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: …
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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"... 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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).
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.
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.
"...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.
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.
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.
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!
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???
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
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
