
Perhaps if this DE is KDE. Gnome devs aren't interested in a configurable DE.
Yet another DE means extra set of conformance tests, bugs to fix, look-and-feels, supporting pages. These all mean money but your customers may not even care about this feature.
So let's say GNU/Linux can use whatever DE and it will always be. But RHEL is just a business product derived from it, with a selected "blessed" packages. There're no conflicts.
Then Ubuntu came out (well, before KDE 4, but during the funny licensing thing), which used Gnome because Debian used Gnome. Debian used Gnome because Qt had the QPL licensing: https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#Q_Public_License_.28QPL...
Ubuntu got popular super quick, which got the DE popular, and the entire community just sort of got behind it.
If you're creating productivity tools for your customers, you probably don't want to channel money into multiple projects that compete with each other. So, it's not too surprising that RH wants to focus on just Gnome.
Mate doesn't need to be the default, but it does need to be easily installable. I never understood the "Kubuntu", "Xubuntu" etc. line of distros when the alternate DEs were easily available in stock Ubuntu. Similarly RHEL ought to make sure KDE is easily installable no matter what is their default... (Though is it common to even run a DE on Redhat?)
we were running centos on the server, so figured i'd use it for my dev vm as well.
The clarifying agreement: (https://dot.kde.org/2004/07/24/trolltech-and-kde-free-qt-fou...) finally fixed things in a way to where if Trolltech got bought out or stopped releasing the free version, it would immediately become BSD licensed. This agreement still exists to day as far as I know.
As far as I remember discussions going back then, people did not trust Trolltech much, and knew the license situation was "weird" - even after the GPL licensing. I don't have anything I can cite specifically, only old discussions that I vaguely remember.
I think Ubuntu went with Gnome because back then it was perceived as the less configurable and flashy, but also less confusing of the two. KDE 3 was for those who wanted to configure everything - the "power user" crowd. Gnome 2 was more spartan (and became more so over time - I remember the outcry when they replaced the path textbox with breadcrumbs!), but mostly "just worked" in ways that people coming from Windows or OS X could readily understand. And Ubuntu was supposed to be the Linux distro for casual users...
Touchscreen UIs are not for creating. They're for taking what you're given, pecking at giant canned buttons in a dumbed-down UI.
A pigeon can peck the colored button to get a food pellet. That's tablet UI.
After Ubuntu dropped Unity I am seriously considering switch back to KDE or a plain old window manager even if I dislike them.
Never thought GNOME performance was that bad.
Gnome 3.0 was released in June 2011.[1] Windows 10 was released in July 2015.[2] Perhaps your assertion is incorrect.
[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/gn... [2] https://www.lifewire.com/windows-10-2626217
(Tbh I don't give a damn about transparency or fancy effects, either)
Our data structures second term required a medium size project in C for a DB management system based on B-Tree and low level i-node manipulation.
I decided to go with anonymous structs, using pointer fields as methods, so something like GObject. Additionally each translation unit played the role of a poor man's module.
While it was an interesting experience, it isn't something I ever considered doing again.
I'd expect to see one DE for mainstream users, one DE for business, and a plethora of less well maintained options for power users (I don't use a DE at all).
The 'user' and 'business' DE I'd expect to coalesce into the same thing because they have fairly similar use cases.
The existence of multiple DE's strikes me as an anomaly, if anything.
Just curious, what do you use?
I rarely use GUI applications with the exception of a web browser and terminal and I have enough arcane knowledge by now that applets for network configuration etc just get in the way.
Well, I’ve got good news for you...
That said, I've come to love the layout of Gnome 3 (with many extensions, by default it's nearly unusable). However, its performance is awful. While it's better than it used to be, it's still a leaky mess. I for one hope KDE continues to exist and be supported for no reason other than having a viable alternative when I finally become tired of performance.
As a developer who looked into the two a few years back, I chose QT as it was much easier to work with than GTK. This was before QML, however, so I don't know if it still holds true.
I do not understand how GNOME feels different since you can setup KDE to behave like you want,
You prefer Andoid/iOS like interfaces on your desktop ? I did not check all apps in KDE but Konsole and Dolphin let you hide the menus(if you need those pixels) also KDE apps let you hide or customize your toolbar so if you nver use the back/forward buttons you can hide them
let me give an example how options are better for me, my right eye is much worse then my left eye so I have the taskbar and notifications on the left, if it was reverse I would move them to the right.
New Qt features are mostly implemented in QML with the high performance parts in C++.
Widgets are mainly for desktop deployments, with QML being pushed for embedded devices and mobile.
