In the end I don’t care whether the “default” Fedora is KDE or GNOME, as long as the spin of the other DE is maintained well. Except for the ootb experience which is better on the GNOME version with setup steps for proprietary drivers and whatnot, the KDE spin feels like a first-class citizen.
But KDE just makes more sense for most users I feel. Currently you start wondering where your tray icons went (for example) when switching from a non-Linux OS. For gaming, KDE is simply more mature with built-in Wayland VRR support for example.
To be fair, it would make much more sense to switch to KDE for distributions like Ubuntu. Fedora never sold itself as a distribution targeting new Linux users coming from other operating systems. Therefore at least that point shouldn’t be the reason to use KDE. Also distributions aren’t just for new users and should not decide too much because of that. On top of that, a user is new for a very short period of time anyway. I digress…
Whether it makes sense for Ubuntu I’m not sure, but I don’t think that it would make less sense on Fedora either way.
Fedora is a “batteries included” distro the way I see it, and besides, I don’t see how KDE likely feeling more familiar for, say, Windows users makes it a worse choice for experienced Linux users.
A big part of what should be the default DE for a given distro is obviously very subjective, so I’d actually be surprised if they really changed the default because of this proposal. It has valid points and I’d say KDE is on average more appealing to the very broad target audience that Fedora aims to have, although as I said: that’s just my opinion/gut feeling.
As long as KDE support stays at least as good as it has been so far in Fedora, I’ll be happy.
Fedora is a “batteries included” distro
You obviously don’t have NVIDIA, kudos, but no CUDA… Also, some of us like codecs, etc.
I wasn’t saying everything is included, and sure, proprietary things like Nvidia drivers aren’t included (and I’m aware of the mesa-freeworld packages that replace the bundled ones). I was referring to Fedora being a “complete” experience in a sense that you get a preconfigured desktop environment, an installer where you can say “just install to this drive, I don’t care about anything else” and quite a few preinstalled applications. It’s not like Arch for example, where you manually partition your drives and chroot into your system to install packages and a bootloader just to get up and running.
I was more referring to the need for RPMFusion (batteries), which is a stumbling block for newbs unless they check the what to install after you install Fedora sites etc. I appreciate the purity, but the poor confused person coming from winblows may not…
GNOME 46 has experimental VRR support too
I know, that’s available just now with Fedora 40. And you have to know that the flag exists, it’s not a visible setting until you enable it. With KDE it’s just there (and has been for quite a while).
Is this an April Fool? I trust nothing posted on 1 April!
timezones are always crazy on 1 April. My initial assumption was it’s a joke. It would be awesome though! More people should use or at least try KDE.
Well then, it’s an interesting proposal because it would be nice to see a major player default to KDE. I don’t see it happening though.
I don’t like KDE at all. Too busy, terrible-looking right click menu on the desktop (some lines long, some short). It’s that stuff that give me OCD. I like cleanliness in the UI.
Lol, that’s what makes me hate GNOME. If I wanted the bare minimum I’d just start a raw display server with only 1 program in it.
But my brain has no issue with dozens of things happening at once (ADHD).
If I recall correctly, the desktop right click menu was one of the things they fixed in Plasma 6, actually.
Similar here. I have switched to xfce after struggling with gnome and kde.
If only it looked bad but performed well, I might still take it. No matter how many times I try, it’s just not stable for me to daily drive.
What are you trying to run it on? An Arduino? I haven’t tried it on a raspberry pi but I’ve never had an issue with performance on GNOME and I don’t have the latest hardware
I also never had an issue with Gnome… 🤷♂️
They like to complain about the memory usage on startup. Because it caches a lot of applications for fast loading. It will clear them when required. The more memory you have the more it will use. My laptop has 16gb it uses around 3gb on fresh boot with Fedora 39 and GNOME, I recently upgraded a 10 year old workstation to 64gb (because it was cheap) and with Fedora Silverblue 39 it uses a bit more memory on startup. Unused memory is wasted memory.
I personally don’t see the Fedora team breaking away from Gnome just yet, but he makes some good points.
