A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop [LWN.net]

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By Jake Edge
May 7, 2024

A proposal to switch the default desktop for Fedora Workstation from GNOME to KDE Plasma largely went over like the proverbial lead balloon—unsurprisingly. But the conversation about the proposal did surface some areas where the distribution could perhaps be more inclusive with regard to the other desktop choices available. The project believes that it benefits from being opinionated and not requiring users to make multiple decisions before they can even install the distribution, but there is a balance to be found.

For Fedora 42

The change proposal was posted to the Fedora devel mailing list on behalf of the feature's owners (Joshua Strobl, Marc Deop i Argemí, Troy Dawson, Steve Cossette, Alessandro Astone) by Fedora operations architect Aoife Moloney on April 2. In short, it proposes to "switch the default desktop experience for Workstation to KDE Plasma" for Fedora 42, which will come in roughly a year. As one might expect, it reads like an advocacy piece about the Plasma desktop, extolling its virtues while not denigrating GNOME at all. The idea would be to swap the positions of Plasma and GNOME, keeping the GNOME edition as a separate version that would still be release-blocking; new installs would get Plasma by default, while upgrading existing systems would not switch the desktop.

The date of the post did not help with its initial reception. It was first posted on the Fedora wiki April 1, but was announced a day later on the list. That led Richard Hughes to wonder if it was an April Fools' Day joke; if so, "it's a weird one, and a day too late". Tomas Torcz thought the proposal made sense because Plasma seems "more technically advanced than GNOME", thus he did not think it is a joke. Feature owner Cossette agreed that it was not a joke; despite the timing, "the proposal is 1000% serious". He followed that up with some more information about the thinking of its proponents. For one thing, it was never meant to knock down GNOME; the real goal is rather different:

The overall spirit of the CP [change proposal] is that we think KDE, and to some extent the other spins too, need a bit more visibility on the website. At the very least, Gnome and KDE should be up front on the frontpage.
[...] We've been discussing it in Matrix, and we can't seem to reach a consensus as to what is the best way to initiate the discussion procedure. Figured a change proposal was probably a decent way to "kick the hornet's nest", so to speak.

But Kevin Fenzi objected that giving the two desktops equal billing would simply lead to confusion; what would be needed is a way to describe the differences to new users "in a quick enough way that they won't decide it's all confusing and go do something else". Kevin Kofler thought there was a fairly straightforward way to raise the visibility of Plasma and other spins without confusing users. He suggested that the first "option" be a big button that users who hate options can click (hyperbolically: "I HATE OPTIONS, JUST GIVE ME SOMETHING WITH NO OPTIONS!"); it would download the GNOME workstation edition for x86_64. Below that would be alternative desktops for the various architectures, then specialty choices, such as mobile versions and Fedora Labs, and so on. The advantage is that the big button at the top will cater to the users Fenzi is concerned about and "will give them a desktop environment designed exactly for them".

Fenzi said that could simply be turned on its head, so that the "Download Workstation" button was at the top, followed by other options—which is more or less what is there now. The current Fedora home page (from the Wayback Machine, since it may be changing) shows the five editions, Workstation, Server, IoT, Cloud, and CoreOS, toward the top, each with its own logo, short description, download link, and "Learn More" button. After that come the other options, Atomic desktops, Spins, Labs, and Alternative (ALT) downloads, each with a description and "Learn more" link. Kofler said that the arrangement places Plasma (and other desktops) behind editions, such as IoT, Cloud, or Server, that may well be irrelevant to the users Fenzi mentioned.