I don't care about all the tweaks and config options as much as I used to 15 years ago when I started using linux.
To each his own.
dosshell.exe or gtfo!
People who are happy about the current primary/default environment don't often go out of their way to talk about it. People who are happy about a non-default environment, or who are not happy with the default environment, talk about it more. It's a form of selection bias.
- how I get tray icons working (tray icons were removed)
- GNOME won't start (an extension incompatibility can make the DE crash)
- lag when some animation happens
- how can I make the theme to use less padding (some devs are considering removing theming support completely )
This are complaints for actual GNOME users that update to latest version and have unpleasantness surprises.
More seriously, I dealt with this trying to run a Linux VM on a Surface Pro a couple of years ago. I don't remember which distro, but 100% and 200% were the only UI scale options.
Surface Pro's native scale in Windows is 150%, and the solution to match that in Linux ended up being to scale it to 200% and then set up xrandr to scale it back down to 75% of that.
Not exactly a clean way to handle it. I'm pretty sad to hear that's still the state of things.
Though they did eventually do a fractional scaling thing with 3x scaled down, which still feels clunky to me but at least you don't have to configure it yourself in two different places one of which is a command line.
Like, okay, make an easy mode the default. But allow for that complexity to exist without completely writing full extensions for basic functionality.
Quite disappointing to see it becoming unsupported by a major distro.
KDE is much better for me. No problems at all
Yeah, I had to stop using Gnome when everyone was manhandled into Unity / Gnome 3. I have no idea what anyone was thinking.
I now use xubuntu, which doesn't seem to have suffered. XFCE beat out KDE on the strength of... similarity to Gnome 2. I like having the two bars.
You can add bars in KDE.
this is true for every software
> how I get tray icons working (tray icons were removed)
They explained the change, they have their reasons, they proposed alternatives to people who wanted to keep them around. What do you need more?
https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gno...
People just hate change (esp. change that requires them to change how their own stuff works to accomodate it—such as devs when their platform changes), regardless of whether the given makes for a more or less coherent experience; and regardless of whether the person complaining would have liked the system more or less if it was already like that in the first place.
Also is a bad excuse to ignore feedback, like you seen in latest release the developers are still moving thing around like the app menu, if a user would have complained about it an year ago you all would have defended Gnome design , now the devs said it was useless and not used and is a great design to remove it. The solution is to do more usability tests and not rely on what some "expert" thinks an UI should be.
Sometimes, the problem is simply that some users really are using your software wrong. Not compared to how you think they should be using it—compared to how everyone else is using it, and so (via usability tests) how you're building it to be used.
Or, to put that another way: https://xkcd.com/1172/
Before you rebut: I'm not saying that that's true in this case. (I'm not saying it's not, either; I don't know enough about this case to judge.) I'm just clarifying the reasoning behind the general principle. People hate change no matter how justified and evidence-based it is. So inevitably, in a project, there's going to be some number of bug/issues filed where the underlying motivation comes down to "the user wanted to whine because they had to learn something new." It's not an excuse to ignore all user-filed bugs/issues; it's just an argument against people who insist that 100% of user complaints should be taken seriously. There is a "malingering quotient"—a certain percentage of complaints (different for each project) that comes down to people trying to avoid the work of coping with change.
See also, the Lizardman quotient: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-...
The truth is one more more Gnome3 designers that had the vision on how Gnome should look, that branding should be non optional, they did not know what XFCE is.
That doesn't happen in the emacs subreddit.
Your argument is invalid.
Fedora's default gnome is completely unusable.
It's like if GNOME developers wake up in the morning and wonder: "how can we prevent our users from doing their jobs today? What useful feature can we drop this month? What fully functional application can we replace with a half-assed 200 LOCs one?"
I am not surprised though: has anyone tried learning gtk programming recently? Unless you learn to use the C library first (and before that, the GObjext library), it's nearly impossible. There's, for example, a nice python 3 tutorial and it covers the basics nicely. However it fails completely to answer the question "how do I continue on my own from here?".
The most important issue however is that it's been like this for years and GNOME developers don't even acknowledge this. GNOME 3 is so bad that people took the effort to revive, update and keep using GNOME 2 in the form of Mate Desktop. And Mate Desktop is a major player in the DE space.
I remember trying Mate in the past, but I also remember I had issues running GTK3 software and I didn't feel motivated enough to dig for a solution. What I wanted was a hassle-free DE, and XFCE was the one for me.
Cheers to XFCE team!!
