Gnome is not the default for Fedora Workstation

Seeing this title, I immediately felt this is the best (unintended?) clickbait title of HN today. "What? This must be wrong!". I just had to click, especially that the article is on gnome.org. I thought I really missed something serious.

Turns out, GNOME is not the default desktop environment of Fedora Workstation because the team considers that GNOME is the desktop environment of Fedora Workstation, anything else is not tested / supported.

All right, I missed nothing noteworthy after all.

> if you tell people that ‘hey, any part of this OS is replaceable and should still work’ you have essentially created a testing matrix for yourself of infinite size

Fair enough.

But between telling people that any part of the OS is replaceable and telling people, for example, that Gnome can be replaced with XFCE, there's a world of difference in terms of the support and testing effort required. It's practically possible to support more than one possibility for some default settings, even if supporting all possible combinations isn't practically possible.

That said, the Fedora Workstation team is of course free to support whatever it chooses. Just quibbling with the reasons given, not the choice itself.

Gnome is the default because it is controlled by Redhat, just like all the other “defaults”

linux was better when it was made for its users by its users. now there's too much focus on developers making a product for users.

why?

the computer most people choose is an android or an iphone, and these developers are not making a product to compete for them, so we're really leaving the biggest group of users in the cold and hunting for artefacts.

tl;dr - it is not the default, it is the only one supported by Fedora and RHEL devs so they can focus on hardware support

Good for them I guess, Red Hat have historically done quite a lot in moving Linux forward, funding or employing a lot of the developers solving hard and sometimes 'unsexy' problems.