Cossette acknowledged Fenzi's point about confusing users, but suggested that choosing between two desktops was not such a huge barrier, especially in comparison to the decision on which of a huge number of Linux distributions to try. Adam Williamson pointed out, however, that the outcome of the Fedora.next initiative back in 2014 had specifically overhauled the distribution to make it "much more focused and less of a choose-your-own-adventure, specifically including making the download page much more opinionated". Michael Catanzaro said that while the changes made have been "key to the success of Fedora over the past 10 years", there may still be room to raise the profile of Plasma on Fedora:

But there is a continuum of strategies we can use to promote our default desktop over other options, and I wonder if we've erred too far in favor of Fedora Workstation and against Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop here. The Plasma spin is much "bigger" than the other spins, it's of comparable quality to Fedora Workstation, and it is release blocking. It just seems strange to relegate it to a secondary downloads page regardless of how popular it is, while the non-desktop editions (some of which are frankly relatively niche) get featured very prominently.

Edition?

He suggested that since the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop spin occupied a singular position among the spins (and various other kinds of Fedora releases), it could perhaps become an edition of its own. The "Workstation" name and branding should not be used for it, and the distribution would "continue to steer undecided users towards Fedora Workstation", but it would make Plasma easier to find and present it "more prominently than it is today". Beyond that, the Fedora Spins could be positioned higher on the home page—since those options are not mutually exclusive, both could be done.

Neal Gompa, who is a member of the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and the KDE SIG, wondered why the options could not be "Fedora GNOME Workstation" and, reusing the current name, "Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop". But Andreas Tunek pointed out that using GNOME in the name of the Workstation edition is concerning because it may imply the existence of other Workstation editions to some, which is not the case at all. Kofler said that he was not sure that he bought that argument, however.

FESCo member Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek agreed with Catanzaro's idea that the Plasma spin become an edition. He did not see that having a second choice would be disruptive to the Fedora Workstation edition. Like others, he thought that the web site needed some reorganization. Gompa seemed concerned that the change would simply move the KDE version in with the editions, but Williamson noted that is actually a big change:

Being an Edition is a very significant thing, though, as we conceive of Fedora more widely than just the download page. We put a bunch of hoops in the way of IoT and CoreOS becoming editions, and there are hoops in the way of Silverblue becoming one (or, you know, wherever we go with that path in the end).

Jędrzejewski-Szmek said that his assumption was that the proposal would be changed to create a KDE Plasma edition, following the Edition Promotion Policy. Overall, it seems that KDE Plasma would qualify, with one possible exception:

The only sticky point is whether KDE desktop serves a different purpose than Workstation with GNOME. I'd say it does: desktop preferences are like religion, and people don't just switch (except when they do).

More discussion

A parallel discussion of the change proposal took place on the Fedora discussion forum after one of the owners, Joshua Strobl, posted it there. That discussion progressed on similar lines, with some highly in favor of a switch, while others were strongly opposed—still others wondered whether it was an April Fools' joke. Cossette clarified that the proposal was not aimed at removing GNOME, but, of course, the proposal wording itself seemed to advocate in that direction, which was confusing.

Fedora project leader Matthew Miller suggested a path for the change proposal owners—and the wider KDE SIG that they are members of—to take, starting with contacting the Fedora Workstation working group to see if there is any interest in switching to, or better supporting, Plasma. In the likely event that does not go far, looking into a promotion to an edition would be the next step, he said. In the meantime, Miller asked that the change proposal be withdrawn, or that FESCo defer action on it, until that process could play out. Gompa, who is also a member of the Workstation working group, said that he would rather see the discussion continue. Since the proposal targets Fedora 42, "there's a very long timeframe to figure things out".

Yet another proposal owner, Troy Dawson, filed an issue with the Workstation group on April 12. As with the change proposal, the issue suggested replacing GNOME with KDE Plasma in the Workstation edition for Fedora 42. If that was not of interest: "we would like to talk with the Fedora Workstation Group about possible ways to promote KDE to Edition level status in Fedora". That set off a lengthy discussion, in the issue thread and over several Workstation meetings, that continues as of this writing. On May 6, Catanzaro summarized the status:

I think we have a rough consensus that:

We do not want to use Fedora Workstation branding for KDE
We still want Workstation to be the "default" choice (i.e. we don't want them to be viewed as equal) (Neal [Gompa] does not agree with this)

But, even after spending the entirety of the May 7 meeting discussing the issue, the group has not come up with an official response. Catanzaro said: "I know you've been waiting a while (sorry!) and we want to finish this soon, but this is also too important to rush."

