I was wondering what happened to the proposal from a month ago…
I just wish their websites reflected to show all their available spins. It feels like you have to go out of your way to get to the spins site because the main page only shows Gnome.
I get that Gnome is RedHat’s main thing, but like at least make a button that says “See other excellent DEs”. The only thing they have is a button for alt downloads that shows stuff for net install and rawhide.
I understood Matthew’s position as “this should be discussed in the Workstation WG first”, not as a “no”:
in favor of the process outlined above (tl;dr: talk to the Workstation WG, and if that does not come to a satisfying outcome, file a Council ticket for next possibilities).
It also seemed more likely that they would promote KDE without demoting Gnome.
But was there a follow-up on that (e.g. in the Workstation WG)?
I understood Matthew’s position as “this should be discussed in the Workstation WG first”, not as a “no”
And later he said it’s not up to the community but the Fedora Council which at least partially consists of unelected Red Hat-appointed people and all decisions need to be on a consensus-basis, so a single corporate-appointed person can veto everything. FESCO (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) is democratic, Fedora Council is not.
Crazy… so much about the best Distro, huh?
Crazy… so much about the best Distro, huh?
IMO Fedora is still a great distribution, IMO even the best for beginners. Just because certain Gnome-affiliated people are insufferable doesn’t change that (at least not for now). From my point of view it would have been completely fine to discuss that, hold a vote, and if Gnome comes out on top, then fine. But with the changing landscape with Steam Deck and with it more development resources flowing into KDE technologies and also many more mainstream people having their first Linux desktop contact through Steam Deck’s Desktop Mode (=KDE Plasma), I think it’s totally fair to hold a discussion, similar to when Debian discussed Gnome vs Xfce years ago and Gnome came out on top because of offering the best accessibility features.
To be fair, there is and has been a KDE spin. I can see an argument for gnome, as it’s overall the simpler environment. Simple defaults has been fedoras thing for a long time.
Isnt fedora like the last distro that doesnt symlink /bin and /sbin to /usr/bin?
Explanation please
In the old days distros used to separate the location of binaries in several places like
/bin/sbin/usr/binand/usr/sbinthere was this idea that system binaries would go in/sbinwhile the rest in/binand the similar dirs in/usrwere so that you could mount a separate drive to store more binaries. This is from a time where storage was an issue.These days distros usually just symlink all those locations to
/usr/binwith the exception of fedora, which still keeps some split.However it seems they will finally merge the remaining dirs in fedora 41: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Unify_bin_and_sbin
Use Bazzite or Aurora if you want an amazing, Fedora Silverblue/Universal Blue-based KDE experience, it’s much better than normal Fedora anyway
True that. Even though Ptyxis is not needed on Kinoite as Konsole profiles do literally that.
Oh I never really noticed. Excited to try it out.
How does Bazzite differ from Kinoite? I use the latter but have been hearing about the former for a while now, and was curious what exactly sets it apart from what I use and what benefits I’d have switching to it.
Gaming.
if you game on Linux you wanna go with bazzite, games “just work” on there without any tweaking or fixing or patching. And in the rare case you do need to patch a game like gmod, they have a built in script for it like
ujust fix-gmod“Gaming” i.e. Windows emulation for GPU heavy stuff.
It is not gaming, it is running Windows software on Linux.
what?
I find it odd to call it “gaming on Linux” as its simply running Windows software
There’s no emulation. Worst case scenario, the game is using Microsoft’s proprietary DirectX graphics API, so we translate those calls to Vulkan or OpenGL with DXVK. That’s simply out of our control since we cannot see or modify the code, but everything else is running on Linux.
Intel actually uses DXVK on Windows for better compatibility and performance for their Arc GPU’s.