I remember that they used to "achieve" stability by not updating (apt pinning) important packages like kernel, xorg etc and did strange stuff like copying deb packages from ubuntu/debian verbatim into their repos.
Edit: I wouldnt touch Mint with a 10ft pole. Seems like they still have no sec advisaries, still ship a remix of debian/ubuntu packages and so on:
2013:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140214063150/https://lists.ubu...
2016:
Yes, markedly.
They basically follow the latest Ubuntu LTS closely, and I get the latest Firefox etc. a couple of days after the official release.
I'm still considering KDE Neon, but that's mostly a personal preference for KDE.
It has been even more "it just works" than Mint, which is already stupendously easy to install.
I've been using Fedora's default gnome for years and never, ever had issues with it nor have I ever felt the need to figure out how one even goes about changing the defaults --well, other than the last update where they totally borked the touchpad to make it more applesque or something and I had to fix that so I could actually use the damn thing.
Though they do seem to like to remove things a lot, the footer at the bottom of the file window thingie comes to mind as it annoys me the most since the "modal popup file info" covers up the filenames often, but mostly I find the changes to be trivial.
So, yeah, once in a while they get a hair up their ass and do something wonky but on the whole I'm a happy gnome user.
There's not just the Mate Desktop. Look at Budgie, built atop GTK3, and it's pretty nice and usable and uses the old paradigms of GTK2.
On the one hand choice is good, but on the other hand it would be nice if the Linux ecosystem were less fragmented. I feel like a lot of the blame for this fragmentation lies with both technical and design issues in Gnome 3.
Whatever issues other people conflict with, they are by definition already known to be no problem for you. It's either things you don't want or care about, and so never tried to do, and you wouldn't think it was important when descibed, or it's things that work fine for you, by your happy good luck of not having whatever combination of configs or hardware or usage pattern or sunspots etc where it fails.
I don't blame you for wondering. It's just that I think it's almost automatically impossible to answer the question and have any other result than you say "oh, that's all?" It's even fine for you to have that reaction, it's just that, what's the point if there is no possible other reaction? That's what I mean by meaningless question.
If you are happy in a Prius, because it does everything you want, then what do you care if I say it can't drive over curbs or be pop-started?
It's like when anyone else asks why you run linux instead of windows or mac, or why you root your android phone. Whatever you tell them, none of them ever thinks it adds up or makes any sense.
What am I missing on Windows? "On linux you can do whatever you want." But what else would I want to do? "Anything. I have no idea. Probably nothing by the sound of it."
If you are using terminals a lot you should try Konsole, see how customizable it is(tabs, you can have multiple profiles, set a profile per tab) the app is made to help you do your job better, same with Dolphin. Gnome apps are optimized for an ideal new users, a user that is so "special" that power options will make his brain collapse, the apps are made by designers and not by user feedback.
But I do recall serious difficulty getting konsole to look like anything but an eyesore.
Wireshark changed from GTK to Qt https://blog.wireshark.org/2013/10/switching-to-qt/
Linus Torwald, a C fan and c++ hater , decided to port from GTK to Qt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0
If you make a simple GUI like for a python script GTK is enough
Thank you for posting this, it's nice to see that someone already had most of my feelings.
GNOME doesn't have this problem, so for all its problems, it works for me.
This page has some variables that let's you set some things and bypass kwin autodetection https://community.kde.org/KWin/Environment_Variables
I know it sucks that it does not work out of the box, at least you don't have Nvidia.
Nowadays it seems Gtk and GNOME documentation lacks updates and is full of broken links.
That's a great way to encourage product teams to produce inadequate documentation.
In other words, they're trying to copy Windows and Microsoft's aggressive feature removals from it? That's horrible, when for the longest time one of the biggest advantages of running desktop Linux was its easier and wider customisation.
I gave a try to KDE at the beginning of 2014. I used it for a few months but everything was painful: twice as many clicks to get things done than I used to in Gnome. It reminded me of Windows.
I installed Gnome Flashback and stayed there. I'm customizing Gnome Shell to look like the old Gnome 2 now. I have to sort out a couple of problems with the Nvidia driver (flickering unless I use a strange 40 Hz refresh rate) and I'll be there for the next few years on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. If there won't be themes anymore by then, I'll switch to something else because the Gnome developers and I have two really different ideas of the desktop. Ironically I'm closer to KDE but it was really unusable.
KDE Neon is a KDE-focused distribution, using Ubuntu LTS as its base, with a pleasingly minimal default install. Every Ubuntu PPA I've tried works just like on base Ubuntu. Similar to Linux Mint and others, it works as a live distro so you can check it out before you commit.