That's where things stand now. The discussion has mostly run its course at this point; along the way it included various comparisons of the two desktops and their ease of use for newcomers (as opposed to the Linux-savvy), rehashing the decision on continuing X11 support for Plasma, and more. Based on what we know, a switch to Plasma for Fedora Workstation in Fedora 42 (or any release in the foreseeable future) seems vanishingly unlikely. On the other hand, more prominence for the Plasma spin (or, probably, edition) is something we are likely to see—perhaps even well before a year goes by.

to post comments

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 0:20 UTC (Wed) by numgmt (guest, #167446) [Link] (30 responses)

I like both GNOME and Plasma. I like GNOME more from a usability perspective, but Plasma is a more mature choice for Wayland right now and seems to have more people working on it.

This whole thing has been swamped by arguments from either side on which one deserves to be the default and what the flaws of either one are. I think it makes sense to focus on GNOME because that's the Fedora Workstation experience. KDE Plasma SIG provides an alternative experience to those who want it.

At the same time, I can see the value in defaulting to Plasma. Presenting it front-and-center means a lot of usability concerns can be worked out, in much the same way as removing X11 support pushes progress on Wayland.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 0:41 UTC (Wed) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (18 responses)

>At the same time, I can see the value in defaulting to Plasma.

This is doing something at someone else's expense.

Do not do to others what you don't want others doing to you.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 0:49 UTC (Wed) by numgmt (guest, #167446) [Link] (17 responses)

In the same way I think Wayland has the potential to be a better experience than X11, I think Plasma has the potential to be a better experience than GNOME (largely driven by its Wayland story). Switching to it now would shorten the gap.

Personally, I could use either, and I'd actually like to see Plasma be the default in more distributions. Once it matches its release cycle with distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora, that will be one more reason.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 1:09 UTC (Wed) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (16 responses)

> I think Plasma has the potential to be a better experience than GNOME (largely driven by its Wayland story)

> Plasma is a more mature choice for Wayland right now

Is it? I can't see how would that be.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 1:32 UTC (Wed) by numgmt (guest, #167446) [Link] (15 responses)

Have you tried Plasma 6? I was surprised coming from GNOME. The initial Fedora change proposal mentions a few specific protocols if you're interested.

Plasma has been far more willing to work with the wider community (wlroots, Smithay, Weston, application developers) on protocols. Here's a good example: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/...

It's not necessarily a knock on GNOME, because they want to make sure the protocol is perfect before implementing it (or see no reason for it to exist at all), but it does mean protocols take quite a big longer to develop. This is only an issue because of the push to abandon X. Or they implement something completely different, like CSD instead of SSD and make application developer's lives difficult if they live outside of the GNOME/GTK ecosystem.

This isn't related to Wayland, but Plasma lets you set the permissions of Flatpak applications inside the System Settings application.

I actually like GNOME more, mind you! It changed my workflow significantly. I would have continued using it if it were possible to use Krita on GNOME, but sadly it isn't, so I had to switch to Plasma. Maybe part of this is just that Plasma seems to have more people working on it, but they've made amazing strides with Wayland.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 2:45 UTC (Wed) by adam820 (subscriber, #101353) [Link] (2 responses)

> I would have continued using it if it were possible to use Krita on GNOME, but sadly it isn't, so I had to switch to Plasma.

What? I use Krita on GNOME on Wayland all the time.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 2:54 UTC (Wed) by numgmt (guest, #167446) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, I made it sound like there was an issue with it not starting at all. That's not the case.

