back to article We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE

While everyone was distracted by IBM's $34bn takeover bid, Red Hat quietly wrote a death-note for KDE – within Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to be precise. On October 30, 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: …

  1. tjdennis2

    Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

    I used to work at HP and we setup thousands of Red Hat servers. I don't think any ever had any UI installed. They were all on virtual machines in data centers and SSH was the only access into them. If you did need X11 for some special software package it was probably just VNC with TWM.

    For desktop Linux, there are much better distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, etc. You wouldn't want to pay for a RHEL license to get patches for a desktop system.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

      There are some desktop products which are "supported" only on RHEL so you have no choice but to use a fully blown UI.

      In one of my past lives while I was still sysadminning, I had to rip out and replace with RHEL a perfectly working Debian setup which was honed to perfection and aligned exactly to our development process as a result of 5 years of work.

      All of that because of an utter POS IDE by one well known embedded software vendor. The POS worked perfectly fine on Debian by the way, but the vendor refused to support both the POS and the POS code it generated.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

        The POS worked perfectly fine on Debian by the way, but the vendor refused to support both the POS and the POS code it generated.

        So why not use it on Debian, and keep one RHEL system in a dusty corner just to reproduce problems & submit support requests?

      2. Ken 16 Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

        Point of Sale applications can be tricky all right

        1. JohnFen

          Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

          I don't think I'll ever get used to the repurposing of "POS" to mean "point of sale".

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

      Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

      IBM does. Red Hat desktop is their default Linux distro.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Solmyr - Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

        If I'm not mistaking RedHat abandoned desktop 10 years ago in favor of server.

        1. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

          Re: @Solmyr - Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

          "If I'm not mistaking RedHat abandoned desktop 10 years ago in favor of server"

          RH is not promoting desktop products loudly, but they're very much available.

          https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-desktop-or-red-hat-enterprise-linux-workstation

    4. ibmalone

      Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

      *holds up hand, waves*

      We run a lot of Unix (possible some of it is strictly Linux/MacOS by now) software for medical imaging research. That means not using a long term support type distribution. Scientific Linux, based on RHEL is a common choice, as is CentOS. However we've got a site license anyway, and the deployment and satellite server tools are useful. So yes, actually have a fair number of people on RHEL desktop and a few more using it in VM's. If we didn't we'd likely still be using a RHEL derived distro.

      1. ibmalone
        Facepalm

        Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

        That means not using a long term support type distribution.

        Edititis struck here. Of course that should be: "That means using a long term support type distribution."

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

        I still have traumatic flashbacks from having to support Perkin-Elmer gel electrophoresis robots back in the day. All this lovely data streaming off the systems....and into a Mac. Running System 7. Shudder.

    5. Cuddles

      Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

      Not only do we use desktop RHEL, we're using KDE. Of course, given the version we're currently on, I don't expect anyone to notice this for a good decade or so.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

        > Not only do we use desktop RHEL, we're using KDE.

        Same here. CentOS (KDE spin) is my primary development desktop. It's pretty good, unlike the Piece of Shit Gnome that can (and should) die in a fire.

        With IBM buying RH and the decision to kill off KDE, Devuan is now looking really good.

        1. ElReg!comments!Pierre

          Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

          > With IBM buying RH and the decision to kill off KDE, Devuan is now looking really good.

          Are you suggesting that Devuan wasn't looking very good before ?

          As for IBM's gobble, from where I sit it may not be so ominous : RH commitment to the basics of the *NIX philosophyvhas been, erm "flaky" (to put it lightly) for some years now, and IBM is arguably not the worst sugar daddy to this respect (remember that RH was also cosying up to Redmond and Mountain View recently... and IBM may have lost some open-source love, but let's remember that it did save Linux' hide from the Darlek (*)(**) ).

          As for the reasons of the gobble, everyone seems to be focussing on market value and growth speed. IBM strikes me as a steadiness-oriented business ; a mobile fortress rather than a racecar. It may not appeal to the younger generation, but it is key to IBM's core market even to this day : corporations that rely on mainframes. And to anyone who have worked with IBM customers the gobble was quite the obvious move : for the big'uns, while the backend is Z/OS, the frontend is RHEL.

          (*McBride)

          (**OK that more corporate interest than kindness of hart, but still)

          1. JohnFen

            Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

            "As for IBM's gobble, from where I sit it may not be so ominous"

            I don't view this as ominous, either, mostly because nothing is lost. Red Hat has, for years now, essentially been the Microsoft of the Linux world, and it's been dead to me for a very long time. Even if it ceased to exist entirely, I would shed no tears.

          2. jake Silver badge

            Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

            "(**OK that more corporate interest than kindness of hart, but still)"

            Oh deer ...

    6. HmmmYes

      Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

      Me too.

      Installed rhel centos 100s of timr.

      Cant think of ever running a gui - and thats not a bad thing!

    7. AdamWill

      Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

      Believe it or not, yeah, they do. Last I heard, the RH desktop team was effectively self-funding, i.e. we sell enough RHEL licenses for desktop use to cover the cost of running the desktop team. It's not a huge business that's gonna set the world on fire, but it's a business.

      For most 'typical' desktop users Fedora or Ubuntu is going to make more sense, but there are some specific cases where people really want a desktop distro with RHEL's lifecycle and maintenance policies.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

        At the university I went to, our CS department did everything they could on REL. Servers all ran it, and all machines in the labs were REL desktops. They probably want everything on the same level. Could they have had the workstations run fedora/ubuntu? Definitely, just as they could have put those on the servers and still been fine. Still, REL on the workstations probably helped in administering them.

    8. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

      I've been using GUI and IDE for almost a decade using RHEL at work (3 different companies) using Windows as a dumb graphics terminal connected thru RDP/VNC. Why bother working under Windows GUI/IDE if one can do the same in the same bare metal environment that the software will run on anyway? I don't understand why people think that's not feasible.

    9. buchan

      Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

      > I used to work at HP and we setup thousands of Red Hat servers. I don't think any ever had any UI installed. They were all on virtual machines in data centers and SSH was the only access into them.

      Sure, and my previous job was providing infrastructure for an ISP (couldn't use "cloud" or other people's data centres for some deployments), where the the entire stack (virtualisation = RHEV, OS = RHEL, application server = JBoss) was Red Hat, and yes, the servers didn't have an X server installed, and only the minimal X libraries for the JRE package to install.

      > If you did need X11 for some special software package it was probably just VNC with TWM.

      Why would you install VNC for X11 when you could just use, you know, X11 (and e.g. ssh)?

      > For desktop Linux, there are much better distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, etc.

      There are cases where RHEL is the better distribution. One of them is that the supported IDE for JBoss is JBoss developer studio ( https://developers.redhat.com/products/devstudio/download/ ) which is officially supported on RHEL. While it works fine on other distros, it's easier to get the same experience on a developer's machine (installing the jboss server from yum etc.) for deployment-related issues when running RHEL with access to the JBoss yum repos.

