Hacker News new | comments | show | ask | jobs | submit login RHEL is deprecating KDE (jriddell.org) 259 points by trasz 16 hours ago | hide | past | web | favorite | 258 comments add comment HuShifang 15 hours ago [-] Does anyone have insights into the possible motivation behind this? I'm an industry outsider, but I've been a bit baffled by the way that Canonical, Purism, and now Red Hat are seemingly doubling-down on Gnome and shifting away from KDE Plasma at precisely the moment that (going by the discourse within my Linux infosphere, at least) Gnome is approaching a crisis point, stripping away features as the debt comes due for bad design decisions made (and good, if painful, design fixes not implemented) years ago, whereas KDE Plasma is cruising, constantly adding refinements onto an already good foundation. Or to put it differently: all the Linux experts I read and listen to (many of whom actually work at Canonical or Red Hat) are talking about how great KDE Plasma is, and how troubled Gnome Shell is, yet all the companies are rejecting KDE for Gnome. What gives? Is this just part of the growing "corporatization" of Linux -- i.e. an investment of resources into a more corporate-controlled project, with an eye on the bottom-line and optimizing business-consumer support, rather than into one that's more decentralized in its development and individual-user targeted (and that would just draw resources from the former)? reply chomp 14 hours ago [-] I don't know, it's always sort of been like this for KDE. Even going back to some of the earlier releases, it was always "That one DE with the funny library license". Qt was eventually moved to LGPL, but when stuff (desktop Linux) was starting to take off, KDE 4 came out and it was awful at first release. I vaguely remember Linus dumping on how bad it was which sure didn't help things. Then Ubuntu came out (well, before KDE 4, but during the funny licensing thing), which used Gnome because Debian used Gnome. Debian used Gnome because Qt had the QPL licensing: https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#Q_Public_License_.28QPL... Ubuntu got popular super quick, which got the DE popular, and the entire community just sort of got behind it. If you're creating productivity tools for your customers, you probably don't want to channel money into multiple projects that compete with each other. So, it's not too surprising that RH wants to focus on just Gnome. reply int_19h 9 hours ago [-] Ubuntu came long after the "funny licensing thing" - Qt was licensed under GPL for the first time in v2.2, which was in 2000. So the switch happened in KDE 2.x timeframe. And then KDE 3.x (which was arguably the pinnacle of the "classic" KDE series - the one that was competing against Gnome 2.x) was GPL from the get go, and that was 2002. The initial release of Ubuntu was in 2004. reply chomp 8 hours ago [-] You're right. Ubuntu warty shipped with libqt3. However if you remember back when, there was still an axe hanging over the KDE team in the form of Trolltech. The fear was that if Qt free stopped existing one day (or if Trolltech wanted to stop licensing as GPL), the community would be up a creek. The clarifying agreement: (https://dot.kde.org/2004/07/24/trolltech-and-kde-free-qt-fou...) finally fixed things in a way to where if Trolltech got bought out or stopped releasing the free version, it would immediately become BSD licensed. This agreement still exists to day as far as I know. As far as I remember discussions going back then, people did not trust Trolltech much, and knew the license situation was "weird" - even after the GPL licensing. I don't have anything I can cite specifically, only old discussions that I vaguely remember. reply int_19h 4 hours ago [-] I don't remember licensing being an issue in 2002, when I first started seriously experimenting with desktop Linux. Qt being dual-licensed under GPL was generally seen as good enough, since it meant that KDE could fork it if they needed to. There were several major distros running KDE 3.x out of the box - notably, SuSE and Mandrake. I think Ubuntu went with Gnome because back then it was perceived as the less configurable and flashy, but also less confusing of the two. KDE 3 was for those who wanted to configure everything - the "power user" crowd. Gnome 2 was more spartan (and became more so over time - I remember the outcry when they replaced the path textbox with breadcrumbs!), but mostly "just worked" in ways that people coming from