KDE4 made me switch away too (I chose Linux Mint), it simply felt too much like a transitional release cycle. KDE5 brought me back, big time.
There are many interesting informations around to get a picture of how they think; this article has interesting concepts:
https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
and this is the most relevant part:
I think one of the most important cases against applets (as they are currently defined
in GNOME) is that they are extremely detrimental to the Identity of the product or
platform. [...]
Let’s say that we are trying to define either a product or a product platform. I don’t
think it is possible to do this without some “brand” coherence. And it is arguably
impossible to do this effectively with such an ad-hoc/individually-customized design
identity.It is particularly perplexing since Windows before 8.x was far more customisable and themable, which probably lead to its success.
The lesson of backward compatibility is slowly getting lost across the whole industry.
Anyway, for consistency, I hope using the Brise theme and the corresponding icon set on gtk apps in KDE remains possible. Adwaita would probably not work really well on KDE apps.
More generally, theming gtk apps is needed for nice integration in many non gnome environment.
The fact that GNOME is less configurable does not mean that the Linux desktop is. Gnome is not compulsory, you can easily run whatever window manager or desktop environment you fancy, and still run--or not--Gnome programs.
- How to create a shortcut for a command -> use the command line.
- Modify group permission in nautilus? -> No use the command line.
- Switching users -> bug, doesn't work half of the time
- Functionality is hidden in the window title bar (debatable)
- Window close button is too close to the logout button
Is Gnome so simple to use because you don't have any option to do something? :-p
The Ubuntu theme is especially bad:
- No window borders -> overlapping terminals become indistinguishable.
- Window title bars and top menu bar are almost indistinguishable...
In contrast, we used an KDE app in the demo and a couple of times we thought, can you configure xy? would simplify things. Yes! you can do xy. Is there a keyboard shortcut for xy? no but you can configure one, Great!
We are now at a point where KDE is vastly superior at this type of UI than Windows 10 is. They've been doing it for almost as long as MS (KDE 1.0 was released in 1998). The settings UIs alone are so vastly superior, it's kind of embarrassing for Microsoft.
So why has KDE stuck doggedly to this UI style? Because it works. MS spend countless millions and hours on UI research for Win95. It's a very pragmatic decision, and they've made progressions based on the original design, rather than throwing everything out the window and trying to re-invent the wheel, like the Gnome devs did.
As a result, KDE is focused, straight-forward and doesn't get in your way. It simply lets you get on with what you actually want to do. Yet it is also extremely flexible, perhaps even more so than famously customizable UIs like FVWM.
The problems czei002 mentioned are absolutely problems with Gnome. Some of them are specifically Ubuntu problems, but generally they are inherent to bad UI choices from the Gnome devs. Not being able to change permissions in Nautilus? User switching not working? Not being able to create shortcuts from the UI? These are all signs of a bad UI.
You can't even set focus to "follows mouse" without raising windows when clicking inside them. I want focus to follow the mouse, and I only want windows to raise if I click the frame or title bar. KDE lets me do this right in the settings UI, with just a couple of clicks. In Gnome (or Cinnamon), you have to alter gconf settings, akin to registry fiddling in Windows. That's not cool.
- how to place files on the desktop
- how to configure virtual desktops in all directions
Does the JS engine even have a JIT?
Just wanted to provide some counter anecdata. I see a lot distaste for it but as an everyday user I've had no issues.
As a user, KDE always felt like an annoying blinkenlight kitchensink where everything could be modified. Gnome started out a little bit like that (with config files) but settled into a mediocre but unsurprising and thus stable and useful environment.
Then I actually use it, and its a giant, sloppy mess. I always appreciate the gnome team's drive to simplify and reduce, after I try KDE (though I agree with many, in that they go too far sometimes).
It's tight, streamlined and has a pleasantly small base install that doesn't get in your way with badly chosen default apps.
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.
I run my KDE desktop 24/7 in very much the way you are describing and it works very reliably.
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
> 20:41:21 up 58 days, 57 min, 2 users, load average: 0.25, 0.36, 0.38
Fedora 28 - Thinkpad T420
Check out go-luks-suspend
Widgets on the desktop seem to be a pointless dead end that we keep revisiting in lots of different environments. Maybe faddish stuff like that is more interesting to work on than spit and polish. That said
"Microsoft did not abandon Windows, they didn’t rewrite from scratch,"
They actually did this more than once in more ways than one that you believe this is so is more of an indication of their obsessive focus on backwards compatiability. Fro example Windows started out as an app running on dos, windows NT/XP was a completely different OS from 95 98. The underlying layers used to build the windows experience have changed multiple times. The ui has been given a substantial overhaul with vista/8. The way drivers worked changed a lot with vista.