      > You wouldn't want to pay for a RHEL license to get patches for a desktop system.

      You don't need to: You can https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download/ since

      https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available/

  2. onefang

    I've used both GNOME and KDE in the past, but eventually decided that those desktops that use less resources where for me. I was a fan of Enlightenment for a long time, even a developer for it. These days I use LXDE and LXDM, though I might give awesome a try some day.

    On the other hand, I no longer use Red Hat based distros, I switched to Debian based ones long ago. Recently switched to Devuan for my main desktop and server boxen.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Unhappy

      the last screenshot I saw of "new, shiny" KDE looked NOTHING like what I was accustomed to seeing, all 2D and FLATSO and "Gnome 3-ish"... like they drank the 2D FLATSO coolaid or something.

      I'll stick with Mate, which should still be "installable" on RH, or something lighter like lxde. No need for 2D FLAT "looks like Chrome/Australis/Win-10-nic" instead of something I _liked_ from 5+ years ago, almost BRAG-worthy even.

      "Up"-grading. SOOOO overrated!!!

      If KDE had _NOT_ swallowed the FLATSO+Wayland 2-fisted GAGGER (aka 'plasma'), maybe it'd be "different enough" that people would WANT it more!!!

      (you really DO have to make your product "different enough" when everybody ELSE is heading over the cliff, to keep your customers from doing a 'Mate' or 'Devuan', ya know??? Otherwise, your "new, shiny obsessed" out of touch "developers" who *FEEL* as if it's "OUR turn, now" to make DESKTOP COMPUTERS look like PHONE SCREENS will *RUIN* *EVERYTHING*!!! [whoops, too late]

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

        Roid rage or crack?

        > all 2D and FLATSO and "Gnome 3-ish".

        Just switch the icons.

      2. Teiwaz

        KDE at least...

        Is still themeable.

        Gnome a short while ago were talking dropping support for themes.

        Whether that is just not dealing with any issues (which is fair enough, some badly designed themes out there) or actually cutting theme UI elements out, I've never sure.

        ON Plasma you can restore the old KDE 4 Oxygen look if you wish.

      3. Updraft102

        the last screenshot I saw of "new, shiny" KDE looked NOTHING like what I was accustomed to seeing, all 2D and FLATSO and "Gnome 3-ish"... like they drank the 2D FLATSO coolaid or something.

        It's a theme you're looking at. You can change that in a few seconds!

        I was "talking" to someone the other day (on a forum) about how he had tried to get people interested in Linux (Xfce), and they rejected it out of hand when they saw it. That amazed me-- do people really not realize that you can change the appearance of things, particularly something like Linux (where product branding doesn't matter and choice has always been a priority)?

        The KDE distros I've tried come with several widget themes (Oxygen, Fusion, Redmond, Breeze) and several icon themes, along with many color schemes (and you can make your own). If that's not good enough, install the QtCurve widget theme (really a theme engine), and you will have nearly limitless control over every element of the UI appearance-wise without having to touch a config file.

        You've been poisoned by too much iOS, MacOS, Windows, or something that has made you forget that you can change the appearance in Linux. The rest of the world may have concluded that options just confuse the poor little brains of the end users, so nearly every customization option has to be removed to keep their precious little heads from exploding, but KDE isn't a part of that world. Even the more minimal DEs like LXDE and Xfce use GTK+ themes and whatever icon scheme you wish. We're not using iOS here.

        1. midcapwarrior

          First impressions matter

          "do people really not realize that you can change the appearance of things"

          They realize it. Just are used to working with tools that care about UI/UX.

        2. Anakin

          Replacement for my linux mint?

          I've used KDE since Suse 4.It's easy to make it feel the way i want. Linux Mint just dropped KDE and i just don't know what distro to use.

          Kde just feel faster and faster for every new version even on my old laptop

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: Replacement for my linux mint?

            Try Slackware.

            14.2-stable is rock solid, but a trifle behind the curve.

            14.2-current is more bleeding edge, and almost as stable as -stable. Still on KDE 4 though ... at least for the moment. Stay tuned.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Replacement for my linux mint?

            Linux Mint just dropped KDE and i just don't know what distro to use.

            I've been using Devuan as my main desktop for a bit to get to know it with KDE. I'd previously used Mint with KDE for a number of older converts.

            Now I'm starting to move them to Devuan/KDE. Not a problem thus far.

            I also found the cinnamon version that comes with Devuan Ascii to be quite nice, finally a Cinnamon I can like. Devuan's Mate needs work to get it looking as nice as what they have in Mint last I looked.

    2. Updraft102

      I've used both GNOME and KDE in the past, but eventually decided that those desktops that use less resources where for me.

      That being the case, you may want to give KDE a(nother) try.

      The devs have been hard at work reducing the memory footprint recently, and it's surprisingly lightweight now.

      1. onefang

        "The devs have been hard at work reducing the memory footprint recently, and it's surprisingly lightweight now."

        Some day I intend to sit down and benchmark a bunch of desktops. That should include the perceived heavy weights as well as the perceived light weights.

        1. Dave559 Silver badge

          Desktop comparisons

          I feel sort of morally obliged to mention <http://www.xwinman.org/> for nostalgia reasons, although it's not exactly up to date regarding the current state of desktops…

        2. Agamemnon

          Do so, and beers/pizza is on me (because I'm insanely curious to know).

      2. unimaginative
        Linux

        KDE is really good now

        I agree.

        I recently switched to Kubuntu from Xubuntu and love it.

        If you want it to be lighter uninstall Akonadi and stop baloo running.

        1. Dave559 Silver badge

          Re: KDE is really good now

          "If you want it to be lighter uninstall Akonadi and stop baloo running."

          Ah, you mean, just stick to the bear necessities?

          1. JohnFen

            Re: KDE is really good now

            "uninstall Akonadi"

            Especially this. Akonadi is horrible and sucks up too many resources. Kill it with fire.

            1. Fungus Bob

              Re: KDE is really good now

              "Akonadi is horrible and sucks up too many resources. Kill it with fire."

              It's quicker and easier to install XFCE instead.

              1. JohnFen

                Re: KDE is really good now

                True, if XFCE meets your needs. But if you prefer KDE, then kill Akonadi.

          2. TheTor

            Re: KDE is really good now

            Look for the bare necessities

            The simple bare necessities

            Forget about your worries and your strife

            I mean the bare necessities

            That's why a bear can rest at ease

            With just the bare necessities of life

      3. keithpeter Silver badge
        Coat

        KDE on old laptop

        "That being the case, you may want to give KDE a(nother) try.

        The devs have been hard at work reducing the memory footprint recently, and it's surprisingly lightweight now."

