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KDE GNOME

Both KDE and GNOME To Offer Official Distros (theregister.com) 66

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
king*jojo writes: KDE and GNOME have decided that because they're not big and complicated enough already, they might work better if they have their own custom distributions underneath. What's the worst that could happen?

A talk from this year's KDE conference, Akademy 2024, looks like it's going to become real. The talk, by KDE developer Harald Sitter, was entitled An Operating System of Our Own, and the idea sounds simple enough: Sitter proposed an official KDE Linux distribution. Now the proposal is gathering steam and a plan is coming together for an official KDE Linux -- codenamed "Project Banana."
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Both KDE and GNOME To Offer Official Distros More

Both KDE and GNOME To Offer Official Distros

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  • It's great that nothing stops anyone and everyone from doing this. At the same time, when it happens too frequently the barrier to entry rises as newcomers have no idea how to select what they need to start and just pay Apple or Microsoft instead.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There is also fragmentation and developer tools, as well as features. Ubuntu finally has TPM decryption of LUKS, and hopefully will be better come the 25.x line will allow this to be done with ZFS as root. Getting commercial vendors to support a distro is very difficult, and it was lucky that most decided to use something other than RHEL or SLES and support Debian/Ubuntu.

      Stuff like Dockerizing all services does help in this regard, but having development tools there is important.

      Then, there is distributio

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by aitikin ( 909209 )

        As for the main filesystem, ZFS should be a core option, with btrfs and ext4 as options. XFS is okay for data, but definitely not great for a root filesystem, as it can't be shrunk, and has no checksumming capability for data.

        Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that ZFS wouldn't be considered a core option as its licensing prohibits its adoption as part of the kernel?

        • I have always wondered if these compatibility licensing issues could be solved by distributing the incompatible software as source and making it trivial to have it compiled and linked locally (launching gcc on first run). I think if you compile it yourself and don't distribute binaries, licence compatibility questions are less problematic.

        • You would be correct, sir. ZFS runs in userland via FUSE.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by caseih ( 160668 )

            No it doesn't. ZFS on fuse does exist but no one uses it for any actual storage. ZFS is most commonly distributed as a dkms build package that builds the kernel modules for your installed kernels. These modules taint the kernel. Ubuntu ships video, signed modules. I'm not sure if they still taint the kernel but they should.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by caseih ( 160668 )

              Ubuntu ships binary, signed modules with their kernels. The legality of mixing incompatible licenses in this fashion is unclear. But who would complain to who is not clear to me. I have no problem with Ubuntu doing this as long as they support it and keep the issues off the kernel mailing list.

        • I've installed Ubuntu with root on ZFS before, and it was seamless. I suspect what they're doing is just downloading it when you choose the option.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "It's great that nothing stops anyone and everyone from doing this."
      Is it?

      "At the same time, when it happens too frequently the barrier to entry rises..."
      Too frequently being once.

      "...as newcomers have no idea how to select what they need..:"
      And developers do not have a single stable platform to target, causing many of the problems for the newcomers.

      "...and just pay Apple or Microsoft instead."
      Because their approach being the thing that "stops" your "great"ness and prevents the problems for newcomers and de

    • Developers do not target a Linux distro.

      They write a program that can run on Linux.

      And that is it. The distro does not matter at all.

  • If they want to attract a user audience consisting primarily of people who just want colorful gadgets to click on - without knowing much about computers or operating systems or IT in general - they can certainly go that route. At some point they might regret attracting an audience that will be at the same time demanding and not helpful.

    I for one was sold on Arch Linux the very moment its installation ended in a console command line prompt on the screen. No one trying to force bloatware, gimmicks or religi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "If they want to attract a user audience consisting primarily of people who just want colorful gadgets to click on - without knowing much about computers or operating systems or IT in general - they can certainly go that route."

      You mean the entire computer market?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ffkom ( 3519199 )

        "If they want to attract a user audience consisting primarily of people who just want colorful gadgets to click on - without knowing much about computers or operating systems or IT in general - they can certainly go that route."

        You mean the entire computer market?

        I did not see anything about selling their software mentioned. So there is no "market", just an audience, that may or may not be inclined to contribute to the non-commercial effort.

  • This could be a great idea, if they base their distro on an already established distro. Like, how Linux Mint based their distro on Ubuntu, and then augmented it with awesomness, and abandoned the lameness. From that, we got MATE and Cinnamon.

    If Kdisto was based on Fedora, Debian --> Ubuntu or Mint, that'd be great. And, I would probably use it.

    As for Gnome... yeah, whatever. I don't care. Do it. Or not.

    • If Kdisto was based on Fedora, Debian --> Ubuntu or Mint, that'd be great. And, I would probably use it.

      I have great news for you, KDE already publishes KDE Neon, a distribution based on Ubuntu LTS + rolling latest KDE software.

      TFA says it isn't clear whether the new KDE distro will be a replacement or a complement to Neon.

