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...

if 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.

I 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:

(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:

For 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:

Either 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.

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

For 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 ;)

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

For 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:

Either 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.

I am pleased that KDE is becoming more and more valued in the Fedora community. Fedora + KDE is a win-win combination, in my opinion.

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

For 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.

There are quite a lot of them: https://apps.kde.org

I don't know which ones Fedora's KDE SIG thinks are core.

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

For 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:

Either 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.

I'm sure they've managed to figure it out as they've since approved the change.

I tried out KDE for a while due to a missing feature on GNOME, but KDE then broke a similar feature, so I went back to GNOME. I agree that presenting two options will lead to a lot of confusion for users. But Fedora is already a distribution that leads to a lot of confusion with the codec limitations, so this is paltry in comparison. I'm interested to see how they present KDE.

As a current user of Fedora KDE, I am looking forward to the future of the KDE Edition.

I wouldn't be surprised if Workstation ends up being renamed to "Workstation - GNOME Edition," with the Plasma edition renamed similarly, in order to reflect the change. Of course, I can't speak on behalf of the Fedora Project or any of its internal groups, but there already seems to be some discussion of future branding on the issue tracker, at least.

For KDE, this would be extra 51 apps!

The last time I tried Fedora KDE it was an awful experience, it literally felt bloated like Windows with lots of pre-installed applications I just don't need. It was some time ago, but this doesn't read like much has changed. So I wonder if Fedora KDE is really a good show case (for Linux in general) & deserves the edition upgrade.

I tried out KDE for a while due to a missing feature on GNOME, but KDE then broke a similar feature, so I went back to GNOME.

Yeah, that's exactly my experience. I really like the Gnome workflow, but because of disliking some of the dev's attitudes/opinions, and the fact that there's a lot of people hyping KDE (and now companies like Valve funding it), I keep an eye on every KDE release, but it's always the same: I try it, it breaks, I regret.

Maybe it's a "me" issue, but even on Windows, if I use it a bit, I find some bugs, even doing nothing. Gnome is just fine.

I just hope that Fedora Cosmic become a fantastic distro.

I think opensuse solved this whole equal question years ago very simple, one installer and you simply select, neither is preselected.

There are quite a lot of them: https://apps.kde.org

I don't know which ones Fedora's KDE SIG thinks are core.

Including all of those as core apps would be lunacy. What I was implying was that only a skeleton number of them is required to make a perfectly usable desktop OS.

I have been glad to see a trend that some Linux distros install fewer things by default and leave more choices up to the user.

There are quite a lot of them: https://apps.kde.org

I don't know which ones Fedora's KDE SIG thinks are core.

Including all of those as core apps would be lunacy. What I was implying was that only a skeleton number of them is required to make a perfectly usable desktop OS.

I have been glad to see a trend that some Linux distros install fewer things by default and leave more choices up to the user.

This page has a list of applications that are likely in Fedora KDE's core: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/kde/

I think the more apps installed, the better, generally. It's beneficial to new users to not need to search for and install applications.

I tried out KDE for a while due to a missing feature on GNOME, but KDE then broke a similar feature, so I went back to GNOME.

Yeah, that's exactly my experience. I really like the Gnome workflow, but because of disliking some of the dev's attitudes/opinions, and the fact that there's a lot of people hyping KDE (and now companies like Valve funding it), I keep an eye on every KDE release, but it's always the same: I try it, it breaks, I regret.

Maybe it's a "me" issue, but even on Windows, if I use it a bit, I find some bugs, even doing nothing. Gnome is just fine.

I just hope that Fedora Cosmic become a fantastic distro.

I really like GNOME, but it has a few deficiencies that are unlikely to be fixed for a very long time. I like KDE too, but the UX is not as good. In some places it's much better, but overall it's not as well-constructed. Both have bugs.

COSMIC is a great desktop. I ran it as my main desktop for a few weeks. I'd love to try it again when it's stable and has more features like support for graphics tablets and integrated input methods :)