        @Bombastic and Updraft102

        Recent KDE Plasma 5 from Alien Bob's packages for Slackware Current. On a Thinkpad X60 (core duo) with 1.5Gb ram, usable, firefox/libreoffice writer/music player. 1 Gb ram isn't happening - goes straight into swap.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: KDE on old laptop

          Concur on Eric's KDE stuff, and pretty much everything else that he has packaged for Slackware. (Alien BOB's real name is Eric Hameleers. He answers to both.)

          http://www.slackware.com/~alien/

          Running Slack-stable on a 16 year old HP laptop (zv5105, Radeon 9000 IGP) with 2gigs. It works just fine, rarely hits swap when doing normal office stuff. Note that it's still on Slack 14.2's version of KDE4, I don't plan on trying Plasma5 on it.

      4. wayward4now
        Linux

        "That being the case, you may want to give KDE a(nother) try."

        Right, until you encounter the "Teutonic KDE Knights" who monitor the shit out of user forums, to delete anyone bitching about obvious faults in KDE. The Kubuntu list moderators were the worst.

        I went to Debian, along with others, and switched to XFCE.

    3. ElReg!comments!Pierre

      One "word"

      JWM.

      While I once enjoyed the cheerfulness of icon-based desktop environments, I realized quite a while ago that nothing beats the brutal efficiency of a lightweight windows manager + console. I have no particular interest in fancy backgounds, animations or desktop clutter. My computers are work tools, and them being more efficient means more time for me for non-work stuff -like computer games or mindlessly posting on El Reg ... oh wait. Bugger

    4. Soruk

      I'm a CentOS user, I actually rather like it. However, I tend to install and run the old-school IceWM as my preferred desktop environment.

  3. jake Silver badge

    "there is overwhelming interest in desktop technologies such as Ggnome and Wayland"

    There is? From what I've seen, the people who use Gnome use it because it comes with their distro, not because they have actively chosen it. And does anybody care about Wayland? Is any important distribution[0] even fiddling about with Wayland anymore? Near as I can tell, Wayland is conspicuous by it's absence ... it's only in use in the Fedora world, the rest of us are over the idea.

    1. ibmalone

      "there is overwhelming interest in desktop technologies such as Ggnome and Wayland"

      My understanding of Wayland is it was intended to improve support for modern graphics hardware and APIs. The X model was also seen as having security problems. However it's been done with the typical "let's break Unix traditions and just dismiss anyone who objects as backwards" approach that characterised Gnome development a couple of years ago (and maybe since, but that's when I stopped trying to give feedback and switched to KDE) and systemd's feature creep. I suppose it's the kind of skewed world-view you can get when you're surrounded by the people working on those systems, of course Gnome and Wayland developers are interested in Gnome and Wayland!

      1. nematoad

        Arggh no.

        "let's break Unix traditions and just dismiss anyone who objects as backwards"

        Don't tell me, Lennart Poeterring is involved with Wayland?

        1. Fatman
          FAIL

          Re: Arggh no.

          <quote>Don't tell me, Lennart Poeterring is involved with Wayland?</quote>

          $DEITY, I hope not!!!!

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Arggh no.

          Don't tell me, Lennart Poeterring is involved with Wayland?

          To paraphrase another turn of the wheel of history:

          systemd ain't done until kde won't run

          1. tq42

            Re: Arggh no.

            Not that it matters, but no, Lennart Poettering is not involved in Wayland.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Unix traditions"

        Is that where you never use one program if you can possibly use five, each with slightly different syntax?

        1. ibmalone

          Is that where you never use one program if you can possibly use five, each with slightly different syntax?

          Yes, one lumbering giant with octopus dependencies that will be abandoned by its developer next year, because process IDs must be conserved at all costs!

          Actually I was thinking of stuff like the primary selection and X forwarding.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            "Actually I was thinking of stuff like the primary selection and X forwarding."

            Has anything changed WRT to Wayland and some sort of equivalent to X forwarding? It's something I use constantly and I'd really rather not have to have a full GUI running on a remote system just so I can run a remote GUI application remotely inside a full remote desktop GUI a la Windows RDS.

        2. JohnFen

          You say that as if it's a bad thing. I consider it a good thing, myself.

    2. tq42

      You might be right about Gnome but you're wrong regarding Wayland. All distros are moving towards Wayland, especially since Cononical abandoned MIR. They decided in the last minute to not default to Wayland for 18.04, instead staying with X. However it will probably be the default for 19.04. There simply is no future for X, it will slowly be phased out. Now even KDE Plasma is working quite well on Wayland from what I've heard.

    3. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      I dunno. Wayland seems the best bet to get out of X Window System land, and so should be supported.

      "Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain. GNOME and KDE are expected to be ported to it."

      If you are "over the idea", embracing a complexified, messy and really 80-ish windowing system is a winning proposition.

      1. JohnFen

        "Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain. GNOME and KDE are expected to be ported to it."

        It's the "simpler replacement" part that's the essential problem. In order to achieve "simpler", Wayland is getting rid of functionality. If you find that functionality to be very useful, this is a bad trade. This aspect is why I don't think I'll be switching to Wayland regardless of what the distros do.

    4. Teiwaz

      Wot Wayland?

      And does anybody care about Wayland?

      Unless they use Gnome, they're still waiting for the other desktops to catch up.

      Of course if you have Nvidia hardware (with proprietary drivers) you're barred anyway.

      Wayland is a good deal nippier, but I get the impression it's been designed with a rather pedestrian concept of screen use which seem limiting in the near future.

      I also got the distinct impression Wayland compositors in Gnome made great strides while Canonical was pushing Mir at it's heels. Now Mir has mostly gone, pace has slowed again.

      I really think Bjorn Stahls Arcan is far, far more interesting.

      1. onefang

        Re: Wot Wayland?

        "Unless they use Gnome, they're still waiting for the other desktops to catch up."

        I understand that Enlightenment has decent Wayland support, though I've never tried it.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Wot Wayland?

        "... a rather pedestrian concept of screen use which seem limiting in the near future."

        If visual, virtual augmentation is any part of the future, then Wayland is currently the only hope. I don't think you've used Wayland, but just imagine MS's old Active Desktop on steroids*. Can anyone name ANY other window system that can do such things natively?

        * Yeh, Active Desktop was a hot mess, but if you could overlook the BSOD's, security holes, resource consumption, annoying focus issues, confusing arrangements... it really did have some cool shit you could do with it.

        1. Teiwaz

          Re: Wot Wayland?

          If visual, virtual augmentation is any part of the future, then Wayland is currently the only hope. I don't think you've used Wayland

          I'm not able to, currently (recent Nvidia hardware).

          But I'm not overly impressed with multi-monitor support - it's no better than X, and a little worse in some ways.

          Wayland is not 'our only hope' - There is another

        2. JohnFen

          Re: Wot Wayland?

          "If visual, virtual augmentation is any part of the future, then Wayland is currently the only hope."

          Fortunately, this is something that I could not possibly care less about, so I don't need Wayland.

      3. AJ MacLeod

        Re: Wot Wayland?

