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."

Comments

Re:Any link to IBM's acquisition?

[Tailhook]

replace Gnome with CDE

Do you really believe they'd improve the RHEL desktop like that?

Re:What is the state of KDE?

[Per Wigren]

KDE users don't fork KDE because we have enough configuration knobs to tweak to make it look and behave so close to what we want that we don't feel the need to fork it. The configuration minimalism of some other desktop environments drives people to fork them over minor disagreements.

Re: Yeah

[nmo.marques]

Really, support money? How much of their business is RHEL Desktop? Or even RHEL Workstation? Besides Im almost sure someone will repackage it from Fedora to RHEL/CentOS. Ive seen SUSE handling over 250 repos OK. I am sure RHEL can do it also, though I have my doubts theres such a number of repos for RHEL.

Re:What is the state of KDE?

[Dutch Gun]

This minimalism is why I don't find modern Gnome usable without installing a bunch of tweak tools and add-ons that I shouldn't even need. Seriously, the cruisade to minimal'ize the Gnome environment has made it far more featureless than Windows or macOS to the point that it pisses me off.

The problem with minimalism is that no one can really disagree on what particular features are candidates for removal - except for the developers who simply make executive decisions, of course. It reminds me of a story/article I remember reading about some MS developers explaining why their company didn't release a simpler version of MS Word that cut out the 90% few people use. After all the "common wisdom" is that most of Word is simply bloat that's little used. Everyone who used it claims to only use about 10% of it's features.

Microsoft actually has a significant amount of metrics on what features people actually use in Word. As it turns out, beyond the core set of common features nearly everyone uses, it turns out that the bulk of the "unnecessary" features are used by a small percentage of people, but the distribution of who uses those features is spread out very broadly. Some people rely on mail-merge features, some require the review features, while others need support for more advanced page layout features. But they're typically not the same customers. So in reality, there's no mythical "90% of unneeded features" they can cut without making the software nearly useless to a very high percentage of their customers.

I think desktop UIs and layouts are probably somewhat similar, in that when removing some "little used" options, you're going to annoy a small percentage of people with each option you remove. No one uses ALL of those options, but many people probably used one or two of them.