"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."
As someone who has been using desktop linux for 15 years now I'm a little confused. KDE 3 was quite usable. KDE 4 was kind of annoying to use 4.0 - 4.3 which was about the begining of 08 through mid 09 but at the time kde + compiz was a thing and was honestly much better.
There are now actually a variety of simple and complete environments all of which work well. Of the ones I have currently sampled. Cinnamon, Plasma, i3wm, bspwm, mate all work well. I have 3 different linux distributions running in my house right now. All work well. The only one that was work to install or maintain is a derivative of gentoo which honestly has been less effort than running windows. What's horrible? We have an embarassment of riches. We have too many aweesome things to choose from.
As for features, the titlebar integration used by a few applications (ala MacOS) is a nice touch.
Otherwise it's true that the KDE experience, especially around customization, seems more thought out. Gnome's UX is nonsensical in more than a few places. The problem with KDE has always been stability and reliability. Having to reboot your machine due to crashes even once a week is enough to justify putting up with Gnome's overall worst UX.
I restart perhaps every six months due to some problem that could be KDE; I find it very reliable both at home and at work. Granted, both machines are desktops, I use a laptop so rarely that I usually shut it down after use.
> titlebar integration
This is personal preference, but that's a showstopper for me ever using Gnome (or Mac OS) for anything beyond web browsing. I use focus-follows-mouse, which is incompatible with a titlebar outside the relevant window.
Wayland is supposed to help with this, since it has a more modern take on screen virtualization (a la Windows or Mac). Getting all the user software to work on Wayland (via XWayland) is a nontrivial ongoing task. I'm not sure what Gnome Shell's state of affairs is w.r.t. Wayland, but I do know the ecosystem missed the boat with Ubuntu 18.04, which elected not to make Wayland the default due to stability and usability issues. So it might be a while before a major stable distro makes the move.
Not by default. I had to hack a script by mixing xrandr scaling and Gnome scaling settings, which works, with some caveats I haven't figured out yet[1].
The reason I stick to Gnome is that plug-and-play works like a charm, remembering my settings with various monitors.
> I restart perhaps every six months due to some problem that could be KDE; I find it very reliable both at home and at work. Granted, both machines are desktops, I use a laptop so rarely that I usually shut it down after use.
Most crashes came from laptop-related actions: monitor hot plugging, closing the lid while being awake, waking up with another monitor plugged in, etc.
> I use focus-follows-mouse, which is incompatible with a titlebar outside the relevant window.
What I meant by "titlebar integration" was when the applications themselves draw UI on the titlebar like in Nautilus or Tilix for instance[2].
The "menu in top bar" feature can be deactivated, so I think you could use Gnome.
[1]: 1. The Gnome UI (dock and topbar) are huge, which isn't much of a problem for me since they are on a smaller monitor. 2. Some applications don't scale properly and are either too zoomed in or out.
[2]: https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/src/images/gallery/tilix-..., https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Files?action=AttachFile&do=get&t...
It does with GNOME on Wayland. I have used GNOME on Wayland for a while with HiDPI and LoDPI displays.
Not true. I use KDE everyday on my primary computer (an HP Envy 17t laptop), and have so since June this year. It works excellently on my 4K display. (You even get to pick a non-integer scaling factor.)
Just FYI, I run Arch Linux, and am (consequently) always on the latest version of KDE.
Everything worked out of the box with KDE. Including my laptop’s various hot keys, sleep/wake, networking, etc.
KDE was quite incredible compared to the 1 kLOC xmonad that I’d been using in my previously laptop. Zero configuration. Everything working perfectly with no headache.
I always felt KDE was more of a corporate project. It's also been my impression that KDE comes with a lot more dependencies. IMHO GTK is a decent toolkit with lower complexity - it's GNOME shell that I really don't like but I live with it.
Add to it that KDE saw some significant early deployments in the European public sector, which resulted in some particular attention given to collaboration features (imap, calendaring etc). That might have looked corporate to some, but it was just a necessity for bootstrapped QT-centric businesses trying to take on the office giants like Microsoft and IBM.
I would argue that this is the case, and if it's not the case then mostly because it's not becoming more corporized but because it always was.
I would argue that there are three popular reasons for open source development, that there is a huge difference in user impact between these, that corporate interests have been the main driver behind open source, that having ones own preferred solution allowed to take profit from the competition, and now that the profits are dwindling distinction between competitors becomes less important than saving costs, and therefore everybody focusses on whatever appears to be as the winner in the current topic area.