        Arcan does indeed seem to be much better (or at least, more deeply) thought out than Wayland - I'm very impressed at how far he's got since I last read about it. His explanations of why he's chosen particular routes seem reasonable and overall he reads like one who has a definite idea not only of the "Big Picture" of what he's doing, but just as importantly, also cares about the small details of how he gets there. That's the bit that leads to good software which has a hope of being maintainable and efficient I think.

        Having said that, for all I've read over the years - decades, even - about how broken X is, it really does just work for me. For that reason I'm quite happy to carry on using it for another decade if that's how long it takes for any replacement to actually match it in terms of real world performance.

    5. unimaginative

      I think they mean They are interested in it

      Very few end users care about Wayland, and only Gnome users care about Gnome.

      I think the overwhelming interest comes from Red Hat,

      1. tq42

        Re: I think they mean They are interested in it

        And just why should an end user "care about Wayland"?? It's a freaking low level protocol. It's not graphical, it's not shiny or impressive by itself. The user is exposed to Wayland only by a compositor like Mutter or Kwin or Enlightments (whatever that is CA lled) that implements the wayland protocol. Everyone that thinks that Wayland is somehow not being successful or that only Red Hat pushes it are being delusional. Wayland is slowly replacing X as we speak. It started with Gnome, yes, but now also Kde Plasma work and Enlightment. Other desktops like Mint will follow. There really is no other alternative.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: I think they mean They are interested in it

          "Wayland is slowly replacing X as we speak."

          Not anywhere outside the Fedora world, near as I can tell. Even Ubuntu has reverted to X.

          1. tq42

            Re: I think they mean They are interested in it

            It is only temporary. It was supposed to have been enabled for 18.04 but they reverted back to X in the last minute. Which I believe was a correct decision for an LTS release. I would be very surprised if Wayland is not flipped on in time for the next LTS 20.04.

        2. JohnFen

          Re: I think they mean They are interested in it

          "There really is no other alternative."

          Sure there is. X.

    6. JohnFen

      "And does anybody care about Wayland?"

      I don't.

  4. Nextweek

    Befuddled

    I never really got why Gnome survives, KDE is built on Qt which has great documentation and an ecosystem around it.

    The pool of Gnome developers has got to be shrinking because of the value of the programming skill outside Linux desktop is effectively zero.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Befuddled

      It survives because it's as practically an in-house Red Hat product... sort of like systemd (which is an in-house Red Hat product) which also survives despite everyone hating it.

      1. ibmalone

        Re: Befuddled

        sort of like systemd (which is an in-house Red Hat product) which also survives despite everyone hating it.

        I might be misremembering, but I'm not sure SystemD started at RedHat, even if it's now mainly driven by them. Think both Poettering and Sievers moved to RH after it started. There was a nice idea at the core originally; come up with a way to standardise init scripts and manage dependencies between them. It didn't have to turn into a different form of towering mess that just happened to be in C instead.

        1. JohnFen

          Re: Befuddled

          "I'm not sure SystemD started at RedHat"

          I'm sure it didn't. But it doesn't matter to me, as it's Red Hat's actions that resulted in SystemD being foisted on us. I will never forgive Red Hat for that.

  5. Herby

    But I LIKE KDE!

    I've found that KDE is a much nicer desktop environment than the silly cashew. I hope that at least Fedora will keep it as an option. I've been using it for about 15 years. Yes, on Fedora as I type.

    Then again, maybe IBM took it over to keep KDE. Sillier things have happened.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: But I LIKE KDE!

      past-tense on the LIKE - those FLATSO looking 'Plasma' screenshots NAUSEATE me. It's exactly why I would have choosen "the OLD KDE" over so-called "modern" GUIs.

      https://www.kde.org/screenshots/

      as the version gets OLDER, the skeuomorphism INCREASES. What the *FEEL* are they *THINKING* ???

      OK if they're "feeling" they're NOT thinking, and that's the point...

      1. ibmalone

        Re: But I LIKE KDE!

        past-tense on the LIKE - those FLATSO looking 'Plasma' screenshots NAUSEATE me. It's exactly why I would have choosen "the OLD KDE" over so-called "modern" GUIs.

        You might want to check your keyboard, looks like the shift key is stuck.

      2. nematoad

        Re: But I LIKE KDE!

        I too used to like KDE.

        It was when they introduced KDE 4 that my enthusiasm waned. I could never ever figure it out. I used Trinity for a while but problems just getting the thing installed led me to Mate. It works and doesn't get in my way which is all I ask of a destop.

        1. Wyrdness

          Re: But I LIKE KDE!

          "doesn't get in my way which is all I ask of a destop"

          Yes exactly that. Some desktop developers seem to have completely lost sight of this. Gnome tried to over simplify everything, to the point of getting in my way removing too much. KDE has gone in the opposite direction by being overly big and complex. I'm currently usnig XFCE, which isn't perfect, but at least it tends to keep out of my way.

          I'm installing Mate right now to give it a try.

        2. ibmalone

          Re: But I LIKE KDE!

          I too used to like KDE.

          It was when they introduced KDE 4 that my enthusiasm waned. I could never ever figure it out. I used Trinity for a while but problems just getting the thing installed led me to Mate. It works and doesn't get in my way which is all I ask of a destop.

          For me that was the difference, KDE 4 went a bit weird, and then they pulled back, Gnome has always seemed much less willing to concede the direction they've chosen isn't working. KDE even seems to have switched the default desktop back to showing files now (but the people like me who got used to it can keep it off).

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: But I LIKE KDE!

      > I hope that at least Fedora will keep it as an option.

      Since Fedora is the upstream / alpha testing source for RHEL, I would expect KDE to be dropped from Fedora *earlier* than being dropped from RHEL.

    3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

      Re: But I LIKE KDE!

      Same here.

      I fully expect that KDE will just move out of the main Repo's and into one of the secondary ones.

      That's where many deprecated packages end up. They don't just disappear from the face of the planet.

      anyway, the IBM takeover of RH hasn't completed yet so I don't think the conspiracy theories (either way) hold much water.

    4. JohnFen

      Re: But I LIKE KDE!

      I agree -- KDE is my favorite desktop environment. Gnome is my least favorite.

      1. smot

        Re: But I LIKE KDE!

        The complete reverse here - Gnome is my favourite (UK spelling), and KDE my least. To me, KDE is a massive kludge that gets in my way, while Gnome is something that just gets the job done easily and without fuss.

        Horses for courses.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: But I LIKE KDE!

          I prefer KDE too. For me it gets better and better, and I'm talking about not just plasma but the KDE apps too. I would imagine that anybody seriously into KDE would be using KDE Neon, for pretty much the very latest revisions of the KDE components.

          1. JohnFen

            Re: But I LIKE KDE!

            "I'm talking about not just plasma but the KDE apps too"

            Personally, I hate Plasma. Fortunately, you can hide or deactivate a lot of that stuff. The KDE apps seem OK, for the most part, but I don't tend to use them much.

  6. Scott Marshall
    FAIL

    Without KDE, RHEL is GNOME to Hell

    RHEL/CentOS has for a long-time been my "go to" Linux of choice.