Windows or OS X could readily understand. And Ubuntu was supposed to be the Linux distro for casual users... reply jdub 7 hours ago [-] Ubuntu was intentionally based on GNOME – before Ubuntu and Canonical even had names – because of the GNOME community's attitude towards usability and integration. (I was there.) reply zelly 3 hours ago [-] KDE is the 2000s model of window management, reminiscent of Vista with its gaudy transparency and compositing. The modern way is tablet-oriented UIs like Windows 10 Metro UI, which Gnome copied pretty well. Also Gnome is now scriptable with JavaScript. JavaScript for UIs is where the future has been headed for a while. reply alxlaz 32 minutes ago [-] I'm not sure what you mean by that. With its default settings, KDE is as "tablet-oriented" as it gets -- the UI of the shell and application are pretty similar to Windows 10's. Also, the whole thing is very scriptable in JavaScript -- KWin is at the point where, if I had the free time for it, I could make it do things that even FVWM couldn't do easily. reply beojan 3 hours ago [-] Tablet oriented UIs only work if you're solely consuming material. They really don't work for producing it. That's why Windows had to bring back the start menu, and many larger applications still don't use Metro. reply Vogtinator 56 minutes ago [-] Plasma's frontend is entirely written in QML, which is JavaScript. reply tomc1985 1 hour ago [-] And what's wrong with that? If it works, why mess with it? reply spiritcat 10 hours ago [-] Make MATE default!!1! reply Jach 1 hour ago [-] I survived the Gnome 3 transition in Gentoo by masking it and staying on 2.4 until Mate was ready. Throughout it all I've been able to keep my wobbly windows and window decoration with compiz and emerald, too. Mate doesn't need to be the default, but it does need to be easily installable. I never understood the "Kubuntu", "Xubuntu" etc. line of distros when the alternate DEs were easily available in stock Ubuntu. Similarly RHEL ought to make sure KDE is easily installable no matter what is their default... (Though is it common to even run a DE on Redhat?) reply JoshTriplett 14 hours ago [-] > all the Linux experts I read and listen to (many of whom actually work at Canonical or Red Hat) are talking about how great KDE Plasma is, and how troubled Gnome Shell is People who are happy about the current primary/default environment don't often go out of their way to talk about it. People who are happy about a non-default environment, or who are not happy with the default environment, talk about it more. It's a form of selection bias. reply simion314 14 hours ago [-] Just go on the GNOME subreddit and you will see there actual GNOME users complaining, you will see mostly this: - how I get tray icons working (tray icons were removed) - GNOME won't start (an extension incompatibility can make the DE crash) - lag when some animation happens - how can I make the theme to use less padding (some devs are considering removing theming support completely ) This are complaints for actual GNOME users that update to latest version and have unpleasantness surprises. reply znpy 11 hours ago [-] I'm sad to say this, but today's GNOME is a complete shitshow. Fedora's default gnome is completely unusable. It's like if GNOME developers wake up in the morning and wonder: "how can we prevent our users from doing their jobs today? What useful feature can we drop this month? What fully functional application can we replace with a half-assed 200 LOCs one?" I am not surprised though: has anyone tried learning gtk programming recently? Unless you learn to use the C library first (and before that, the GObjext library), it's nearly impossible. There's, for example, a nice python 3 tutorial and it covers the basics nicely. However it fails completely to answer the question "how do I continue on my own from here?". The most important issue however is that it's been like this for years and GNOME developers don't even acknowledge this. GNOME 3 is so bad that people took the effort to revive, update and keep using GNOME 2 in the form of Mate Desktop. And Mate Desktop is a major player in the DE space. reply systematical 8 hours ago [-] I've used gnome 3 everyday for several years. I browse and code in it. What am I missing? What are the problems? I have seen few. reply Brian_K_White 3 hours ago [-] This is essentially a meaningless question. Whatever issues other people conflict with, they are by definition already known to be no problem for you.