The issue is with GNOME's multi-monitor handling. I have a 4K display scaled to 200%, and then a graphics tablet (with a screen) that I also want scaled to 200%, but if I do that, I can't fullscreen Krita anymore. I also can't shrink it down to the degree that the entire window fits on my graphics tablet. If I remember correctly, it either wasn't possible for me to chose 100% for the graphics tablet (I had to choose 100% for both monitors), or it was and the Krita window *would* fit, but all of the tools were tiny so it was unusable.

This was about half a year ago.

Anyway, it's also broken on Plasma's X session in the same way, but Plasma's Wayland session was the only thing that worked for me. The multi-monitor handling is great in that respect. I tried three different distributions with GNOME & KDE, FWIW.

On the other hand, Plasma's multi-monitor handling is an absolute pain in terms of handling workspaces, which at least GNOME gets right.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 10, 2024 7:58 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

> Anyway, it's also broken on Plasma's X session in the same way, but Plasma's Wayland session was the only thing that worked for me.

It sounds like Krita is using Qt's X backend in GNOME, try running it with the environment variable QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland .

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 10, 2024 7:48 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (11 responses)

> Plasma has been far more willing to work with the wider community (wlroots, Smithay, Weston, application developers) on protocols.

GNOME & Plasma developers are involved to similar degrees in discussions on the most important protocols.

> It's not necessarily a knock on GNOME, because they want to make sure the protocol is perfect before implementing it (or see no reason for it to exist at all), but it does mean protocols take quite a big longer to develop.

It's not really fair to blame "protocols take quite a big longer to develop" on GNOME alone. Even if GNOME devs were the only ones raising issues in protocol discussions (which isn't the case), issues which are only discovered after a protocol has landed are far more painful for everyone.

> This is only an issue because of the push to abandon X.

Xorg upstream development was abandoned years ago, no push was needed for that.

> Or they implement something completely different, like CSD instead of SSD and make application developer's lives difficult if they live outside of the GNOME/GTK ecosystem.

The core Wayland protocol has always been CSD only. SSD is an optional extension not supported by all compositors.

The reality is that every general-purpose Wayland client has to support CSD.

> This isn't related to Wayland, but Plasma lets you set the permissions of Flatpak applications inside the System Settings application.

So does gnome-control-center's Apps panel.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 13, 2024 6:01 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (2 responses)

Everything in Wayland is an extension. *Putting a window on the screen* is an extension to the core Wayland protocol. Without any extensions, you can stream pixels to the compositor, but you can't tell the compositor what you want it to do with the pixels.

(Which is pretty weird, IMO. Where X11 has a window-centric model, Wayland has a pixel-stream-centric model.)

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 13, 2024 10:07 UTC (Mon) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (1 responses)

I suspect the reason for leaving that out of the core protocol was that there can be special-purpose Wayland compositors which don't support "normal" windows.

However, some kind of shell protocol for creating "normal" windows is obviously required for any application which uses "normal" windows. A compositor which doesn't support any such protocol can legitimately be considered unusable for general-purpose applications.

That's different from SSD, which isn't strictly required for any kind of application.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 16, 2024 22:19 UTC (Thu) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

Every protocol is an agreement among parties which makes tradeoffs for the sake of consistency and interoperability. A sensible window system protocol involves operations like "create window" and "set window title". Because of this, Wayland is not a sensible window system protocol.

Some cases always sit outside of the protocol design goals and have to be bodged in. For example, there may be a server which intends to display only one window, but runs the multi-window protocol anyway because that's what the client is using because the client normally runs on multi-window systems. In this case the first "create window" request can set "the" window, and "set window title" can be ignored because there is no title bar. Alternatively, "the" window might be selected based on its title. This is the server's implementation choice. Most of the windows on my desktop don't have title bars because I use a tiling WM which doesn't show title bars; "set window size" is also ignored in many cases. These are also my server's implementation choices to deviate from the specification.