      • Yeah I got excited until I read the article and if they were just rebranding Neon. Tried it possibly 1 decade ago and went back to Debian when I realised I didn't need to be bleeding-edge!

        You'd only really care about a KDE specific distro if there were officially branded hardware such as the Slimbook. But even then, couldn't you just do an official ISO 'spin'?

        Unless they're radically diverging on non x86 hardware projects e.g. tablets or e-ink slates (such as PineNote) and they want to save the user from al

        • You'd only really care about a KDE specific distro if there were officially branded hardware such as the Slimbook

          If they do it right, they can also attract new developers. Many KDE users have some development background and could fix at least some small bugs that annoy them. But setting up a development environment in a regular distro might not be easy, and you won't see the result in the distro maybe until next year, unless you run KDE from git, which isn't very recommendable. With an official distro, you get an easily configured development environment to write bugfixes, and you get to see your own bugfixes in the o

  • The Year Of... (Score:3)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @04:21PM (#64980013)

    Another candidate - or two - for The Year Of Yet Another Linux On The Desktop.

    I love the choice I enjoy in Linux, but I can't help wondering if having so many flavours works against it being more widely adopted. I'm sure a lot of would-be Redmond Refugees look into it, see all the choices, have no clue where to begin, and go crawling back to Winblows.

    • I doubt the users are the issue here. For the most part many of them would be perfectly fine with any major name they've heard, and lets face it if they are Windows refugees they are very likely to end up with something like Ubuntu anyway and if they don't search themselves they'll likely to whatever their friendly local nerd tells them is the best.

    • ... I'm sure a lot of would-be Redmond Refugees look into it, see all the choices, have no clue where to begin, and go crawling back to Winblows.

      Almost everyone I hear of using Linux (eg on a couple of hobby forums I know) are using Ubuntu because that's the one they had heard of. I suspect that some think that Ubuntu is just another name for Linux, and doubt they have even heard of 99% of the other distros. I have probably not heard of 75% of them myself, and I've been on Linux for years. Is it really a problem?

      • I suspect that some think that Ubuntu is just another name for Linux, and doubt they have even heard of 99% of the other distros. I have probably not heard of 75% of them myself, and I've been on Linux for years. Is it really a problem?

        My thinking was that if there were a lot fewer distros, they would also be "bigger" and have higher public profiles beyond the FOSS community. I admit that I could be wrong about that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If you watch "switching you Linux experience" videos on YouTube, it's pretty clear that the biggest issue is simply that there's always something broken with every distro, and there's always a fix that involves some command line hacking.

      My latest one was that Ubuntu 24 broke Firefox after an update, and the fix was to remove the flatpak and install it from apt, after some configuration file hacking. The default web browser breaking, which makes it hard to even search for a solution, is pretty bad.

      I don't kn

      • Fair point. But if all of the development and management and testing that goes into all of the existing distros was invested in three or four of them, do you think occurrences like this might be less common? Also, if everybody except Ubuntu pooled their resources, perhaps the result would be a less tyrannical distro at the top of the list.

        To be clear, I know that there's zero chance of that happening, but it's nice to speculate sometimes.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I'm not sure it can be solved by open source. Like documentation, it's not a fun or interesting job. Compatibility testing is a slog. Most open qualified to do it have their own highly custom Linux install and take the attitude that users should just "get good".

          In other words it needs people being paid to do it, like Microsoft pays people to ensure Windows compatibility is excellent and doesn't break things (except when they deliberately want to ram Edge up your arse).

          Then again RHEL isn't all roses either

  • Thank goodness (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @04:30PM (#64980025)

    I was just thinking about how there simply aren't enough Linux distros around!

  • Hmmm, not sure if that's the right approach. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak&yahoo,com> on Friday November 29, 2024 @05:04PM (#64980063) Homepage Journal

    There's a lot of distros, which means there's a lot of redundant effort and insufficient quality control or differentiation.

    There IS, I believe, a space for a new distro, one similar to Gentoo but which senses your platform and configures the kernel and compiler flags to default to whatever is optimal for that system. If it's not a known system, it should run tests to see what is optimal for it.

    But I can't see the sense in building a distro around a desktop. The desktop is central to how you think, but it is not dependent on what you're thinking about. The distro is about the activity, the GUI is about the mind. It is the act of trying to force users down specific paths that weakens Windows and MacOS.

    What you want is for users to use a distro that does what they want and a GUI that does it how they want.

    • I can't see the sense in building a distro around a desktop.

      One point of view:
      KDE appeals to power users, and a subset of those want the latest and greatest KDE (because desktop software is the core of our daily activities and a bugfix or new feature can improve significantly the daily experience). But latest and greatest KDE is not easy to get. Many distros publish numbered versions so you're stuck with a given KDE version for 6-12 months; or you get testing distro versions and get an overall unstable system; or you get a gentoo and can mix stable and unstable soft

    • and insufficient quality control

      Citation needed. Last I checked we have billions of people on the planet and from what I can tell distro maintainers aren't split between doing QA/QC on multiple distros, they each focus on their own. We are perfectly fine with redundant effort because we have redundant people. I have zero reason to believe that if there were less distros on the market that the quality would improve on them.