Starting in 2025, KDE Plasma’s release cycle switches to a semi-annual cadence that lines up with Fedora Linux releases, enabling a tight interlock of development and integration between Fedora and KDE.
This is the key change that might make such a move viable, imo. One of the key benefits of Gnome to point release distros, and Fedora in particular, is the predictable 6-month release cycle. If KDE achieve the same, then it will make the proposition a lot more attractive.
This is not April fools. The submitter did want to mess with people, though.
Please
In theory, I would love to use KDE and use Gnome only with many plugins and tweaks (like IMHO the majority of Gnome users out there, see Ubuntu desktop).
In practice, KDE has still too many unsolved problems:
- For years now, I try KDE from stable mainstream distros in standard VMs, always something from the vanilla KDE setup segfaults within the first 30min w/o me even starting to customize it. It seems this is not only a personal anecdote, but the experience of a lot of people trying KDE. (Gnome in these VMs runs stable w/o any segfaults, these VMs sometimes are running for days)
- KMail … even the KDE community themselves point out all the trouble with KMail: It works, until it doesn’t, no support for GMail OOTB, etc … This problems with KMail are known/reported/experienced for years now, w/o being fixed. Thunderbird/Evolution work OOTB and stable for my needs since a decade by now
- Online-Accounts for Gnome works on every distribution OOTB for me, for all my professional/private needs. Again, in theory Dolphin is a much better file manager than Nautilus, in practice I can remote mount everything in Nautilus
In summary: I am not a big fan of Gnomes UI and would much prefer KDE, but in practice Gnome works stable, lets me setup my online accounts/connectivity and email and simply works. The KDE community ignored too many of this issues for too long (stability) and is still ignoring the widely known issues with KMail (fix it, dump it or at least communicate it is not ready for general use). I lost trust that these issues will ever be fixed by now. (Was a happy KDE 3.X user back in the day.)
I believe these problems would be sorted out pretty quickly if big player like Fedora really switched. We can only dream for now…
I agree, it would give KDE a boost.
Merkuro Mail might fix some of KMail’s issues. It still uses the same backend though, and isn’t really stable yet.
I know you mean good, but exactly this is the problem: Fix known issues with KMail or with KMails backend? - Nope. Write a new E-Mail client which someday, in the far future might work and have all the features we need? Let’s go!
IMHO Evolution had the benefit, that it initially was written by Ximian and brought up to be good enough™. Honestly, I don’t see anyone investing this time, money and energy in a new KDE email client (or in KMail).
Building KDE on gnome is not feasible
If this is real, this is actually a good idea. Even things like multi monitor management work a lot better on KDE imho
Funnily enough, leading the proposal is Joshua Strobl, the lead dev of the budgie DE. More here https://joshuastrobl.social/@me/112197620423915344
You have my vote. The out of the box experience would be polished and I have no doubt would be done very well.
Yes please
I like the UX KDE gives over Gnome. It feels way more like a personal computer, something that you can modify and do multiple tasks with.
Gnome is a lot more limited in functionality, but it’s also a lot more stable. KDE is buggy and has a tendency to crap the bed a few minutes after startup, which never happened to me with Gnome.
It’s a though decision, but lately I’ve been thinking of switching back to Gnome.
Unfortunate date to publish a proposal on…
I might use XFCE… but PLEASE GO KDE… I CANNOT EXPLAIN MY LOATHING OF GNOME
oh I can explain mine, Bad performance, lacking features, devs who don’t care about problems that effect the user.
I felt that way before meeting a GNOME dev. Their target audience is the whole world of users who either don’t already have a computer or don’t know how to use one. They don’t want people customizing their apps. They don’t want a calculator named anything other than “Calculator”. They’re target audience is the 2B users that we don’t currently interact with.
I mean that’s fine, but when people complain about text being too blurry and not sharp enough, their response was something along the lines of sharpness not being the sole metric for performance…
who the fuck does that? and they do this shit all the time
I think they’re targeting people who want to get stuff done. I don’t want to remember the icon for every application I use, I just search or I click on the window I want. Not a waste of screen space at the bottom, just a thin strip of basic stuff so I can focus on the task at hand. Yes KDE is supposedly easier to customise but that’s a requirement given it’s fugly out of the box