However the tail cannot wag the dog. Excluding "create window" because "what if the server only supports one window?" and excluding "set window title" because "what if it's a tiling WM?" are very silly and create more friction for everyone.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 14, 2024 18:03 UTC (Tue) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (7 responses)

>> Or they implement something completely different, like CSD instead of SSD and make application developer's lives difficult if they live outside of the GNOME/GTK ecosystem.
> The core Wayland protocol has always been CSD only. SSD is an optional extension not supported by all compositors.
> The reality is that every general-purpose Wayland client has to support CSD.

The Wayland "core protocols" (for some definition of core protocols that includes the extensions "necessary" for a desktop) do not specify decorations at all. You can't really infer whether that means CSDs or SSDs based on that alone. What you can infer is that window decorations is another extension. And indeed, that's what xdg-decoration does.

It's a very annoying misnomer to say that Wayland is "CSD-only" or prefers CSDs, when in reality, Wayland doesn't even support a desktop in the core protocol at all.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 15, 2024 7:55 UTC (Wed) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (6 responses)

> The Wayland "core protocols" [...] do not specify decorations at all. You can't really infer whether that means CSDs or SSDs based on that alone.

It means only CSD is possible (with some limitations, if the compositor doesn't know where the decorations & drop shadows are).

> What you can infer is that window decorations is another extension.

Then we agree that Wayland originally supported only CSD.

> And indeed, that's what xdg-decoration does.

From the top of https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-decoration-unstable-v1:

"This interface allows a compositor to announce support for server-side decorations.

[...]

A client can use this protocol to request being decorated by a supporting compositor.

If compositor and client do not negotiate the use of a server-side decoration using this protocol, clients continue to self-decorate as they see fit."

That's quite clear: CSD is the default, the compositor may optionally support SSD. A general-purpose Wayland client has to support CSD.

It's revisionism trying to blame GNOME for CSD in Wayland, when it was there from the very beginning, long before GNOME supported Wayland.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 15, 2024 11:23 UTC (Wed) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (4 responses)

I think it's fair to say that GNOME is the only desktop that reinforces this expectation, as all other desktops and even most independent Wayland window managers expect or force server-side decorations (regardless of the xdg-decoration protocol extension).

However, I do think it is revisionist to say Wayland forces CSDs when the core protocol forces nothing. If applications do nothing, there's nothing, and "Wayland" is fine with that. And there are applications that do that. There's an implication that you need CSDs for window decorations, but it is not explicitly stated in the core stuff at all. The xdg-decoration protocol definition is really the first explicit mention of one way or another.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 16, 2024 8:09 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (2 responses)

> all other desktops and even most independent Wayland window managers expect or force server-side decorations (regardless of the xdg-decoration protocol extension).

Per the parent posts, a Wayland compositor can't force SSD: The client may ignore the xdg-decoration protocol, in which case only CSD is possible.

> If applications do nothing, there's nothing, and "Wayland" is fine with that.

"Nothing" is really CSD: Since there's no SSD, the client is responsible for drawing decorations as needed.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 16, 2024 10:32 UTC (Thu) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

A Wayland compositor can do whatever it likes. And tiling window managers have generally had some kind of SSD to support their workflows.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 16, 2024 22:45 UTC (Thu) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

> Per the parent posts, a Wayland compositor can't force SSD: The client may ignore the xdg-decoration protocol, in which case only CSD is possible.

Not true. The compositor could simply render decorations around every window. Especially if it doesn't advertise the xdg-decoration protocol, which means that it makes no promises about decorations one way or the other.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 17, 2024 11:51 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> However, I do think it is revisionist to say Wayland forces CSDs when the core protocol forces nothing. If applications do nothing, there's nothing, and "Wayland" is fine with that. And there are applications that do that. There's an implication that you need CSDs for window decorations, but it is not explicitly stated in the core stuff at all. The xdg-decoration protocol definition is really the first explicit mention of one way or another.

Sounds like Nikon cameras when they went digital. The old film cameras were all "AF in the camera". The cheap new cameras were "AF in the lens".

