Red Hat is Planning To Deprecate KDE on RHEL By 2024 (theregister.co.uk) 203
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."
Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu (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.
Re:Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu (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.
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Re: Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
You are years behind. Qt is under GPL / LGPL licenses.
Re:Fedora did KDE better than Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
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Sure, but there's no indication that will change. Red Hat will no longer ship KDE in RHEL at some point in the future, but Red Hat doesn't ship a *lot* of packages that are in Fedora with RHEL. That's what EPEL is for.
I don't see any reason to think that Fedora won't have great KDE packages in the future, or that KDE won't be available in EPEL.
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One word from IBM and this stupidity gets reversed.
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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 t
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This is Linux purely for a business environment.
Even more reason not to inflict Gnome 3 on them. Remember, IBM has historically been aligned with Suse which is all in on KDE. That alignment is still very much operative.
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They didn't say anything about getting rid of xfce, so business users are safe. ;)
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You're a bit confused about a particular cultural detail.
See, it is the hobby distros that are principled and ideological, and interested in a "pure" environment.
Business culture, OTOH, is pragmatic and practical.
Nobody knows how many people involved in the "creativity business" use CentOS because the distro doesn't have a culture of virtue-signaling; nobody is impressed by the choice, even other people who made the same choice don't care if you use it or not. Generally though people in the "creativity busi
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Even if your fanciful bean counters were running amok, good thing KDE is free.
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The summary says RHEL depreciated KDE, but doesn't say that Fedora depreciated KDE (despite confusingly mentioning Fedora). So it seems likely Fedora will continue with KDE, official Red Hat support not being an issue since there is none anyway.
Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it works and isn't tied to systemd like Gnome. You can't make support money if everything works smoothly.
Re: Yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
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KDE is beautiful, smooth, and Dolphin is the best file manager available. But KIO sucks. Just try playing a video over smb:// without downloading it first. Unless your client app natively supports KIO's messed up way of doing things, you can't.
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so rhel 8 2024? (Score:2)
so rhel 8 2024?
Any link to IBM's acquisition? (Score:3)
Re:Any link to IBM's acquisition? (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.
Re:Any link to IBM's acquisition? (Score:5, Interesting)
replace Gnome with CDE
Do you really believe they'd improve the RHEL desktop like that?
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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.
Replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell" (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, it'll be replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... [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.
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Nah, it'll be replaced with OS/2' "Workplace Shell", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... [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.
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OS/2 wasn't bad, outside of multitasking.
If they hated us they'd go back to AIX, instead of putting more skin into the linux.
Red Hat's new desktop environment (Score:5, Insightful)
Red Hat is pleased to announce its new desktop environment... systemd
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Red Hat is pleased to announce its new desktop environment... systemd
you joke now but I could so see a DesktopD being released by them they will then remove support for other environments from SystemD.
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It would be called SystemDE
22 Years after the release of KDE 3.0 (Score:2, Informative)
Can't blame them (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.
Don't use KDE much anymore but (Score:2)
I like Qt and use the "konsole" terminal app. Guess I need to find a new tabbed terminal app that I like as much as konsole.
Re:Don't use KDE much anymore but (Score:5, 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. :)
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The version of Konsole in Fedora 29 supports split windows fine.
It's inferior to Terminator, though. Konsole can only split a window either horizontally or vertically, while Terminator can mix and match those. So for instance you can't make a 2x2 split layout in Konsole.
Also, if you're a fan of fancy terminals, Kitty is also worth looking into.
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How it's it better than just have a 2x2 matrix of four instances of Konsole? Isn't it just another window manager running inside a window at some point?
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Probably he doesn't want to look like an old fart with a dozen xterms.
$ ps ax | grep xterm | wc -l
14
I tried to try the tabbed ones long enough to decide if I liked the paradigm, but all of them that I tried crashed at least one time over a few months of use. xterm has never crashed on me in decades! Also, no weird bugs, because no new features.
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I like Qt and use the "konsole" terminal app. Guess I need to find a new tabbed terminal app that I like as much as konsole.
Considering qt and konsole are a lib and an app, respectively, and not the desktop environment, no, you don't.
I run xfce and I can link to Qt and run applications starting with the letter k just fine.
Plus, you'll still be able to install it normally from whatever third party repo you get media codecs from. :)
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re:What is the state of KDE? (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.
