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Red Hat is Planning To Deprecate KDE on RHEL By 2024 (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the up-next dept.

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."

48 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu by Octorian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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

      Slackware does KDE better than anybody. In fact they do everything better than anybody. There's no reason to even consider using anything else. And the entire thing installs in less than 10 minutes.

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

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

    3. 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.
    4. Re:Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu by pnutjam · · Score: 2

      Ask me how I know you haven't used OpenSuse lately.

      --
      Cheap storage VM.
    5. Re:Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

      One word from IBM and this stupidity gets reversed.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    6. Re:Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu by rtb61 · · Score: 2

      This is Linux purely for a business environment. Choice for the end user is most definately not an option. A GUI to serve the business need, of a particular desktop, doing a particular job and only that is desired, no creativity allowed. Redhat does not feature at all in the creativity environment, their mistake and one thing IBM definitely needs to change. They do need to create a Redhat distribution targeted at the creativity business sector (the content creation sector) where choice is required to keep the munchkins happy and creative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., even the blue ones working at IBM.

      So gnome the business data input output sector and KDE the creative arts sector because they like to decorate their workspace and set it out their way and it makes them feel happy and a happy munchkin is a creative and productive munchkin, leave M$ nothing.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    7. Re:Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu by Aighearach · · Score: 2

      They didn't say anything about getting rid of xfce, so business users are safe. ;)

  2. Yeah by ArchieBunker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re: Yeah by nmo.marques · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  3. Any link to IBM's acquisition? by MerlinTheWizard · · Score: 2

    Or was it decided before that?

    1. Re:Any link to IBM's acquisition? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Or was it decided before that?

      If anything IBM will try to replace Gnome with CDE. Now that can sell support contracts.

    2. Re:Any link to IBM's acquisition? by Tailhook · · Score: 4, Interesting

      replace Gnome with CDE

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

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    3. Re:Any link to IBM's acquisition? by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 2

      replace Gnome with CDE

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

      Sure they would: just about anything would be an improvement over Gnome.

  4. Red Hat's new desktop environment by gosand · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Red Hat is pleased to announce its new desktop environment... systemd

    --

    My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.

  5. 22 Years after the release of KDE 3.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The best version of KDE.

  6. 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.

  7. What is the state of KDE? by squiggleslash · · Score: 2

    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.
    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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
    4. Re:What is the state of KDE? by Per+Wigren · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      My other account has a 3-digit UID.
    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. Re:What is the state of KDE? by Octorian · · Score: 2

      The configuration minimalism of some other desktop environments drives people to fork them over minor disagreements.

      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.

    8. Re:What is the state of KDE? by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 2

      Gnome 2 was awesome.

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

      That is why I use Mate Desktop fork of Gnome 2. I do miss compiz though. Desktop environments peaked in 2010 and have been shooting themselves in the foot since. The want to be the environment for phones that will not support them or be touch accessible to the touch screen desktops that no one buys because mouse and keyboard function better for PC.

      --
      ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
    9. Re:What is the state of KDE? by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    10. Re:What is the state of KDE? by rkoot · · Score: 2

      Recent LibreOffice (development) versions can be configured to use Qt5/KF5 instead of gtk3/gnome.

    11. Re:What is the state of KDE? by walterbyrd · · Score: 2

      Use MATE.

      As a MATE user, I cannot understand why anybody would use Gnome or KDE.

      I think a case could be made for XFCE. Or IceWM, if you are low on resources.

  8. 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. :)

  9. 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.

    2. Re:Context by MtHuurne · · Score: 2

      I don't know why Red Hat is deprecating it, but my experience with btrfs was so poor that I've dropped it.

      The first problem I ran into is that free space is not automatically reclaimed. I'd get processes unable to create files when "df" reported 75 GB free. It turns out you have to regularly run a cleanup command that moves data around so the free space is combined and usable again. So not only do you have to defragment your disk in 2018, if you don't, it doesn't just slow down but becomes unusable for everyday operations.

      I figured I'd set up a cron job to defragment the disk every week. But then the problem is that while the defragmentation is running, the PC becomes so unresponsive that it's barely usable. This is a problem with Linux in general, that heavy I/O will make the system unresponsive. But usually it doesn't happen unless you're using a lot of swap space.