ALL Nikon guaranteed was "the physical mount is compatible. The electronic connectors won't fry your kit".

Stick an old lens on your new camera, and despite both being AF-compatible, you had no AF. I had to buy a top end amateur camera to get my old AF lenses to AF. That sounds like Wayland to me - bear in mind it is a PROTOCOL, it cannot do ANYTHING itself. If the *implementation* of Wayland (client or server) don't implement something, you don't get it. So if both your client and your server expect *the*other*side* to implement decorations, bingo! No decorations! Nothing to do with Wayland!

Cheers,
Wol

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 16, 2024 22:39 UTC (Thu) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

As I already said a day and a half before you, *everything* in Wayland is an extension. *Putting a window on the screen* is an extension. The fact that SSD is an extension has absolutely no relevance to whether it's a requirement or not. Every other display system in existence has SSD, because it is the sane choice for a toolkit-agnostic window server, and GNOME is the *only* Wayland stakeholder which doesn't want it to be mandatory, because they want to force people to use their toolkit alongside their window server.

It's very important, so let me repeat it again: **EVERYTHING in Wayland is an extension.** Without extensions, you can do nothing. Conan_Kudo made a good point that the core protocol doesn't specify decorations at all, which means neither CSD nor SSD are specified. One might reasonably guess that there will be no decorations at all, which means if you render your own decorations, there will be one set of decorations, which will be the ones you render. But that's not actually specified by the protocol. As it happens, things did evolve that way, which is the so-called "CSD default". But that isn't specified by the protocol. Decorations are undefined behaviour.

If the application renders its own set and then gets two sets because the server also rendered them, the server isn't wrong to do that -- *unless* the server claimed to advertise the xdg-decoration protocol, in which CSD is the default, and the client noticed the protocol and did not request SSD because it wanted CSD, and the server did SSD anyway.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 5:18 UTC (Wed) by kucharsk (subscriber, #115077) [Link] (10 responses)

I still think until Wayland has an easy way to do the equivalent of "xset dpms force off" to blank the screen and put the display into power save mode, dumping X11 is stupid.

Last time I asked about it I was given a bunch of horrifically complex command sequences to "try."

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 5:39 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (9 responses)

wlr-randr --output <display_name> --off

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 5:57 UTC (Wed) by kucharsk (subscriber, #115077) [Link] (8 responses)

Does that shut off the screen until a key is pressed as xset does, or until you run the inverse of the command?

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 6:04 UTC (Wed) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link] (7 responses)

>> wlr-randr --output <display_name> --off
>
> Does that shut off the screen until a key is pressed as xset does, or until you run the inverse of the command?

Your first question should be: is the Wayland protocol used by wlr-randr to achieve its function supported by non-wlroots-based compositors like gnome-shell and kwin?

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 14:34 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (5 responses)

I think it's wrong to expect 99.99999% of users to even understand this question let alone be able to answer it.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 13, 2024 6:00 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (4 responses)

One of the big problems with Wayland: lack of standardization.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 13, 2024 10:04 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (3 responses)

I believe X11 used to be like this too, see ICCCM. What surprises me is that it's taking so long to standardize things that I'd naively think would be pretty uncontroversial, such as the ability for a voice communications application to have a 'push to talk' key that works even if it's in the background.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 13, 2024 10:19 UTC (Mon) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (2 responses)

There's a global shortcuts portal for this now.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 15, 2024 23:47 UTC (Wed) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (1 responses)

However, only KDE Plasma implements it, so it doesn't help if you use any other environment for now.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 16, 2024 7:59 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

Just a matter of time. It's being implemented in mutter.

I suspect the inertia in apps adopting it will be the bigger issue.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 9, 2024 6:11 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

No, the first question should be what the user actually wants to accomplish...

