On Saturday, November 3, 2018, 12:01:42 p.m. EDT, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler@chello.at> wrote:
Temlakos wrote:
> The article mentions the recent release of Fedora 29, but says not a
> word about whether /Fedora/ will deprecate KDE as well.
It will not.
This is a RHEL-only deprecation and has no effect whatsoever on Fedora. KDE
packaging in Fedora is already mostly community-driven.
The packagers are around on #fedora-kde on Freenode IRC.
> I switched to KDE for a reason. GNOME simply /did not show me/ how to
> switch users, or do any of the things that, on MS Windows, are
> practically intuitive. And I understand the reason for it. GNOME mimics
> MacOS, while KDE mimics Windows.
GNOME's idea of "user-friendliness" is to hide as many options as possible
from the user. Everything is hardcoded. This is very similar to Apple's
philosophy, indeed.
> I believe that GNOME has come to dominate for one reason only: those who
> develop distributions, like GNOME and dislike KDE. There's just
> something about KDE that, while it is /user/-friendly, is not
> /developer/-friendly--at least, not to the developers of operating
> systems. (Developers of /applications/ might have a different story to
> tell.)
I don't see KDE being unfriendly to any kind of developers. For application
developers, Qt is a much nicer toolkit to work with than GTK+ (and yes, I
have worked with both). Distribution developers are also always welcomed
upstream. Some KDE upstream developers strongly dislike downstream patches
to their code, but so do GNOME upstream developers.
The main difference from Red Hat's standpoint is that GNOME development is
almost entirely driven by Red Hat, as they have many GNOME developers and
control a large part of GNOME upstream development, whereas for KDE, they
actually have to work together with other people (both individuals and
companies). Red Hat also has very few KDE developers in house who can
develop needed changes for them (upstream or even as a downstream patch),
which is pretty much a vicious circle: no manpower leads to no interest
leads to no manpower.
> I suggest to this community that we have arrived at a crisis. In six
> years, according to /The Register/, Red Hat Enterprise Linux /will not
> support/ a KDE installation or maintenance.
It will not be supported by the commercial support (RHEL support contracts),
but the Fedora KDE SIG plans to provide it in EPEL.
> What are the maintainers of KDE going to do about this?
The Fedora KDE maintainers want to package it for EPEL.
As for commercial support, there may or may not be a third-party company
offering support contracts. I would not count on it, but it might actually
happen if there is a market. It is too early to tell. But that only matters
for (mainly corporate) customers that want support contracts to begin with.
CentOS users are not really affected by that support issue, and Fedora users
are not affected at all to begin with.
> Will Fedora's maintainers do the same thing that RHEL maintainers have
> announced their intention to do?
No.
Kevin Kofler
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