Reason 1 for open source development, and probably the original reason, is art. People wanted to scratch an itch, they themself felt. They don't care much about gaining any additional advantage so they share the whole thing and not just the binaries, maybe by doing so gaining some recognition by other smart people. These artist developers usually hate the normal user and despise the disrespect these bring towards their piece of art. They often don't care about the trivial problems the user has, like the need for a complex yet intuitive UI. So users will often refrain from using these tools. Making them mostly unimportant at large, if not someone else comes along and uses the knowledge gained from it for another category of open source.
Reason 2 for open source development is the goal of social and political influence, which drives a person or group to develop tools to fascilitate communication between supporters and fascilitate spread of the culture. One example I see here is the scuttlebut network, which if you analyse closely, is not really good for everybody but mostly used by a group of New Zealend developers to spread their ideas of off-grid lifesstyle and something they call "solar punk". This is by no means criticism. It's a great tool/protocol and the ideas they spread with it also don't seem harmful to me. But without the desire to influence the political landscape they probably wouldn't invest that amount of time and energy to build their social network. This kind of project can gain quite a lot of influence on users at large. For instance all these 2chan,4chan,8chan imageboards might rival professional social networks in size and usability. But usually it's limited to people who support the political goals or at least can accept them. For instance it's unlikely that a group of feminist game developers would choose 8chan as their platform after it became a platform for the anti-feminist gamergaters.
Last but not least stand the group of open source project which directly or indirectly are for profit. For instance Linus Torvalds is one of the best earning people on this planet. Multiple companies have formed around linux distributions. And most of the commits nowadays come from people who are paid to do them. As said as it may sound, this is the most influential group. It's simply a fact that user-focussed development can be a daunting task and most people wouldn't do it if nobody paid them for it. So the development is also built around market dynamics. When cool UIs gain user attention most distros will focus their resources on one desktop manager that separates them from the rest, so that users who like these distinctive features will come to them. And when profits shrink they will look for whatever desktop manager is the current winner and jump on that band wagon, so they can reduce their development investments and focus these on other topics.
If we can agree on these three categories I think it's clear that the last one is the one that gains the most users, and therefore will also influence open source in general the most. Also it might have never been different from that, and as long as the getting is good it's also not to the users disadvantage.
> What gives?
Simple question to answer: why do so many devs work on OS X machines?
People value "it works without me thinking about it" over "it has features".
However, the people who value "features" are really loud.
The only thing most people use computers for is sharing pictures and videos. And what are the things that Linux sucks at making work out of the box: wireless, audio and video.
KDE could win the battle simply by making those work--every single time.
OS X does it. And look at how many developers use it.
Add to it that every Linux distribution has its idiosincratic approach to low-level subsystems, and you have a recipe for problems if you work anywhere higher up the stack.
But don't worry, eventually the problem will be solved the other way around: there will be a systemd-DE, and everyone will use that. /s
Too bad the 3 are OS problems, and the DE has no way to fix them.
If you don't want to do that, then you need to realize that the DE is THE point of contact between the user and those problems. As such, fixing those problems starts there.
Now, the DE developers may need to relentlessly pound Linus until he finally allows them to do something sane to fix things. And they may have to get chipset spec sheets and correct things deep in the kernel. And ...
RedHat, for all their faults, DOES THIS. And they catch a lot of flack for it.
RHEL is interested about that one guy or woman that actually decides(to pay them) and has control of the company. This person wants control overall of what people do with (her company) computers.
Desktops like Gnome have a very limited set of options, great for companies. More stable, less problems, people focusing more on work to do at the company.
I used to program KDE widgets for things like displaying the tides, the lunar phases, sunset times and so on. It was a cool thing to do and useful if I wanted to go fishing or to the beach. Marginally useful for work.
Working you need something that works, with the least amount of work and money possible. KDE is not designed for that.
Instead of configuring things, good point.
KDE initially used QT which didn't have a satisfying license. Possibly incompatible, I'm not sure it was ever resolved entirely as to what the condition of things was. What was clear is that a corporate entity could close source QT and effectively end KDE. After years, multiple business transactions and such, QT was really open sourced all the way. By then RedHat had gone "all in" with BlueCurve and GNOME. I think as a result of that, and in spite of various standards about open desktop support, the commercial apps tend to be on GTK+; maybe not full GNOME apps, but Firefox and VMware and others have GTK+ in them and they will seamlessly use your distribution's custom skin... Ending support for KDE is just momentum. There could be a bit of a European vs North America thing too; I'm just speculating but take Suse vs RHEL, RHEL is tons more common in the US despite Suse's remarkably quality, there has been some questions about its future at times but it is a remarkably high quality platform with a really nice aesthetic about it but RHEL and Centos tend to dominate.
