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.
Slowly more and more distros are looking over to a KDE future. GNOME devs being so incredibly hard to work with and this feeling of a huge community that is KDE and with how polished Plasma 6 is becoming, many distros are finally looking to at least give Plasma a try as a default. GNOME is well polished but there are so many extremely important and urgently needed features that KDE already implemented that are not even being discussed for GNOME. Many distros are getting fed up with how slow GNOME is into advancing their desktop. They take 2 years to change a few buttons around. And now that Plasma 6 has a 6-month fixed release schedule, it finally aligns with what distros want.
First Valve shocked the corporate distro world by choosing the seemengly less stable KDE as their default for the Steam Deck, which proved to be an amazing choice after all. Then recently, Nobara Linux, one of the most used Fedora distros, also switched to KDE as the default. And now Fedora is discussing into switching the main distro too. Qt6 is also a really flexible and promising framework and developers seem to have more fun working with it than with GTK4.
Recent switchers from Windows also largely prefer KDE instead of the minimalist approach, macOS-like GNOME. And linux has been gaining a lot of popularity and market share recently, and I could bet that a lot of these new users are not on GNOME, at least not on vania GNOME.
A great example is KDE having hit a HUGE record of bug reporting and feedback submissions, which means that more people than ever are using KDE actively and actually trying to help the project somehow. KDE has also been having a huge presence in social networks like YouTube and TikTok (especially because of its fun and interesting features that make GNOME look plain and a bit boring, needless to say GNOME vanilla wont convince a Windows user to switch…) which might speed up its adoption too.
Ah i see kde has fixed the issue where dropdowns had broken behavior when scrolling https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/-/commit/f6ca218607ff7e5d5066eb3224154c3256cb9516 this was my main blocker why i couldn’t use it when i tried it around 2020. Maybe i could give it another try?
Is this an April Fool? I trust nothing posted on 1 April!
Man, why do people publish serious announcements on April 1st? Between the XZ backdoor that almost pwned all of Linux, a Silksong update, Bellular News taking some absolutely degenerate stance with games “journalism”, and this, I don’t know what the fuck to believe.
Defended Kotaku sucking up to SBI, downplayed and ignored SBI’s harrassment campaigns and the apparent racism of some of its employees. There’s also some conflict of interest because his company is in bed with SBI. I skimmed through most of the videos, it’s really not worth my time.
According to some comments, he also said some ridiculous things in support of SBI’s witch hunt against a particular Steam user on twitter, but I won’t go wading into that cesspool, so can’t verify.
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.
Please