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 0:55 UTC (Wed) by calvin (subscriber, #168398) [Link] (8 responses)

The proposal doesn't seem like it's in good faith to me. Strobl has a history of not getting along well with Gnome, very publicly.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 1:28 UTC (Wed) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (1 responses)

> The proposal doesn't seem like it's in good faith to me.

I originally became aware of this proposal as part of another Linux news site coverage, but until this article, I didn't even stopped to consider that it could be in good faith. To my eyes, it would be like a proposal to systemd to retarget to GNU/Hurd.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 2:24 UTC (Wed) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

Sorry, GNu Hurd is occupied. No room for systemd

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 10:50 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

> Strobl has a history of not getting along well with Gnome, very publicly.

Sounds a bit like me :-) I don't have a clue who Strobl is, but distros like Fedora, Ubuntu, et al that push Gnome I actively avoid. SUSE is my "big distro" of choice because they've always been KDE. Gentoo is completely agnostic so I have no problems there (my problem with gentoo is there is a fair bit of systemd-hostility :-(

At the end of the day, there is no "one size fits all" - I actively hate things like Word and Gnome because they get in the way of my work flow. If somebody else likes them, it's no skin off my nose until they demand I start supporting their choice for them ... :-( Because I'm the local "computer expert" ...

That's a big problem I have with modern computing - there are too many young turks who think they have a "silver bullet", and don't realise us silver-backs have been there, done that, and been badly burnt too often by the "latest and greatest" which doesn't actually work ...

Cheers,
Wol

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 15:02 UTC (Wed) by arsen (subscriber, #161285) [Link] (4 responses)

> Gentoo is completely agnostic so I have no problems there (my problem with gentoo is there is a fair bit of systemd-hostility :-(

We support systemd well, and many devs use it. I'm not sure what you mean.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 16:07 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

I know systemd is supported. It's just that my current systems are gentoo/systemd, and they've been far more of a pain to get configured / up than the previous gentoo/openrc machine.

And it's my experience that whenever I've searched for help, all the main documentation is openrc-based, and systemd is very much an afterthought that is *much* harder to find. Getting networking to work was a real pain on both systems, my memories of the OpenRC system are that there was a handy tutorial that was much easier to follow, in the main documentation.

Next job, get systemd-boot or whatever it's called to work, and I'll be able to ditch my old laptop that doesn't work properly. I'll see how easy that is ...

Once systemd is running, it works well. It's finding anything that tells me how to get it running that's the problem ...

Cheers,
Wol

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 16:12 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

>And it's my experience that whenever I've searched for help, all the main documentation
>is openrc-based, and systemd is very much an afterthought that is *much* harder to find.

Just use the Arch documentation, as everybody (not using Arch) does ;-)

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 9, 2024 7:40 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Wait, Arch is not just the best Linux documentation, there is more to it? /s

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 13, 2024 6:06 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

You chose to use the optional harder thing, and now life is harder? Well, yes. Why did you think everyone else was complaining about that thing?

Systemd documentation for any operating system should work, since it's the same on all of them.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 16:23 UTC (Wed) by carlosrodfern (subscriber, #166486) [Link]

Wait, it wasn't a April fool day thing? LOL

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 8, 2024 16:30 UTC (Wed) by tau (subscriber, #79651) [Link] (2 responses)

I prefer GNOME but I suppose I could get used to KDE, since after all KDE is very customizable. Either way I strongly agree with the original "Fedora Workstation" branding change and I think that there should be one and only one "main" edition, whether that is a GNOME desktop or a KDE desktop. I use Fedora because it is an "opinionated" distribution that focuses on building a well-integrated and cohesive product. If you want a build-your-own distro construction kit then there are plenty of other alternatives in that ecological niche (Arch, Gentoo, Nix, Debian etc). Actually I use Fedora Silverblue because it goes even further in the direction of having a single canonical system image and separating out user-installable software down into various container technologies, but i digress. Fedora doesn't try to be all things to all people and I like that.

