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.
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.
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I also never had an issue with Gnome… 🤷♂️
Hmm… my right click menu looks uniform. Could be your theme.
If I recall correctly, the desktop right click menu was one of the things they fixed in Plasma 6, actually.
I’ve said it before, I don’t really like KDE or GNOME because they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum.
GNOME seems to have a very vivid ideal of beauty, and that ideal is “empty windows that don’t do anything.” Open up a utility app, Big window with lots of empty space with a few buttons crammed in the top bar and not enough options to do what you actually need to do.
KDE feels a lot more amateurish in that…things don’t line up as well, the spacing between elements is off a lot, and the whole experience is BUSY! Lots of UI elements everywhere. A basic utility will have more options than you knew what to do with just in case. It’s hideous the way the control panel at a nuclear power plant is hideous.
So I use Cinnamon. Which Gnome is trying very hard to corrupt, but for now it works while still being comfortable and comprehensible.
I agree with you.
If forced to use either of the two, I’m going with KDE in almost all circumstances.
I was reading this whole thing thinking “this is why I use Cinnamon.” I like that I can customize Cinnamon without it being ridiculous.
That said, the best Cinnamon experience is on Mint. Fedora’s spin is crappy. So I don’t really have any teeth in the game.
Yeah basically if you want to use Cinnamon, use Mint. It’s the showcase distro.
I like KDE’s conformance to open standards, which is better than GNOME’s, and pace of development. However you’re absolutely right that the UI on KDE is inconsistent, messy, and buggy as hell. GNOME is still my go to because it’s just so polished, but I’m looking forward to COSMIC this year for that nice tiling workflow
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).
Similar here. I have switched to xfce after struggling with gnome and kde.
Same here. I can’t stand the lack of cleanliness in UI. In Plasma, within 5 mins of usage, I can already notice imperfections everywhere.
Have you guys tried windows?
sadly.
Have you?
KDE rules, not surprised more and more and moving its way
The reason this is feasible now, is that KDE is changing the release cycle for Plasma, Frameworks, and the Apps to all be aligned with the sometime-before-the-distro-release 6-month cycle, that allows for a release of everything KDE to be taken, tested properly, and released with the 6-month release cycle for Ubuntu, Fedora and other distros following that release cycle. Until recently, we would have the releases of these components all separate throughout the year, meaning that it would be harder for the distros to package, test and ship Plasma as a flagship desktop because of stability concerns (also because of bugs).
Now, with Plasma 6 being all about making Plasma better and more stable, especially in the Wayland department, I’d say Plasma is superior to GNOME in every way (except funding). At this point, it’s not too unrealistic to see distros consider the switch to Plasma, including major distros like Fedora, as seen here. I really think this is the best time to consider using Plasma over GNOME.
You have my vote. The out of the box experience would be polished and I have no doubt would be done very well.
Dang, I finally started liking gnome over kde because of fedora
you could just use the gnome fedora spin, this is just about making it not the default.
What about upgrades, are they going to switch everyone to KDE?
No you’d just find that your fedora says gnome edition or whatever
why would they post this on April first this is amazing
Not gonna happen obviously. It’s so funny to see every fedora announcement on linuxfr.org detailing every minute aspect of the release while ignoring completely KDE.
Obviously it’s a difficult sell - but if this got positive attention I could see Fesco relenting and “upgrading” the branding on Fedora KDE to Fedora Plasma Workstation
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.
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?
Please don’t! If RedHat start participating in KDE, it will kill it like it killed GNOME.
This is probably the best take in fedora not adopting KDE i’ve heard to date lmao
GNOME always seemed like an odd choice considering how little customization is available. It feels like a prescriptive approach, you will use your computer the way GNOME feels is appropriate, whereas KDE tries to accommodate however you want to use your computer.
This is the advantage to GNOME. I know that all I need to make a Linux desktop work the way I want is to install GNOME and GSconnect. I really like default GNOME, adwaita, and the actually usable out-of-the-box experience. Sure there’s a learning curve but that’s true of every desktop and I really hate the context menu hell that KDE imported over from Windows.
Not to mention there are still a lot of amateur mistakes over at KDE like the recent themes fiasco.
People who want the customizability of KDE will use the KDE spin or a distro that ships it by default. People downloading a massively popular distro like Fedora should get something as maximally functional as possible out of the box, and with all the stuff they’ve been adding recently, GNOME is more and more polished almost to a macOS point. I just recently found the built-in RDP, SSH, and filesharing toggles in the settings menu, and they’re easy enough that I’d actually call GNOME quite beginner friendly at this point.
Back in the Gnome 2 days this wasn’t as much the case. Plus KDE was kind of a mess back then so the main choices were Gnome or XFCE which had fewer features. When Gnome 3 came around the devs switched hard to a much more opinionated approach, leading to Gnome 2 forks like Cinnamon since KDE was still very underpolished. It’s a bit regrettable that all that effort was poured into Gnome forks instead of improving KDE especially considering how great it is now.
Gnome 2 was great and I wish MATE got more attention
Having a company behind software means you can pay to have your bugs fixed. Big distros want that stability for their corporate customers. It’s no secret or anything. KDE has sponsors, but doesn’t have a direct relationship with a huge contractor like RH. Same reasoning for systemd.
Politics, basically.
I wonder if the Gnome team’s cavalier aditude towards agreed upon standards is related to Redhat’s influence 🤔 It’s totally possible the devs are just high on their own fumes due to being the default for so long.
Whoever pays the band decides what they play.
GNOME is grared toward dev people who need something almost as minimal as a wm. KDE is better suited for average users.
I’m a developer and I’ve strongly preferred KDE over Gnome for many years. I find the lack of features and customization in Gnome extremely irritating.
Donno why i was downvoted. I’ve been an avid KDE fan for years.
Meanwhile I CANNOT be productive in GNOME. There are hundreds of maybe thousands of KDE features that make IT and dev work so extremely easy. I could make a 50 page comment just listing them. I can start with how horrendously basic and generic the default gnome terminal is.
But then KDE also is in fact good for average ex-Windows users because it has stuff where people expect it to, has features that people expect too (cough minimize/maximize buttons cough) and well yea KDE is better for average users.
So KDE is better for IT users and developers, and is also better for average users. And since it supports vsync off, VRR and HDR it is also better for gaming.
So wait is KDE better for literally EVERYONE? 🤔
LMAO no.
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.
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.
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).
I’d be against this, despite using Plasma on one of my systems and having an overall positive view of the project. Although admittedly I do slightly prefer Gnome because consistency is something I’m really anal about, so there’s bias here.
Gnome just feels a lot more stable and consistent. It works well, has a good release cadence (although KDE is making steps to improve theirs), and most people who use Fedora are happy with it.
Critically, Gnome has good accessibility features, and they’re improving rapidly at the moment. I think good accessibility features are imperative for a workstation distro.
I’ve also never really heard any Fedora Plasma Spin users quality of Fedora’s work, or it being called a “Spin” instead of workstation. It’s already treated with pretty much the same level of care as Gnome is, so what would this achieve, other than months of bickering and a bit of confusion?
Good proposal
