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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."

15 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. 22 Years after the release of KDE 3.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The best version of KDE.

  2. Can't blame them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Don't use KDE much anymore but by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Look at Terminator.

    I was a huge fan of Konsole when it first got tabs. But, as screens got wider and wider, tabs weren't enough. Split-windows were needed. Early versions of Konsole supported it. Later versions removed it.

    Terminator makes tabbes consoles, split-window consoles, and focus-follows-mouse work beautifully together. And it can send input to multiple consoles in a windows, in a tab, or in a tab group.

    Haven't touched Konsole since installing Terminator. It's one of the few non-QT apps I like using. :)

  4. Context by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Context by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Upstream doesn't consider Btrfs to be stable (ie unchanging) and it is known to break in some multi-disk situations. You don't want to support something that is fast moving and known to lose data - not in enterprise environments for 10 year spans.

      SUSE gets around this by disabling some Btrfs features and focusing on keeping the file system static rather than chasing new releases. Seems to work for them.

  5. Re:What is the state of KDE? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    KDE4 in later versions was mostly adopted and considered good enough. KDE Plasma is currently well into version 5 though, so you're a bit behind the times.

    There is technically a fork of KDE3 (Trinity) but it's only used in a couple of distros, like Q4OS. KDE Plasma 5 is generally considered pretty solid and has no forks.

  6. Re:What is the state of KDE? by Daemonik · · Score: 4, Informative

    KDE users don't fork KDE because in general we're fairly happy with it, unlike GNOME which has always been a hot mess. Every distro that provides KDE sticks with the current version. KDE3 is still supported by the diehards with Trinity though.

  7. Is multi-login GNOME working, yet? by J053 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:There are no properly packaged KDE distros toda by Daemonik · · Score: 4, Informative

    Try KDE Neon, it's built on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and maintained by the KDE community.

  9. Re: Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are years behind. Qt is under GPL / LGPL licenses.

  10. Re:Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu by Per+Wigren · · Score: 5, Informative

    Try KDE neon. It's Ubuntu LTS + rolling releases of the latest stable versions of the KDE packages straight from the KDE project itself.

    --
    My other account has a 3-digit UID.
  11. Slackware by BringsApples · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  12. Re:What is the state of KDE? by AvitarX · · Score: 3, Informative

    Gnome 2 was awesome.

    I miss the clean thin top and bottom panels with some nice effects from Compiz.

    --
    Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
  13. Re:What is the state of KDE? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's a pretty serious misconception. There are a few high profile Linux apps which for some inscrutable reason use GTK, that is true, but I'm putting a serious question mark for "most". Not to mention that the trend actually is that applications which used to use GTK in the past has or are in the process to or have switched to QT, like Wireshark, VLC and the LX desktop.

    If you have a quick look at this list over at Manjaro, you'll see that Qt has you pretty well covered, unless you absolutely insist on Chrome(ium), Libreoffice and Firefox, which all seem to favour GTK because of lacking competence and legacy reasons.

  14. Re:What is the state of KDE? by Daemonik · · Score: 4, Informative

    Honestly I think it's also how each project formed. KDE was always an integrated effort from the start with clear goals, while GNOME was a reaction to Qt's license and kind of accumulated extra bits, and developer egos, as it went, mostly in reaction to KDE. Every distro that standardized on GNOME had it's own interests over the project as a whole, whereas KDE had a team fully in control outside of the distro.. which I think is why GNOME has been so popular with distro maintainers, they don't get to claim KDE like they could GNOME.