Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat is Planning To Deprecate KDE on RHEL By 2024 (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: This week, the Linux distro biz emitted Fedora 29 and RHEL 7.6, and in the latter's changelog the following appears, which a Reg reader kindly just alerted us to: "KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE), which has been provided as an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment has been deprecated. A future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the default GNOME desktop environment." In other words, if you're using RHEL on the desktop, at some point KDE will not be supported. As our tipster remarked: "Red Hat has never exactly been a massive supporter of KDE, but at least they shipped it and supported you using it."
What's a shame here is that Fedora has actually done a much better job at packaging a polished and functional KDE desktop than Ubuntu ever did. That's part of the reason that I've stuck with Fedora on my home desktop, after getting fed up with OpenSUSE many years ago.
Because it works and isn't tied to systemd like Gnome. You can't make support money if everything works smoothly.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
so rhel 8 2024?
IBM's first order of business?
Bye Bye
Or was it decided before that?
First you take the idea of X-and-WMs, then let the WM part bloat into a humongous pile of crap, so that with two of those piles most of the available space is taken and nothing else will thrive. And now one of the piles is enough crap already for even purveyors of poettering-infected software red hat.
I'm typing this on something running flwm and wbar, and wbar is already well more than strictly needed. Gah, I miss WM2. And that's just on an actual desktop. MY servers are headless.
Microsoft deprecated having more than 16 colors starting with Windows 8.
Can't make money off of open source unless it has bugs, quirks, and user interface complexities that make it uneconomic to use without paid support.
Red Hat is pleased to announce its new desktop environment... systemd
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
KDE sucks anyway.
The best version of KDE.
I can't blame them. Pushing things like the disaster that Discover is or the mess that KDEPIM has been since version 4 to companies is calling for trouble. More trouble than paid support can chew.
KDE prioritizes bleeding edge tech and new features over performance and stability, specially at the start of new major versions, and I say this being a KDE user since version 2.0. That approach doesn't work well in enterprise.
I like Qt and use the "konsole" terminal app. Guess I need to find a new tabbed terminal app that I like as much as konsole.
Support for KDE in Red Hat products has been crap for everything post Red Hat 9.
If you want KDE use SUSE.
The last time I looked, which was a while ago (hence the question) there was quite a schism between KDE 3 and KDE 4 proponents. Did KDE4 ever reach a level it was (almost) universally adopted? Did they get forks like GNOME did (GNOME 2 -> Mate = supported GNOME 2, GNOME 3 -> Cinnamon = usable GNOME 3)?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
In 2024 M$ will have merged with IBM and made Explorer a viable Linux DE that will simply sit on top of Redhat.
It'll be Gnome vs. Explorer, not Gnome vs. KDE anymore. KDE is too similar to Explorer for Microsoft's liking I'm sure.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I don't use RedHat anymore, and was never that impressed with it when I did. KDE on Ubuntu/Debian works pretty well, and I have no incentive to change to GNOME and figure out how to do everything I need to do all over again.
Sun's Project Looking Glass was the last forward-thinking desktop environment I saw.
What became of it ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
I think some context is required for the article.
1. RHEL is mostly used in server environments. Desktops usually aren't a focus for RHEL users.
2. Support for KDE Plasma is being removed. That doesn't mean you can't install KDE, just that it's not supported. If something breaks you're on your own.
3. There were some other major removals or depreciations which the article mostly skips over. Python 2 is going away in favour of Python 3. Btrfs is being dropped entirely. A lot of driver support is being trimmed for future releases.
Back in 2005 KDE was freeken awesome and there were distributions that focused on properly packaging it. Today not so much. It does not help that KDE went to shit after the last 3.x release. GNOME 2 sucked, but GNOME 3 got better in some areas. Then forks of GNOME 3.x fixed some of those issues (mainly a lack of a menu system to find programs you just installed). Unity also sucked in this regard. Cinnamon which is based on GNOME 3 works really well, but lacks Ubuntu's polish. For whatever reason Linux Mint's developers insist on fucking it up with proprietary NVIDIA drivers. That for a long time got in the way of seamless and smooth upgrades that one could experience on Ubuntu. Ubuntu of course has fucked things up alongside every major distribution between System D and bundling malware. Between Amazon, Flatpak, and Snaps GNU/Linux has gone to shit. Somehow I'm still using it, but only because everything else is either worse or support just isn't there. I could probably utilize some un-fucked up distribution that doesn't have System D, Snaps, or Flatpak, but I know those distributions all have there own quirks. No, I don't want the latest and greatest outside of printer drivers, kernel, and a graphics stacks (ie hardware support). I want stability, ease of use, and wide support (I'm not even demanding support for non-native applications, but just what gets built for GNU/Linux), etc.