GNOME's architecture does seem to integrate more seamlessly with the surrounding operating system platform, since for all its faults GObject does interoperate nicely across different implementation languages in a way that C++ and MOC (does Qt still use this?) does not and never will; there is a hard border between KDE Frameworks and fd.o projects and systemd etc in a way that isn't there for GNOME technologies. Which I think is a point in favor of choosing GNOME as the user interface for a highly vertically integrated OS project, if that makes any sense. On the other hand GNOME's development team does have a rather, well, let's say tenacious commitment to a particular vision of how a user's workflow should operate, and that workflow works for some people but definitely does not work for others.

(incidentally I am reminded of this famous mailing list post, the question at hand today is more about user preferences than relative technical maturity but I think a lot of the earlier points still apply http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/ )

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 9, 2024 0:40 UTC (Thu) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

>http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/

Talk about being opinionated.

(its opinion I agree with)

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 9, 2024 16:01 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

"seamlessly with the surrounding operating system platform, since for all its faults GObject does interoperate nicely across different implementation languages in a way that C++ and MOC (does Qt still use this?) does not and never will"

This is nonsense. And I'm telling you this as the author of the first book about PyQt that was ever published, in 2002: https://valdyas.org/python/book.html -- that is, over twenty years ago.

Oh, wait, that was years and years before gobject.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 9, 2024 3:29 UTC (Thu) by azumanga (subscriber, #90158) [Link]

About 15 years ago, one reason I bought a mac instead of using Linux was because it seemed everything was Gnome vs KDE, and some apps worked in one but not well in the other. To this day I've never really figured out why I should choose one over the other, and the choice remains. Now I just take whichever one my current distro (currently Ubuntu) offers by default.

The idea of making people choose when they download the distro is really awful.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 9, 2024 12:13 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

This is a good move.

I recently switched from GNOME to KDE on Debian trixie.

Plasma and KDE software more generally do seem more useful and featureful as workstation software than GNOME, which seems more like an end-user desktop.

The reason I switched though, was to escape the multiple daily gnome-shell crashes killing the user session, even under Xorg. With Plasma the shell seems to crash more often but doesn't take out the session, although notifications and task manager window order are lost. Its still possible to take out the session through kwin or kded5 but those seem much more robust. Hopefully one day some mainstream desktops will be able to catch up to Arcan, which can supposedly even survive the death of a GPU with the session intact.

https://arcan-fe.com/2017/12/24/crash-resilient-wayland-compositing/

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 10, 2024 3:44 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

> The reason I switched though, was to escape the multiple daily gnome-shell crashes killing the user session, even under Xorg.

Something is obviously very wrong that is specific to your setup. I've been using GNOME for a decade on lots of different hardware and have never seen anything like this.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 10, 2024 3:48 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

I even have a bit of a power-user setup with multiple monitors, using Nvidia and Intel GPUs at the same with Optimus, and running beefy games under WINE/Steam on the Nvidia GPU.

Off topic, but when I first got this laptop Optimus didn't work reliably so I stuck to the Intel GPU only. Recently I wanted to run games on the Nvidia GPU so I tried enabling Optimus again and it worked flawlessly. That stuff has come a long way in the last several years. Bless the developers responsible.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 11, 2024 23:01 UTC (Sat) by kmeyer (subscriber, #50720) [Link]

Too bad it won't happen, but this would be a good move for Fedora. GNOME is pretty bad. Linux users are typically more advanced users and less in need of the iPad-ified dumb-as-possible desktop that GNOME presents.

A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop

Posted May 16, 2024 21:26 UTC (Thu) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]

I think Christian Schaller's blogs about Fedora are really informative, and nobody with this change proposal really addressed the points he made in 2020: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2020/05/07/gnome-is-not-th...

Fedora Workstation is a complete OS similar to Windows, MacOS or ChromeOS. You can actually develop for that platform, which is not really the case for the super fluffy thing called "Desktop Linux".