To be honest, I didn't know Redhat still supported KDE.
KDE is great, I think it's always been a bit more consistent, a bit more cohesive and it has a great set of well crafted applications.
With Redhat being bought by IBM and everything, the possible rumors about Canonical being in play, it sort of seems like it might be time for a new distribution to take hold. KDE is a great place to start, there is an awful lot of good stuff in there.
As someone who uses RHEL (and also CentOS because we do our own support) at work all day long I'm surprised it had a supported desktop environment at all. I've spent tens of thousands of hours on logged into shells on RHEL systems and not once have I seen what the GUI looks like.
I'm sure RedHat to their delight has managed to find some clueless customer somewhere who's overpaying for RHEL as some GUI workstation environment, but that customer is going to be happy with GNOME.
I consider the following as possible reasons:
1. GTK+ is completely (GNOME) community owned (QT is a company owned, which companies like to avoid)
2. QT is LGPLv3+/GPLv3+. This, I assume, is to encourage buying commercial license than promoting free software. GTK+ is LGPLv2.1+, a lot of individual/small team developers prefer [L]GPLv2 over [LA]GPLv3.
3. Accessibility is pretty bad in GNU/Linux in general. But if there is one, the only choice is AT-SPI[0]. It's a GNOME project. I think KDE is a bit behind (I'm not sure though).
4. GNOME, GTK+ are GNU projects (Or many people prefer GNOME because it's a GNU project). I have seen many people in our Free Software User Group using GNOME just because of this.
> Gnome is approaching a crisis point, stripping away features as the debt comes due for bad design decisions made
We have seen a lot of software pieces whose development stalls, just because the code complexity increases way beyond some limit, or the main developer quits. Many (vocal) users prefer well configurable software pieces - but it comes with a high price. Many implement every possible feature to look the application c00l. But eventually as we gain experience, we may eventually abandon the project just because it's bloated (code wise), or even re-write it with less features, so that the code is more maintainable. If we look the code of many abandoned projects, we can see how bloated the code is, with many hacks, and bad designs.
I think GNOME is in the path of porting their applications to maintainable pieces, and eventually adding features as the code gets better.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_Technology_Service_P...
If avoiding commercial vendors is what you want, do not look at the emails in the GTK commit messages :-).
Qt is covered by an agreement with the KDE Free Qt Foundation which ensures that even if the company decides to stop developing it (even in case of bankruptcy or acquisition) or to stop releasing it as open source, the Foundation can release it under an open source license.
It's in no worse shape than GTK+ in this regard, except it has more paid developers.
> 2. QT is LGPLv3+/GPLv3+. This, I assume, is to encourage buying commercial license than promoting free software. GTK+ is LGPLv2.1+, a lot of individual/small team developers prefer [L]GPLv2 over [LA]GPLv3.
This is, legit, the other way 'round. Large companies are the ones preferring GPLv2 over GPLv3 because of the tivoization clause. In the services/consulting industry, ensuring that a BSP is free of (L)GPLv3 components is basically a standard statement in SoWs.
Small teams and independent developers sometimes stick with GPLv2 because it has fewer legal pitfalls and they don't mind commercial attention, but it's not in your favour :-).
The code complexity of Gnome has been steadily decreasing, not increasing in the last 7-8 years. The impending "crisis" has nothing to do with code complexity and everything to do with how design and implementation decisions were made (and, of course, with many of those decisions).
KDE was built on Qt, a framework that did not always have the licensing it has today.
GTK and GObject are C libraries, and many constructs are easy to reason about. Qt is C++ based and there is a LOT going on and the meta compiler is insane.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions#GNOME_d...
(interesting to compare with their KDE developers just below).
The whole reason everybody got stuck with systemd is because Gnome wouldn't run without it. Every distribution had a choice of getting rid of Gnome or moving to systemd.
I actually gave up Gnome several years ago when they decided to make it so that every window shared an IME. That would mean that I couldn't have a window that had Japanese input and a window that had Roman input at the same time. Red Hat developers were busy making patches to every IME that existed so that it would follow the grand vision of what they had decided for Gnome. The only hold out was FCITX. I think they eventually saw reason but there was a good year or so where Red Hat was bent on breaking my computer just because that's what the Gnome developers had decided was best for everybody.