    (IMO, Linux Mint is the only half-way decent Debian-based distro for Muggles)

    I absolutely loathe GNOME3. Fortunately, apart from CentOS on my notebook, all my Linux servers are non-GUI (ie headless/SSH only).

    MATE and Cinnamon are excellent GNOMEish alternatives to GNOME3, however I switched my desktop allegiance to KDE precisely because of the abomination that GNOME3 was when released way-back-when in Fedora.

    So, so long as KDE/Qt remains available for CentOS, I couldn't give a rat's arse whether Dead Rat* deprecate KDE in RHEL or not; I absolutely refuse to have the excrement known as GNOME3 shoved down my throat once again.

    *Dead Rat because that's what they'll be after they get swallowed by the Sargasso Sea that is Big Blue.

    1. nematoad

      Re: Without KDE, RHEL is GNOME to Hell

      "...with functionality similar, identical or more advanced to the one deprecated."

      Given the Gnome devs. track record of removing "unwanted" features and thereby reducing the utility of the desktop I'm not sure that the speaker had Gnome in mind when making that statement.

      See also: Nautilus.

      1. fandom

        Re: Without KDE, RHEL is GNOME to Hell

        On the other hand, the way Konqueror has been gutted in KDE defies belief.

        1. Teiwaz

          Re: Without KDE, RHEL is GNOME to Hell

          On the other hand, the way Konqueror has been gutted in KDE defies belief.

          As I understood it, Konqueror has merely never been maintained - it needs a almost total rewrite to bring it up to Frameworks 5 standard and no one is willing to stand up and volunteer for the task.

          It's not so much been gutted (that implied intent to kill it) than no one wants to volunteer to totally rewrite it to use Frameworks and no doubt subsequently maintain it.

          1. fandom

            Re: Without KDE, RHEL is GNOME to Hell

            If Dolphin was half as good managing files as Konqueror was in KDE 3, I would believe it wasn't intentional.

            1. Teiwaz

              Re: Without KDE, RHEL is GNOME to Hell

              If Dolphin was half as good managing files as Konqueror was in KDE 3, I would believe it wasn't intentional.

              That makes no sense.

              I rather liked the dual purpose Konqueror and the Semantic Desktop of KDE 3, and the way it could inline display almost any file type, but that was tied into KDE 3, and not replicated in KDE 4 (mores the pity).

              I'd settle for more than one split window in Dolphin, I miss having more than two panes in some file management tasks, two tabs is just such an awkward workaround.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Without KDE, RHEL is GNOME to Hell

                Konqueror? It was OK. Until it got left behind. Dolphin? It was OK, too. Until I grew tired of the Akonadi-related processes using up all available CPU. I finally uninstalled everything that depended on that CPU cycle sink.

          2. Smartypantz

            Re: Without KDE, RHEL is GNOME to Hell

            Still use KDE as my goto De.

            I remember being sooo impressed by konqueror (in kde 2 and 3) and kioslaves flawlessly handling sftp, ftp, smb, http, webdav, local filesystemes and more!! hands down the best file manager ever made!!

            Where has this gone? dolphin isn't anywhere near this, it can't even handle modern SMB/CIFS. It seems like it has been sacrificed on the alter of UI re-design like so much good software!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Windows

    Yep

    The debate on Linux UIs can be so vicious because the stakes are so small.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Yep

      Choice, eh? We don't want any of that where we're from.

      1. Teiwaz

        Re: Yep

        Choice, eh? We don't want any of that where we're from.

        Microsoft?

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Yep

      I think the debate on the UI is more of "why did you CHANGE it into *THAT* it when I LIKED IT THE WAY IT WAS???" And THEN, make it so I CAN NOT GET THE OLD ONE ANY MORE!!!

      Yeah, same thing done to Windows, too, after Win7.

      How soon people forgot how Windows 3.0 sold Windows as a UI _BECAUSE_ it was 3D skeuomorphic as well as being intuitive, unlike Windows 1.x and 2.x before it.

      NOW everything's going BACK to Windows 1.x and 2.x because *IDIOTS* are jumping on that bandwagon with NO good reason, and TAKING! AWAY! ALTERNATIVES!!!

      WHAT the FEEL, right???

      1. FIA Silver badge

        Re: Yep

        I think the debate on the UI is more of "why did you CHANGE it into *THAT* it when I LIKED IT THE WAY IT WAS???" And THEN, make it so I CAN NOT GET THE OLD ONE ANY MORE!!!

        Isn't the point of open source that you can? Or have they purged all the repositories? It may take some work but surely KDE3 source is out there somewhere?

        How soon people forgot how Windows 3.0 sold Windows as a UI _BECAUSE_ it was 3D skeuomorphic as well as being intuitive, unlike Windows 1.x and 2.x before it.

        Windows 3 was intuitive??? Maybe my memory is fading as I age but I'm sure I remember it was a slow bloated crashy piece of crap; populariesed only due to the then monopoly of it's creator?*

        NOW everything's going BACK to Windows 1.x and 2.x because *IDIOTS* are jumping on that bandwagon with NO good reason, and TAKING! AWAY! ALTERNATIVES!!!

        It's open source, stop complaining and start coding..... ;)

        * Okay, they've still got a desktop monopoly but noone cares anymore because... phones... tablets.... etc etc

        1. nematoad

          Re: Yep

          "... surely KDE3 source is out there somewhere?"

          A little late I'll admit but if you are that interested in KDE 3 living on then look at Trinity. See it's in the name, 3, Trinity. They took all the code and have, sort of, maintained it and even done development work. It's good and I used it for a while, but installation on my distro was awkward so I moved to Mate.

          Try it, you might enjoy it.

          1. Citizen99

            Re: Yep

            I like Trinity (the fork from KDE3), not least for the not-crippled Konqueror in particular, and the clarity and richness of the desktop tools in general.

            I've never had a problem installing it on Debian, and now Devuan, although I can't speak for other varieties. It runs happily enough for me even on low-end Atom class notebooks.

      2. Jedipadawan

        Re: Yep

        To be fair re: 2D buttons and the like... I also hate them but I can see why the world has gone 2D.

        Love it or loathe it, the new standard for computing is smartphone. Most users of any kind of computers are content consumers and they want selfies, whatsapp, Facebook and... it pretty much stops there. On those small form factors with limited screen and only touchscreens to work with flat, 2D buttons are rather required.

        Users also now EXPECT such on their desktops because the desktop interface is now rather driven by the smartphone! I live in SE Asia where smartphone rule more than in the West. People who can't afford a laptop, even a cheap ASUS netbook, will have a smartphone.

