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
Or was it decided before that?
If anything IBM will try to replace Gnome with CDE. Now that can sell support contracts.
Red Hat is pleased to announce its new desktop environment... systemd
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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. :)
replace Gnome with CDE
Do you really believe they'd improve the RHEL desktop like that?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.