      The final drop was when the system became so unresponsive that it wouldn't even react to the command I issued to abort the defragmentation in progress. I wanted to actually use the PC, so I did an emergency unmount and reboot with SysRq. On the reboot the brtfs file system was corrupted and wouldn't mount. Eventually I got it to mount read-only and managed to get most of the data off, but I never got it to mount read-write anymore.

      Apart from the inconvenience, what really scared me off btrfs was the state of the recovery tools. The official pages firmly tell you to only run fsck as a last resort. There are a whole lot of other tools that can each recover from specific problems, but unless you know how btrfs works internally and can figure out from a vague error message which part of it is broken, all you can do is try one tool after another, wait a long time as it scans your entire partition and see nothing improve.

      So all in all, brtfs has some interesting features, but despite being around for quite some years, it's nowhere near a mature file system.

    3. Re:Context by Jerry · · Score: 2

      RH is re-inventing the wheel by dropping Btrfs in favor of their own fs, called Stratis. Considering how long it took ZFS and Btrfs to reach their current state of development Stratis may be years in the making before it's ready for RH servers. Besides, who knows what IBM will do with either Btrfs or Stratis. As far as Btrfs is concerned, I've been using it for almost four years on both Kubuntu and Neon User Edition and it has been faultless for me. I've used SINGLETON's, RAID0 and RAID1 on two disks, but I haven't tried RAID5 or 6. I limit my snapshots to 5 per subvolume on a rotating manner and all of my archival snapshots were created using the incremental method offered by "btrfs send -p...". A few people at Kubuntuforums.org have used Btrfs longer than I have and two of them keep three and five distros on their primary disk in a multi-boot scenario. Oshunluver and Vinny. Check out their posts. Personally, I'll never use a distro which does not allow me to install Btrfs as the root filesystem.

      --

      Running with Linux for over 20 years!

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.
    1. Re:Slackware by BringsApples · · Score: 2

      If you've got an extra box laying around, it's worth installing slackware with KDE. When I first started using slackware, in 2007(?) I only used it as a mail/ftp/dns server, and router, so I only ever used ssh to conenct, and it was all command line from there. Then around 2012 I decided to try to ditch windows, and loaded up the latest version at the time (I think it was slackware 13.2) and loaded the desktop. I was not very impressed, but fought through it anyway. Now it's on version 14.2, and the desktop environment is much better. Most all hardware is usable now :)

      Cheers!

      --
      Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
  13. Replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell" by perpenso · · Score: 3, Funny

    Nah, it'll be replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    1. Re:Replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell" by ilsaloving · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nah, it'll be replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      You know what? That would be bloody awesome. I *loved* workplace shell when it was around. It completely blew the crap out of Program Manager on Windows.

    2. Re:Replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell" by perpenso · · Score: 2

      Nah, it'll be replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      You know what? That would be bloody awesome. I *loved* workplace shell when it was around. It completely blew the crap out of Program Manager on Windows.

      Of course OS/2 2.0 blew the crap out of Windows, its contemporaneous version of Windows for 16-bit 3.1, 32-bit Windows NT was not out yet. All the more tragic.

  14. Re:Move on by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Funny

    You dumped RedHat for Mandrake because 20 years later RedHat would announce plans to deprecate KDE over the next four years?

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  15. Re:Red Hat needs adult supervision by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    KDE #1

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  16. Re:Red Hat needs adult supervision by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    Says random internet troll.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  17. Microsoft orders last attack of the Gnomers by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    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.
  18. Re:Doesn't matter to me. by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    Any corporate weenie that loves redhat deserves a special corner of hell writing rpmbuild scripts over and over again for the rest of eternity.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  19. Re:There are no properly packaged KDE distros toda by Jerry · · Score: 2

    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!

  20. Re:Red Hat needs adult supervision by Aighearach · · Score: 2

    KDE, rather than being only a desktop environment, is actually a collection of applications, one of which is the desktop environment itself.

    ***ROFLCOPTER***

    Newsflash, the applications don't actually care which window manager you're running, or if you're using a "desktop environment" or just running startx when you want a GUI.

    But he continues with further high praise:

    Whether you want a desktop environment that works just out of the box or you want a fully customized desktop experience, you can definitely choose KDE.

    Indeed! Even people laughing while it slowly dies can agree: You definitely can choose KDE. If you know how to turn on an optional repo, anyways! LOL

    My favorite, Xfce, is also on that list. The only con listed?

    Comes with less application installed.

    Yeah, about that... LOL
    But he deserves some slack, because it says he's just a student whose hobby is TV.