I’m glad Fedora comes with the most usable no-bs/out-of-the-way (in my subjective experience) DE by default. Yes I do run it with Tweaks and a few extensions, but otherwise I have no need for extensive customization for customization’s sake (which seems so many ppls problem with GNOME, smth that I couldn’t find more irrelevant), since everything about its UI/UX is so intuitive. I understand if people don’t like its opinionated workflow, but it’s just right for me personally…
I don’t get the proposal either way bc Fedora has always been the spearhead of vanilla GNOME and there is an official KDE spin iirc
Or you can run OpenSuSE which comes with one of the best Kde versions by default.
It’s another enterprise type distribution that’s rock solid. It also has a rolling version.
1lso it’s based in Europe, which some see as a plus.
I plan on switching to Slowroll once it’s matured, but I think I’ll stay with Gnome :p
Slowroll does sound like a great model for versioning and patching software.
But for the actual package management I dont want to use anything but rpm-ostree. The immutable OpenSUSE variants are a joke and dont offer any real benefits over Tumbleweed to my knowledge (after having researched them).
Fedora may offer that “more stable package set” when sticking to the old release, currently F39. Not its still less seemless.
I used to use Gnome all the time but I have to install a bunch of extensions for it to be usable. This one addon, I think it was called window list, is the most important and invaluable one of them all. There is no way I can use Gnome without it and I don’t understand how other people have the patience to deal with not having that. The number of times I updated Gnome and found out window list was so out of date the only way I could get it working was if I download the source code and fix the issue myself, is too damn high. That addon should be part of Gnome by default.
Now I use cinnamon or kde depending on which one works better in that respective distro’s repository. Some installations of your favorite desktop environment come with better configs than others. For example last time I tried KDE on Ubuntu, it was a broken buggy annoying mess to the point it was was less functional than Windows 11’s ui. On Arch, KDE is the epitome optimization and polish. On Arch, cinnamon is respectably borked out of the box. Cinnamon on Ubuntu usually only comes with a few bugs however I rarely end up finding a way to fix said bugs.
LXDE is the same across distros usually but I only use it if running Linux on an absolute potato. That lack of a start menu search is awful, I don’t miss those pre-search bar era uis. I need a search bar dammit.
Have you tried Trinity instead of LXDE?
With Q4OS for example.
Is Trinity using… maintained software? I will try it in a moment, but the KDE Plasma people only really maintain what is in Plasma today. There are tons of abandonware like Konqueror (which Trinity supposedly uses?). Falkon is hardly maintained, Amarok was resurrected.
Lots of great software, interesting, unique. But I dont know if I would use it for actual work.
I honestly don’t know about that.
Can you maybe recommend something that is similar but might be still updated? I really like how KDE used to look back then but I missed out on it. The way most new desktops copy the flat look of Windows and Mac OS annoys me. I want the details back and like my window has sides and shadows.
I agree a lot. Had Vista and XP machines in the past.
Then mainly used Win10 and KDE Plasma was a solid upgrade.
But they really copied the Win10 look which is atrocious. I agree that WinXP and 7 and the era where way better.
There are themes for everything though. Its just theming. I dont know if all apps support it and have never dealt with it, as Breeze works pretty well with Adwaita and Electron apps too.
I think there are Kvantum themes for this?
Glad to read we are thinking alike about these things.
I see there are some nice themes at the place you’ve linked. If those work with KDE Plasma, that would certainly be interesting to give a try.
I’ll have a look at that.
I looked but couldnt find it.
Tbh I like some of the more modern things, and they are for sure easier to unify. When theming like that, you also need a GTK3 theme, a GTK4 color scheme, a firefox theme etc.
And many of these toolkits dont support big themes anymore, just swapping colors.
Or LXQt which is the variant they switched to mainly. Like, both are maintained but the Qt one is the one getting all the fixes, Wayland support etc.
Thanks for reminding me about LXQt. Back then it didn’t really have all the features that LXDE used to have, but it does seem to have matured a bit.
I just tried it and it lacks some basic stuff like drag to edge for resizing. The apps are really minimalist though and it should really run everywhere.