        GNOME have clearly gone all in with the smartphone and seem to take the view that *like Windows 8 assumed you were using a tablet,) you expect to use your laptop the same way as your smartphone - a few buttons, touchscreen everything, no configuration, run some apps... end. Hence their policy these days of "If in doubt, cut it out." I also think, though this is conjecture, that Gnome are taking a policy of making the UI as minimal and, thereby, as light as possible so as to be used on smartphones with minimal load and with anything pertaining to the desktop being for 'experts.' Every feature Gnome has cut out I understand can be restored by installing an add-on. So it seems to me that Gnome is moving towards base GNOME being just a minimal UI for smartphones ONLY by default and 'expert' users installing whatever add-ons they like for their desktops.

        I figure GNOME has lost interest in the desktop have left it to the user to sort out Gnome for the laptop. Only, cutting features out does seem to endear distros and more and more are turning to Gnome 3 by default! It seems the 'if in doubt, cut it out' approach has traction with distros!! [I guess no options means no config issues equals less support hassles... a very Mac approach.] More and more distros are dropping KDE and going Gnome. I love it and won't use anything else but I keep seeing "New distro - running Gnome 3, while older distro = KDE dropped..."

        I can see why Neon came to be.

        KDE, though, is doing the same thing a different way. They are keeping the desktop experience but also want KDE on smartphones and so working on convergence which is a risky game given NOBODY has succeeded with this as yet but... KDE has spent serious time building up to this and Plasma will operate in different modes depending on the device it is running on. I think that is smart and the first plasma phones I think are coming out next year. But... there has to be some common look and feel and that means... flat, 2D buttons.

        I also think KDE has got to smartphone to gain traction. Outside of servers and niche content production bases the world has gone smartphone! I can see Neon being developed with smartphones in mind. Like Gnome it's a minimal install that you add to - but can still be used as a desktop UI by default in a way Gnome really cannot any more... unless addons are supplied.

        Whether we like it or not, the world has standardised on smartphones and users expect buttons and scroll bars to look like they do on their smartphones and the industry has had to bow to public demand. I don't like but that's the way it is. BTW, this also explains the crude, clunky style of the slowly-becoming-usable 'Discovery'... it is clearly app designed to run on a smartphone first. The smartphone rules now baby!

        For the record, I don't have a smartphone. I hate them at multiple levels but my wife has one and my clients will ONLY respond to whatsapp and nothing else including email and phone calls!

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Yep

          "the new standard for computing is smartphone"

          No. The new standard for consumer haberdashery is the so-called "smart" phone. Computing is still done the old fashioned way. Consider, for example, the platform used to create "apps". It sure as hell isn't the mobile device they are targeted at.

    3. Teiwaz

      Re: Yep

      The debate on Linux UIs can be so vicious because the stakes are so small.

      The passions are deep though.

  8. _LC_
    WTF?

    This is silly

    Whether or not Red Hat was going to axe KDE, is as important as the proverbial sack of rice in China. I know of nobody who uses KDE in conjunction with Red Hat. Put differently: I know of nobody using KDE, doing so on Red Hat.

    I think IBM's acquisition has something to do with their OpenPower initiative. It makes perfect sense in that context. ;-)

    1. Giovani Tapini

      Re: This is silly

      It's not that silly - historically at least I always preferred KDE.

      In an enterprise environment the choice of GUI can be limited but then again in an enterprise you are probably mostly using shell and a selection of external management tools.

      Using Linux as a desktop environment rather than just a server GUI though KDE was a good choice. The challenge is will KDE survive being just a desktop GUI?

      1. _LC_

        Re: This is silly

        You say it yourself, "... but then again in an enterprise you are probably mostly using shell and a selection of external management tools."

        Red Hat has never been that big on the desktop (home users).

        "The challenge is will KDE survive being just a desktop GUI?"

        Haven't they done so the last years? (K)Ubuntu, Mint, ... Those are the popular user distros. They all support KDE. If at all, KDE is being challenged by MATE and Cinammon. They are becoming increasingly complete, while being more stable and less boated than KDE.

        1. Updraft102

          Re: This is silly

          Haven't they done so the last years? (K)Ubuntu, Mint, ... Those are the popular user distros. They all support KDE. If at all, KDE is being challenged by MATE and Cinammon. They are becoming increasingly complete, while being more stable and less boated than KDE.

          Mint dropped KDE.

          Cinnamon is a great DE in terms of features and usability, and it used to be my go-to until I bought a laptop whose battery run time actually matters to me (my ancient laptop's battery run time has always been so bad that it hardly matters). When I tested the battery run times on various desktops, Cinnamon was much worse than Mate, Xfce, and KDE, all else being equal (kernel versions, Laptop Mode Tools active, etc).

          Not all of my PCs exhibit this, but on the ones that do, the 'cinnamon' process never drops below 1% CPU, frequently bouncing to 2-3% even when the system is idle. It seems to prevent the CPU from entering sleep states for fractions of a second that save a lot of power overall, and overall, the effect is a huge hit to battery life (loss of a third or more of run time). That's when I began to seriously investigate others, and KDE (which I've always wanted to like, but some or other problem kept appearing that made me go back) had finally gotten to the point that I didn't want to go back.

          KDE, meanwhile, is now on par with Cinnamon in terms of RAM footprint.

      2. JohnFen

        Re: This is silly

        "historically at least I always preferred KDE."

        Me too, but I emphatically do not prefer Red Hat. I suspect that's what the commenter was getting at, that the group of people who both use Red Hat and KDE is pretty small.

      3. Jedipadawan

        Re: This is silly

        >"The challenge is will KDE survive being just a desktop GUI?"

        KDE has been working on the smartphone market for many years and has been carefully making Plasma operate in different modes on different devices while running the same software. Yes, I know convergence has been tried before and has a 100% failure rate to date but KDE has been working on the convergence plan for longer than anyone else and responded to feedback so I have some hope here.

        I think it is still beta but it possible to install KDE Plasma on your android device now and Plasma smartphones are meat to arrive next year.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Tastes vary.....

    .....but Gnome3 (as commented elsewhere) is an abomination. My preference is for XFCE, although MATE is pretty good.

    Wayland though won't get my vote till someone tells me that remote applications over ssh will work just as well as remote X does today -- you know:

    ssh -X -C -l <name> -p <port> 192.168.1.254 (or similar)

    - then run your remote application (either terminal application or windowed application)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Tastes vary.....

      > that remote applications over ssh will work just as well as remote X does today

      X isn't great over wide area networks, there are to many backward and forward conversations between the client and server meaning that any latency lag soon multiplies to painful extents. I'm sitting here managing a bunch of servers in the US on the other end a 110ms delay line (AKA the big puddle). So I tend to run remote stuff inside a VNC desktop, which I still tunnel through SSH.

      1. JohnFen

        Re: Tastes vary.....

        "I tend to run remote stuff inside a VNC desktop"

        I find VNC to be far, far too limiting, personally.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Tastes vary.....

          I find VNC to be far, far too limiting, personally.

          I don't do anything like video remotely. I'd be interested to know if there is anything else you find limiting with VNC.

          1. JohnFen

            Re: Tastes vary.....

            "I'd be interested to know if there is anything else you find limiting with VNC."