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Re:What is the state of KDE? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What is the state of KDE? (Score:4, Informative)
Gnome 2 was awesome.
I miss the clean thin top and bottom panels with some nice effects from Compiz.
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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.
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I really liked having thumb-nailed windows, easily adjusted transparency and things coming and going from their proper locations when minimizing and maximizing.
3x3 desktop wall and a slight non rigidity when dragging windows was nice too.
Desktop Linux peaked a little earlier even, I stopped using it somewhere in the 2.6 kernels when there was a bug/feature with the IO scheduler that caused lots of hangs starting with Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10 (I forget). Windows 7 came out and I didn't really look back.
Windows 7
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Do people still use Compiz today?
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No idea, I stopped using Linux on the desktop when the IO scheduler caused frequent lookups and it was implied I should buy an SSD to fix the problem.
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What do you use now? Mac OS? Windows? BSD?
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That's perhaps the most absurd reason for changing OSes I've ever heard; "somebody random blamed a software bug in a free OS on having low class hardware."
Lets just say, I do believe you that your computer was locking up, but I don't believe you that you know what caused it, or that it was the "IO scheduler."
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Gnome 2 was awesome.
I miss the clean thin top and bottom panels with some nice effects from Compiz.
Gnome 2 was awesome, but I don't miss it because Xfce has everything it had, and doesn't bother trying to add new stuff to trip me up.
At first I went to Mate, but they were using language that implied that they were not against the forced changing of paradigms, they just didn't like specific details of the changes. So I don't trust them to stay with the Gnome 2 awesome at all.
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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.
Re:What is the state of KDE? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is the state of KDE? (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
Re:What is the state of KDE? (Score:5, 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.
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I think the biggest issue is most Linux Apps are GTK based, while KDE is QT based.
So the GTK apps all look a bit off when you use KDE. So in order to get most of your Linux Apps to work you would need to install 90% of Gnome anyways. While they are a lot less popular KDE apps. Which is kinda sad konqueror was really the IE Killer browser, as it was one of the first WebKit browsers, that Safari and Chrome uses.
I think the next issue is KDE seemed for most of its history to Copy the Windows UI in style,
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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 [manjaro.org] over at Manjaro, you'll see that Qt has you pretty well covered, unless you absolutely insist on Chr
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Plasma 5 is pretty amazing
Only if you are easily amazed. Plasma 5 does pretty much the same thing that desktop environments over ten years ago were already doing, only using fewer resources. Plasma 5 just has more bells and whistles, but it is very, very far from amazing.
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Oh I get it now (Score:2)
In 2024 M$ will have merged with IBM and made Explorer a viable Linux DE that will simply sit on top of Redhat.
It'll be Gnome vs. Explorer, not Gnome vs. KDE anymore. KDE is too similar to Explorer for Microsoft's liking I'm sure.
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As much as I hate to say it, compared to Gnome, I'll take Explorer. The Gnome developers should be ashamed of themselves for what they're doing.
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Disregarding your opinion of Gnome, do you think Microsoft would open source Explorer in this hypothetical scenario?
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I say they would, because the only way that that scenario comes about is if it is IBM buying Microsoft, and you know they would do it.
Once upon a time, most email was delivered by sendmail. Sysadmins joked that you only need a BS to be a sysadmin, but you need a PhD to configure sendmail! Yes, the config was that bad. So then MS put out Exchange, and lots of people started switching. Horrified, IBM wrote Postfix and open sourced it so that there was a non-MS alternative to sendmail. Because obviously everyb
Context (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.
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I guess I am confused on why btrfs is being deprecated. Any ideas why?
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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.
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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 ever
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I guess I am confused on why btrfs is being deprecated. Any ideas why?
Business reason: Red Hat is making its own storage system that poorly reinvents parts of btrfs in a higher layer, touted as enterprisey with paid features.
Technical reason: Red Hat uses ridiculously ancient kernels, backporting features from kernels 30 or so versions newer. This just can't be stable unless you have a team of engineers devoted to every subsystem, and Red Hat never had such a team for btrfs. The kernel moves quickly, without regards to internal compat, such backporting just can't go well.
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BtrFS is a steaming pile and hasn't gotten better over the years. Copying ZFS and making it GPL was a nice idea but the implementation was bad from the beginning.