Red Hat doubled down on Gnome a long time ago. They aren't interested in anything else.
Edit: Also of note - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions#Desktop...
Go down the list a bit and notice: "GNOME Shell - Primary development by Owen Taylor and many Red Hat developers and interaction designers" among many other core Gnome infrastructure.
They haven't made it easy to run GNOME Shell without systemd, but people have got it working in Gentoo, Void etc., see, for instance: https://dm.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/66ass2/update_void_li...
(That said, I don't run GNOME Shell on any of my machines.)
Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat (but not on RHEL or Fedora).
...yet.
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.
Source: Former sysadmin for ~5k CentOS desktop users (using gnome)
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.
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.
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.
There seem to be some plugins or scripts for grid tiling, but I've never investigated.
https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin (wow...) found via https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/87hutr/kde_making...
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.
Btrfs is still very much a moving target, with large patches every release.
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.
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.
Is it too user-friendly?
Edit: spelling
Something we could have gotten sooner if those guys actually worked together.
Could you make money selling it to coders? The go-to dev laptop for non-Mac users?
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.
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.
For instance -- Go has to link to glibc, and glibc doesn't provide proper support for static compilation (you _can_ do it but it's not actually supported in the RHEL sense by glibc upstream). And even when you force Go (through several magic incantations) to give you a static binary, networking and similar code will still use NSS (which uses dlsym and thus still requires dynamic libraries on the host to be installed).
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.
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
I use KDE, if I introduce someone to Linux they're likely to use KDE as well. If significant "influencers" use KDE, like universities and people writing software for the public sector, then many casual users will follow.
SUSE is German, Mandrake (Mandriva) was French, both defaulted to KDE. When I first used Linux, it was easy to find a magazine with an installation CD for one of these. Presumably there was some sponsorship, or simply network effect.
Also, Gnome's top menu bar felt like it was trying to imitate Mac OS, which has always been less common in Europe than North America.
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.
Disclaimer: I co-maintain the KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Applications packages in openSUSE and I'm not employed or affiliated with SUSE.
Back in the days of KDE 3, every survey showed KDE being the most popular Linux desktop by a very wide margin. I have no idea what the numbers are today.
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.
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.
What? Install EPEL, install Python. Done. Does get older version, but it's RHEL.
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).
Why push them all into 7.6? What’s going into 8?
Although with the merger I'd assume it's going to be a bit longer regardless.
Then again the day they decided there was no money to be made on the desktop could only lead to this.
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.
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.
Frustratingly I can not remember the exact procedure to sort this out (and it's only been a year since I had to do it!), but I can tell you it is possible to get KDE resizing everything perfectly without any of these artefacts.
It is something like this:
KDE system setting -> Display & Monitors -> Scaling, leave set to 1
In /etc/sddm.conf, add:
[XDisplay]
ServerArguments=-dpi 125
KDE system settings -> Fonts -> Force Font DPI set to 125
KDE system settings -> Icons -> some tweaks in here I think
The 125 change as preferred of course.
There may be other settings I am forgetting. But I could absolutely not deal with those corruption in Konsole, KWrite, Okular etc and now I have it absolutely perfect.
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.
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.
There's a bug report, and the suggested
QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=1 gwenview .
Haiku is free software too but their desktop environment is tightly integrated into the system because that's the experience they're building towards.
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...
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde...
KDE is a modern desktop environment that kicks GNOME in its ass.
There's a subtle difference :D
As a user, Gnome works just fine. Get over yourselves KDI guys. Sometimes you just have to walk away!
I used gnome 2 and really liked it, i switched to kde before gnome 3 and now I just like KDE apps and Plasma more (and I regularly try gnome 3 out of curiosity). Imagine how much more wonderful KDE would be if gnome developers worked on KDE instead.
I guess it's a matter of taste and personal experiences.
I sure would appreciate that most of the work could be shared but the world is not perfect and the ability to explore and try different things in different ecosystems is valuable too.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
Maybe the volunteer community keeps it alive, but one can't really be optimistic about Fedora KDE in light of this.
It was an outgrowth of the original "Red Hat KDE" work that Rex Dieter and other community members did for the original Red Hat Linux.
The fact that KDE was in RHEL for so long was a blessing that is sadly no more. :(
You mean like Fedora or CentOS?
Also, barring a miracle, this change will propagate to CentOS... and given the nature of Fedora, you'd have to be very naive or very optimistic not to worry that will also propagate to Fedora at some point... even if the KDE spin is largely community maintained.