I had to check the proposal at its source to make sure it wasn’t an April Fools joke.
I started using Fedora / GNOME as my daily driver on my laptop for a few months and can see where this change may be coming from. I really like how clean GNOME is and it works really well with smaller single screens (laptop) and multi-touch input /w gestures… but the reason I haven’t switched my desktop over is because I can’t see how that same design philosophy translates to a desktop environment with just a mouse and keyboard.
Trying to figure out how to manage background applications like chat programs, soft-phones, and even email seems to be an uphill battle with GNOME.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. My Linux experience might be limited, but I installed Ubuntu recently and tried sticking with GNOME and I just couldn’t wrap my head around how I was supposed to get anything done without going straight for the terminal. At that point, I might as well not use the desktop environment at all.
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I totally get why this is being put forth. Watch Brodie’s videos on the Wayland portals (after binging on LUS, of course ;-) ), and notice which DE is more actively helpful in making the portals better…I guarantee you it doesn’t start with a “G.” They actually mention this in the change proposal, and I doubt that Red Hat is blind to this difference.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays-out.
That would be huge improvement. They could even make it look and act almost as restrictively as GNOME is since KDE Plasma is so flexible and configurable so it can easily mimic GNOME or any other desktop out there. And from there one they could slowly start unlocking the full power of KDE Plasma desktop.
Reminds me of the KDE guy who quit Red Hat when they used to do exactly that (make KDE behave like GNOME) 22 years ago.
https://www.theregister.com/2002/09/26/kde_red_hat_spat_escalates/
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The proposal has yet to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but given Red Hat’s deep roots with GNOME, I have a hard time seeing this pass at least in the near-term.
Joshua Strobl known for his work on the Budgie desktop and Solus Linux along with Fedora developers Alessandro Astone, Marc Deop i Argemí,Steve Cossette, and Red Hat’s Troy Dawson have submitted this change proposal on making Fedora Plasma Workstation the default for next year’s Fedora 42 release.
The GNOME desktop is moved to a separate spin / edition, retaining release-blocking status.
Red Hat continues employing many upstream GNOME developers and is often driving many of the new features going into the desktop.
It’d frankly be very surprising if FESCo votes in favor of this proposal and everything comes to pass for making KDE Plasma 6 effectively the default desktop of Fedora Workstation.
In any event we’ll see where this goes and those wanting to run KDE Plasma 6.0 can easily do so as an alternative spin/option with the upcoming Fedora 40 release.
The original article contains 285 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 37%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’m not a fan of GNOME. I feel like it’s restrictive. KDE allows me to do more things with windows but feels much slower.