Where ZFS was initially only a few hundred lines (and the core is still very clean and small), BtrFS came out of the gates at thousands of lines and tried to "fix" what COW and self-healing/aware filesystems inherently lack, a way of re-mapping data previously committed to disk while atomically maintaining the log.
In the end BtrFS has been supersed
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It is hard to get the code finished when the prototype keeps slipping through your fingers like Btr.
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RH is re-inventing the wheel by dropping Btrfs in favor of their own fs, called Stratis.
Nope. Stratis composes existing software so that it adds up to having features people wanted from Btrfs/ZFS.
It uses XFS and the linux devicemapper subsystem to export a D-Bus API. This way, there is new implementation code, but there aren't any new core technologies, and the base filesystem code is already stable.
Btrfs is not going to be a significant part of the future, because it has failed to show itself as worthy. You can't lose data, and you can't change features all the time, if you want to be a files
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Which product do you mean? I think RHEL replaced AIX in many places.
Though RHEL isn't exactly cheap, but over the next decade, I suspect their revenue will go up considerably as it replaces Windows in the business space.
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Nonsense, they already support a lot of different stuff.
This is high end support, they have to hire actual smart people who understand *nix to do that work. Because, the employee actually calling from the client company is often a sysadmin or engineer.
The support they do is mostly professional services, not helpdesk. Though they certainly do offer desktop support too. Actual professionals have no problem at all supporting two things, because they're thinking about real problems that are being presented, the
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If you are in the enterprise and something like KDE Plasma isn't supported by RedHat then it's not going to be installed. It'd just give the RedHat support people something to point to as the problem even it couldn't possibly be the problem.
I was responsible for about 75 servers for a government department to host some of their web sites and application servers. This was for development, testing, and production servers. I wanted to have all of the servers to boot up to run level 3 and forget any of the des
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They are putting sendmail to bed. Finally. Long live Postfix.
Move on (Score:2)
This is part of why I dumped RedHat for Mandrake in 1998 and never looked back. Now it's Manjaro FTW.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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This is part of why I dumped RedHat for Mandrake in 1998 and never looked back.
Protip: Next time, bring back sports scores.
Is multi-login GNOME working, yet? (Score:5, 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.
Slackware (Score:5, Informative)
And thanks to Red Hat for giving us all a 5-year heads-up.
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SURE hope you're dreaming on that "even if it will probably die in a few years".... I started with Slackware back in 1994 and with EVERYBODY seemingly jumping off the "systemd" cliff like Lemmings, I may have to go back to my "Linux roots" if my current distro, Devuan, shits the bed....
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Doesn't matter to me. (Score:2)
As a KDE user I personally deprecated RedHat back in 2001 or so when I switched to SuSE Linux, and abandoned RPM all together when I switched to Debian Etch.
Redhat - the corporate world loves it, but actual people who like Gnu/Linux seem not to.....
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Any corporate weenie that loves redhat deserves a special corner of hell writing rpmbuild scripts over and over again for the rest of eternity.
Dunno (Score:2)
RHEL has never been advertised as a desktop distro. I'm not sure this news will affect more than a couple of people.
Besides KDE in RHEL is extremely outdated and contains very few KDE applications, so it's not like it was a good choice for its users in the first place.
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Nonsense. RH offers RHEL Desktop and RHEL Workstation for desktop use.
Red Hat needs adult supervision (Score:2)
This is why Red Hat needed to be bought by IBM. It is 100% certain that IBM will put KDE back to first class status. To do otherwise just accelerates the loss of desktop share, and when that goes, server/VM soon follows. This is already the trend due to incompetent Red Hat stewardship.
I don't care, we'd all be better off with Ubuntu in the server room than Red Hat anyway.
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pffft, KDE is dying. People have moved on to better.
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KDE #1 [itsfoss.com]
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LOLZ.
so the writer of that article liked it. Meanwhile, KDE is dying.
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Says random internet troll.
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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'
Microsoft orders last attack of the Gnomers (Score:3)
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.
Re:There are no properly packaged KDE distros toda (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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Oracle bought Sun Micro-systems.
They own the IP and probably don't care to put resources into it.
At the time when Sun was still themselves, the biggest problem was Sun was leaving the workstation market, and focusing mostly on servers, this means people were not going to pay a lot of money for a 3d card for a Sun Workstation, while 3d Gaming cards for PC's which were nearly as good if not better were much cheaper.
Then we had the rise of Apple OS X during this time frame, which caused the market to rethink