            The video thing isn't a limitation that bothers me (it comes with all remote desktop schemes). The primary thing that I find limiting is that with VNC, you don't have a separate login and desktop per connection, you're sharing another login's desktop.

    2. JohnFen

      Re: Tastes vary.....

      "Wayland though won't get my vote till someone tells me that remote applications over ssh will work just as well as remote X does today"

      Yes, this is pretty critical for me as well.

  10. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Why Gnome?

    I wasn't keen on Gnome 2, but at first sight of V3 ran away to any other desktop KDE, XFCE, MATE, OPENBOX...

    Oh, and since KDE started to go rotten they're of the list too now.

  11. Dazed and Confused

    RHEL7.6 release notes and IBM

    So I was quickly scanning the release notes on Wednesday night and noticed lsslot, Bugger! thought I why hadn't I seen that before, saves all the messing around in dmidecode. I got all excited till I realised it only runs on IBM boxes, it's not in the x86 version

  12. src

    Very Happy With GNOME Shell

    I use a CentOS7 machine for web development and conducting system administration tasks. I have tried various desktops but GNOME Shell is my favourite by a long distance. I can tweak its looks and behaviour to my liking with minimal effort.

    It makes sense to me that Red Hat chooses what they believe to be the best available desktop and focus their efforts on making it work as well as possible. There is nothing to stop people installing alternatives from source as long as they don't expect support from Red Hat.

    1. _LC_
      Angel

      Re: Very Happy With GNOME Shell

      "I can tweak its looks and behaviour to my liking with minimal effort."

      Are we trolling?

      1. src

        Re: Very Happy With GNOME Shell

        Absolutely not. I have been using X11 for a long time. DECwindows, OPEN LOOK, MWM, CDE, Icewm, FVWM, XFCE, KDE, Openbox have all been my main desktop at one time or another. I prefer GNOME Shell to any of the others.

        I really liked CDE on Solaris back in the day but both Solaris and Motif dropped off the map for desktop use long ago. GTK3 and GNOME Shell are the best choice as a platform for getting work done.

        1. JohnFen

          Re: Very Happy With GNOME Shell

          "I prefer GNOME Shell to any of the others."

          Why? I'm honestly curious. I have a hard time imagining what it is that people like about Gnome.

          1. smot

            Re: Very Happy With GNOME Shell

            1. No desktop clutter

            2. Easy app launching (only one mouse click or one to two keyboard actions)

            3. With Wayland, apps can run across mixed HiDPI and standard DPI devices scaled on the fly

            4. Good useful set of Gnome-associated apps

            5. No scrolling around endless menus.

            That's a few off the top of my head. Petty issues, you may think, but they are key to my desire for a simple and mess-free environment.

            I originally spent a long time originally pitching KDE against Gnome to make my decision and I found KDE to be a most frustrating experience.

            My environment uses only three Gnome extensions although there are stacks available for the dedicated hacker, all that can be enabled directly from a web browser.

            Cinnamon is OK, but like KDE, is based on the same type of experience as WIndows passim and Gnome 2.

            I really don't think it helps for the constant DE bashing that seems to populate these pages - people simply can't accept that their choice is not necessarily the One True Choice.

            I prefer Gnome - if someone else prefers something different, that's fine - I'm grateful that we can make a choice that works as we would like. Unlike poor Windows users who have to live with what they're given.

            1. JohnFen

              Re: Very Happy With GNOME Shell

              "Petty issues, you may think"

              I don't think they're petty, but the only thing in the list that doesn't also apply to most of the DEs I've used over the years is #3 -- and that's about Wayland, not Gnome.

              "prefer Gnome - if someone else prefers something different, that's fine"

              Indeed, we agree! I am not trying to say that people who prefer Gnome are wrong in doing so. I am just trying to understand why some people prefer Gnome out of intellectual curiosity.

  13. DropBear

    I can't help but wonder...

    ...what's going on around KDE - first Mint announces that KDE is kaput, then this. Something is undeniably afoot. As they say (with a bit a license to paraphrase) in IT once is coincidence, twice is proof.

    1. devTrail

      Re: I can't help but wonder...

      It started years ago. First they repeat over and over again that users want a simple interface and don't want to be confused, then they push the "minimalist" philosophy and eventually the interfaces are so much dumbed down that the difference in functionality between a PC with a big screen and a tablet becomes negligible. In this way it's easier to push people to the smartphone/tablet environment which increases the earning and provides better user tracking capabilities.

  14. MacroRodent

    Personally I "deprecated" both Gnome and KDE years ago. Bloat without any real gain. XFCE is what I have long used, and I notice most of my co-workers do likewise. Mate is also popular. However, I am a bit concerned whether XFCE or other light-weight desktops will be supported in the brave new Wayland world, as it appears to push some of the grunt work X11 used to do into the desktop environment.

    1. Teiwaz

      Never to late to become more minimalist....

      Bloat without any real gain. XFCE is what I have long used

      Even XFCE is bloat to the dwm people.

    2. devTrail

      I have XFCE on some virtual machines and I have to do most of the configuration via command line or text editor. Lighweight in this case means only that a lot of things are missing. Try just changing the timezone on a PC.

      1. MacroRodent

        TZ

        Try just changing the timezone on a PC.

        It is not XFCE's concern. Many modern Linux distributions have their own GUI tools for things like the setting up timezone, users, printers etc that are usable from various desktop environments.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: TZ

          tzselect is your friend.

        2. devTrail

          Re: TZ

          "It is not XFCE's concern. ..."

          Rather than installing a new package I use the command line, I chose XFCE for that particular VM because I lacked disk space.

          But the real issue is that the IT environment is vast and you can't know everything, especially if you are a developer and not a sysadmin. Yes you can use an external package, but you must be aware of it and if you have to search for a solution you just need once or twice you don't search for additional tools, but for the command line. With KDE you don't waste time searching, you can find the setting in the default widget.

  15. alain williams Silver badge

    I notice: tcp_wrappers deprecated

    probably because it does not play well with systemd.

    Regarding desktops: I just hope that when I need to upgrade by CentOS 6 desktop to CentOS 8, that Mate will be available. I hate Gnome-3.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: I notice: tcp_wrappers deprecated

      "probably because it does not play well with systemd"

      Got that bassackwards. systemd doesn't play well with much of anything.

      (If you don't know what tcp_wrappers is, read Wietse's paper on the subject here . It's a handy addition to your toolkit.)

  16. WibbleMe

    Working with Ubuntu desktop, its great when it works but often it does not support older hardware or new hardware like graphics cards to you would be face with blank screen.

  17. a_yank_lurker

    Pox on both Gnome and KDE

    Personally I dislike both Gnome and KDE (for different reasons). My favorites are Cinnamon, Mate, and XFCE. RHEL is simplifying their support needs and costs by dropping KDE which sort of makes sense at first glance. But I wonder, other differing configuration methods, how much extra work supporting several desktop environments causes and is this a significant amount of work. My impression from other projects is there is some work to support each DE. Just have to have someone dedicated to doing the grunt work.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I despise Gnome and have been a long time user of KDE, yep KDE has had it's up and downs but for a workstation DE IMHO it's the best one for Linux out there.