This is part of why I dumped RedHat for Mandrake in 1998 and never looked back. Now it's Manjaro FTW.
FT!
We have been a RHEL/CentOS shop (servers and workstations) since around 1996. In our environment, it is necessary for system operators to be logged-in on the consoles of more than one computer at a time. We started out with GNOME (actually installed it on Solaris before moving to Linux), and found that the GCONF databases did not like having more than one instance of the same user (with a shared, NFS-mounted $HOME) logged in. Configuration options would get scrambled, sessions couldn't be saved, etc. These problems did not occur with KDE, so we migrated all of our workstations to KDE as our officially-supported environment. If GNOME can now function properly with multiple login instances, OK, we'll try it - but if not, looks like LXDE or something else. Good thing I'm retiring before 2024. Grumble.
Try KDE Neon, it's built on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and maintained by the KDE community.
Slackware still installs (as default option) and runs KDE very well. And if you like installing everything from source, like me, then slackware's great, even if it'll probably die in a few years.
And thanks to Red Hat for giving us all a 5-year heads-up.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Nah, it'll be replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe cost cutting from the new owner has started?
The investment had to pay off.
Redhat is deprecated itself anyway.
Then it still has KDE. Support is for people who should probably not be using KDE.
Sounds like a bad idea to me.. Really ANY desktop is a bad idea. Let them be servers.
RedHat probably wont even exist in 2024. It will be called BlueHat or just IBM Linux if they don't manage to run it into the ground 1st. They'll probably replace all of the GPL desktop environments with an OS/2 desktop environment. Good reddens to RedHat for pushing the bastardization that is SystemD on the Linux community
As a KDE user I personally deprecated RedHat back in 2001 or so when I switched to SuSE Linux, and abandoned RPM all together when I switched to Debian Etch.
Redhat - the corporate world loves it, but actual people who like Gnu/Linux seem not to.....
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
RHEL has never been advertised as a desktop distro. I'm not sure this news will affect more than a couple of people.
Besides KDE in RHEL is extremely outdated and contains very few KDE applications, so it's not like it was a good choice for its users in the first place.
Who needs anything more?
Want more?
FVWM2!
Peace out.
its only about KDE SC 4 which its already very old.
This is why Red Hat needed to be bought by IBM. It is 100% certain that IBM will put KDE back to first class status. To do otherwise just accelerates the loss of desktop share, and when that goes, server/VM soon follows. This is already the trend due to incompetent Red Hat stewardship.
I don't care, we'd all be better off with Ubuntu in the server room than Red Hat anyway.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Yes. Another KDE (Poettering)-ism is that minor releases would change major
features - not fix them. So while I like / use KDE, those types of lazy behaviors
really get under my skin. Anyone remember the screen saver with widgets at the
same time? Yeah, that sorta thing.
CAP === 'preempt'
KDE was the only part of linux I understood. I guess we'll have to wait a lost generation for linux adaptation.
KDE is like Myst. Gnome is like Pong. WTF?
Or, as everyone else calls it, "suicide by cop".
Doesn't have Ubuntu's app for adding proprietary drivers, so I can't set up my wifi on it.
That's the only way I can make sense of this. Microsoft, knowing that IBM will soon move Red Hat out of reach of the old Miguel/Friedman infiltration axis, moves to cause as much damage as possible in the time they have left.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Don't you mean IBM?
Doesn't have Ubuntu's app for adding proprietary drivers, so I can't set up my wifi on it.
Yes, it does. It's called "ubuntu-drivers". I used it to install my Nvidia GT 650M.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
And the fact that this is upmodded, makes this whole brain turd all the more retarded.