Fedora KDE gets approval to be upgraded to sit alongside Fedora Workstation

The fact that replacing GNOME with KDE for Fedora Workstation was even discussed is crazy. I do hope that they really will put both as equals - if one is labeled Fedora Workstation and the other Fedora KDE, then I wouldn't call that equal...

Quoting: fenglengshunif one is labeled Fedora Workstation and the other Fedora KDE, then I wouldn't call that equal...

Exactly. Workstation vs KDE is like PC vs Linux. I wonder how that happened… Anyone using Linux should know of (and be annoyed by) the horrible habit of using PC as synonym for Windows.

KDE keeps leaping forward while Gnome spins its wheels. The Gnome Foundation needs to really get it together. A large part of the Linux community is looking at the stagnation and financial trouble going on there with eyes wide open. It would be a shame for mismanagement to kill a project that's pushed the Linux desktop forward, and is a key source of competition for KDE to compare itself against. I see this as Fedora admitting that Gnome is a bit stalled at the moment.

Quoting: LanzI see this as Fedora admitting that Gnome is a bit stalled at the moment.

There are a lot of Fedora users and KDE maintainers pushing for KDE to be better represented. Fedora's KDE spin (now Edition) has a lot more maintainers than it had in the past, so it's as well maintained as Fedora Workstation (GNOME), as compared to other spins like i3, Sway, and XFCE.

This isn't the singular opinion of "The Fedora Project" but like all FESCO decisions, a community of disparate people coming together to discuss this. Some don't have any opinion on KDE because they've never used it. The KDE and GNOME people are completely different aside from Neal Gompa. A quote from the issue tracker:

Quote(Honestly, the only thing we have in common right now is Neal imo, otherwise we don'T really communicate as-is)

A member of the Quality Assurance team for instance is concerned about being able to assure the quality of KDE:

QuoteFor KDE, this would be extra 51 apps! Compare the scope. I believe it's impossible for us to have the same quality bar here. And even if we had a huge surge of volunteers to test those regularly, it would just mean that we'd hardly ever release, because the likelihood of discovering a broken functionality in 73 apps (22+51) is much higher than in 22 apps. Workstation is quite lean on pre-installed apps, and yet we already struggle with this, and many people get irked by the whole compose being blocked on a bug in gnome-clocks/gnome-contacts/gnome-calendar/etc.

And concluding:

QuoteEither the quality requirements won't be the same, or we need to lower the Workstation one and meet somewhere in the middle for both.

This discussion has been going on for several months and it's taken this long because the KDE SIG are the ones interested in becoming an Edition, while the GNOME people mostly don't have an opinion. There were a lot of objections in the beginning about how confusing it would be to have two Editions listed equally. It was hard to see how it could work. Especially because no one wanted to get rid of GNOME because Fedora has a great relationship with GNOME.

So while it is an acknowledgement of how good a job the KDE SIG is doing at maintaining the KDE spin (despite some decisions not being in line with upstream like dropping X11 packages), this says little about what Fedora thinks of GNOME.

Awesome news. Hopefully this makes from-windows newbies realise Linux can be for them before installing the "wrong" version of Fedora then finding out afterwards.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualA member of the Quality Assurance team for instance is concerned about being able to assure the quality of KDE:

QuoteFor KDE, this would be extra 51 apps! Compare the scope. I believe it's impossible for us to have the same quality bar here. And even if we had a huge surge of volunteers to test those regularly, it would just mean that we'd hardly ever release, because the likelihood of discovering a broken functionality in 73 apps (22+51) is much higher than in 22 apps. Workstation is quite lean on pre-installed apps, and yet we already struggle with this, and many people get irked by the whole compose being blocked on a bug in gnome-clocks/gnome-contacts/gnome-calendar/etc.

Thanks for the quote. I am not a Fedora user -- what do they mean by "apps" here? Other than the core plasma bits (settings, kwallet, etc.) the only "KDE apps" I have installed on my Neon system are Okular, Dolphin, and Gwenview.

Edit: I forgot Kate.


Last edited by no_information_here on 8 November 2024 at 7:47 pm UTC

I just switched to KDE when I hopped to Bazzite/Kinoite. As much as I like Cinnamon, KDE feels much more robust and polished. It's exciting to see Fedora recognize this as well. I was on GNOME when I first tried Fedora, and I can safely say I'm enjoying the distro a lot more under KDE.

About time they name it "Fedora Desktop" and place it on the front next to Fedora Workstation. This way Desktop users will use a real Desktop OS and the industry can use something that has a simple UI like the current "Workstation" to do whatever job they want with their workstations. Ideally Fedora should provide a simple, polished stacking window manager for that and have a 3rd one called "Fedora Tablet" for tablets using GNOME ofc, so that people coming from other OSes aren't confused and ask themselves "is that Linux/is that really so bad?/that's why everyone calls it a bad option/that is just for tablets, I can't work with something like that on my PC!".


Last edited by sudoer on 8 November 2024 at 9:18 pm UTC

This is exciting! One gets tired of explaining that's it's not Linux that's hard, it's Gnome, so making KDE the default in more places will help. Maybe we even get KDE Red Hat by the time RHEL 10 comes around at work?
This leaves Ubuntu as the last important Gnome by default outpost... and I write this from Kubuntu ;)

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualA member of the Quality Assurance team for instance is concerned about being able to assure the quality of KDE:

QuoteFor KDE, this would be extra 51 apps! Compare the scope. I believe it's impossible for us to have the same quality bar here. And even if we had a huge surge of volunteers to test those regularly, it would just mean that we'd hardly ever release, because the likelihood of discovering a broken functionality in 73 apps (22+51) is much higher than in 22 apps. Workstation is quite lean on pre-installed apps, and yet we already struggle with this, and many people get irked by the whole compose being blocked on a bug in gnome-clocks/gnome-contacts/gnome-calendar/etc.

And concluding:

QuoteEither the quality requirements won't be the same, or we need to lower the Workstation one and meet somewhere in the middle for both.

Seems solid at first but the entire argument hinges on the fact all "apps" are of equal complexity and quality.

Either way, pretty happy about the news. Right when I was thinking of giving KDE a spin after fixing gnome's search tracker for the umpteenth time.