    OpenSUSE all the way.

    1. RoyalHeart

      Still using KDE3 on openSUSE

      KDE3 is still supported on openSUSE.

      https://en.opensuse.org/KDE3

      I love it as it is lighter weight than the later versions of KDE, and it does what I need. And it stays out of my way.

  19. simonb_london

    All roads lead to Neon

    At least KDE won't drop support for KDE on their own disto. I hope....

  20. nycnikato

    Exactly right ,and it is a good thing.

    KDE is a fine Desktop, but represents a division of effort.Hopefully This will mean an end to the RPM packages of old. RPM-Ostree will be used for system packages, and command-line utilities, while Flatpak will be supported for GUI applications. This type of standardization , at least in the commercial product, is what Red Hat has needed for a very very long time. KDE will surely be supported at the Fedora project.

  21. simpfeld

    EPEL Repo

    It will probably be in EPEL but sadly that will mean no RH support if you find issues. That's a deal breaker for such a critical component in our organisation.

  22. JohnFen

    I'll add this to the list

    I'll add this to the list of reasons to avoid using Red Hat.

  23. Ilsa Loving

    I don't understand...

    Why do distributions gravitate to Gnome? Gnome was ok in the 2.x days, but since then it is complete garbage. The DE is so half-assed they should be ashamed of themselves. Evolution isn't fit for purpose. KDE and it's associated suite of applications is so overwhelmingly better (albeit possibly a little too complex for the average user) that it's not even a comparison.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    systemd dependency?

    Perhaps, he says paranoically, GNOME is more tightly bound to systemd than KDE, therefore mandating GNOME as the future binds us into systemd ever more tightly.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seems like something IBM might ponder.....

    When is Redhat going to adopt something awesome like Windows Metro?

    Yes, I am joking

  26. cjcox

    Broken by design

    Gnome is broken by design. Why have a background if you can't use it? It's just weird.

    With that said, RHEL's KDE implementation was also pretty broken. Maybe Red Hat's goal is to make every DE non-functional? They've done a pretty good job.

    If you want a good KDE experience there's always SUSE. IBM's crush of Red Hat could mean opportunity for SUSE. Maybe they can hire back some of their talent?

  27. Jedipadawan

    KDE deserves some love!

    I know this is sorta off topic but I don't get why the world has been so shifting to Gnome when it's become minimal to the point of smartphone UI only!

    I live and die by KDE but had to shift to Neon on the ground I can't guarantee another other KDE based distro will stick now. That, plus, despite the fact Neon needs shed loads of libraries and apps to be installed to actually run stuff - though that's easily done - it's hardware support is A1!

    KDE gives me:

    A recognisable Windows XP like initial interface that new users - students - can pick up instinctively.

    If I install Linux for someone out here - I had got converts now - the training under KDE is minimal. The says, "But I used to do it this way in Windows/Mac, can't Linux do it..." flick the switch; "There, like that?"

    "Yes!"

    Happy user and no retraining or explaining why they cannot have what they want.

    The user defined keyboard shortcuts in KDE are a DREAM! Nothing comes close in another other GUI. I seems this is a feature of minimal interest to most users who seem to want touchpad, icons and maybe touchscreen but I need small, portable, on the move and the keyboard shortcuts that take me to favourite folders, apps, even web pages saves me huge amounts of time and hassle! Also great for new user. "You press this and it goes."

    I put KDE on one student's laptop for him. Young kid, he appreciated my efforts but came from a Mac background. He just could not handle the Windows way but he liked the keyboard shortcuts I had set up for him.

    So I put on Docky, gave him his icons, put the panel at the top of the screen, icons on the desktop and generally 'Macifed' KDE. It worked and he LOVES IT! He is beaming at the new set up but I keep the keyboard shortcuts so I can take control in a way I understand if need arises.

    You can do stuff like that with KDE!

    With respect to Gnome, I try to use it for five minutes and want to throw the laptop at the wall (like I always want to do with the Mac UI as well) as I just cannot get it to do anything!! I do not get how "if in doubt cut it out" is so popular.

    And while I know early renderings of both KDE 4 and 5 were ropey, Plasma is now solid on my laptops! Absolutely solid!

    I hope KDE gains more traction soon, especially as it can now be run on smartphones. It really is a GUI in a class of its own and it deserves to thrive. As it stands, I can see why KDE is going smartphone and why Neon has come to be!

  28. zparihar

    Red Hat does not have a popular/good workstation never did much for KDE... no big deal

    When I think of Red Hat, I don't think of Desktop nor Workstation. Ubuntu comes to mind for a better Desktop/Workstation experience.

    Red Hat never did too much for the Desktop community in general outside of funding the GNOME project. Red Hat is a great Server distribution, and that's their focus and bread and butter. From a business perspective, it makes sense to focus only one Desktop Environment and that should probably have been KDE right from the beginning. The Windows world would be more familiar with it, the KDE community is huge, responsive and talented. KDE has produced a high-level experience with very little funding compared to GNOME.

    My ideal scenarios for an enterprise would be:

    - Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the Servers

    - KDE Suse Linux for Workstations

    - Managed by Katello (the Open Source version of Red Hat Satellite)

    - Integrated with FreeIPA (the Open Source version of Red Hat Identity Management)

    I'd like to see other Enterprise distros (OpenSuse and Ubuntu) step up their KDE game!

  29. This post has been deleted by its author

  30. FrankAlphaXII

    So what? You can install whatever DE you want anyway.

    I've been using KDE a long time, I use it on FreeBSD and even on TrueOS, and if I'm ever forced back onto using Linux for anything its a simple su dnf install @kde-desktop-environment away.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Frank, why do you need a GUI on TrueOS? Most of my TrueOS servers are headless ... although I can configure my statmux to give me a dumb terminal console, should I need/want one.

  31. lsatenstein

    The question to answer is does it matter which distribution you use if they all provide the current Linux and the Current Gnome and the current KDE.

    Any linux distribution will do. And with the containers (flatpacks), eventually there will be a global standard, and a flatpack from SUSE will be runable on Debian.

    RedHat worked hard to become #1 in the server world. With a new priority --IBM, watch what happens to global support for HP, and other hardware vendors.

    HP and others will not give business to a competitor. Here comes UBUNTU or SUSE to take RH's place.

    1. jake Silver badge

      "eventually there will be a global standard"

      There already is. It's called a tarball. Has worked since time immemorial.

  32. disk iops

    What's all this about DE then?

    f'k me, all this heartache over desktop environments, icon sets, and changing window dressing? If you're running anything more than TWM and some xterms with screen, you're doing it wrong. FileManagers (Nautilus, Konqueror, etc), really? You people can't use cp and mv? Good *diety*, what is wrong with *nix users these days.

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