      The distro is about the activity, the GUI is about the mind.

      On a desktop OS the GUI becomes the activity. In that regard it makes perfect sense for a GUI creator to provide a "re

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jd ( 1658 )

        It is because they focus on QA on their own distro that makes the approach weak and fragmented. There's a finite number of Linux QAs and if they're scattered over 100 distros, then the overlap means that they'll find a tenth of the flaws that would be found if that same pool worked over 10 distros.

        No, we aren't fine with the redundancy. The number of defects per kloc ranges between 10-100x the number in the kernel because there simply isn't enough QA to go round. Really, we need 100x the level of defect det

    • If there is place only for a finite number of distributions, Gentoo is not one of them. Gentoo is an abomination, a waste of energy and a carbon footprint disgrace. There is very little benefit you can get from a locally compiled but vanilla kernel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      But I can't see the sense in building a distro around a desktop.

      There are several flavors of Ubuntu based on the desktop environment you get by default.

      Default Ubuntu gets your GNOME. Kubuntu defaults to KDE. And there are several others with different default desktops.

      And while you can install KDE and such on default Ubuntu as an equivalent to Kubuntu, there's probably enough demand that people want it by default.

      I'm not entirely up with Ubuntu's packaging, but I'm guessing there's probably enough things

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jd ( 1658 )

        It would impact the image a lot, as you'd need packages for every desktop you wanted to support, and appropriate defaults. Furthermore, since many apps can be compiled with different GUIs in mind, you'd need multiple packages for every app, one per GUI, and much longer package names to differentiate.

        To support two of three desktops, you'd need to more than double/triple the size of the image. Much easier to have one image per frontend, differentiating by repo.

        Since it's unusual to install Gnome, KDE, and Ci

  • 12 years too late. (Score:5, Informative)

    by DraconPern ( 521756 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @05:15PM (#64980079) Homepage
    Using Linux Mint and it's great because of Cinnamon. 

  • Link to the presentation (KDE) (Score:3)

    by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @05:37PM (#64980113)

    Took some digging, but I've found you can watch the original presentation in Sept. about KDE's distro plans here [fediverse.tv].

  • If they find an art gallery where they can tape their Project Banana on the wall, they might get rich with that idea. (ref [nytimes.com])

  • Ditch 'em both ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Friday November 29, 2024 @07:06PM (#64980241) Homepage

    I was on KDE for many years.
    But they started changing things around, and deviate from their philosophy of having everything configurable, and hiding or eliminating configuration, settings, and so on ...

    As a result, I have been on XFCE (Xubuntu), and never looked back ...
    Small, functional and stays out of the way ...

  • But will it be KDE or Gnome? Wayland or X11?

  • Neon (Score:2)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 )

    Does KDE not consider Neon their own distro? I assume whatever they are thinking of coming out with will be a derivative of another distro either way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Does KDE not consider Neon their own distro?

      Yes and no. KDE contributors do, indeed, maintain Neon. Neon is Ubuntu LTS underneath. So they have to contend with two problems:

      1. LTS dependencies age too fast, so Neon maintainers have to supplement dependencies with newer alternatives, which is a lot of effort.
      2. When they do 1, it breaks unrelated things in LTS, which is yet more effort and greatly disappoints users.

      The Ubuntu LTS neon is using doesn't have PipeWire (22.04, I presume, because 24.04 has PipeWire,) for example. They recently bro

      • That you for that. To be honest, the article spends so much space grousing about the fact they're doing it at all, that it never goes into why they're doing it. And while some were suggesting it was just re-branding neon, that didn't seem to be the case since they were moving from LTS to Arch (which seems a little drastic for a re-branding)

  • I can buy a Toyota or a Honda, GM, Ford, VW, Nissan - whatever - I can choose based on preferences, and each maker offers different models and features to entice different buyers.

    But, when I need to add gas, oil, new tires, they all support the same standards and industry wide interoperability.

    "Tech" has failed to achieve the same. For all of its other warts, love 'em or hate 'em, MS has come closest to having a universal computing ecosystem that can be used by anybody, not just experts, with good backward

    • I agree. Wasnt LSB supposed to go someway toward solving this? But its stilll very fragmented.

    • Google-Android, Apple - they do too to varying degrees, but they are walled gardens

      I'm a user, but not a huge fan of Android, and I'm loath to defend it, but is it? I have F-Droid installed on my phone, and it seems to work well. I can install a shell, and apt install stuff.

      Now don't get me wrong, there's plenty shitty with locked bootloaders (not my phone) and massive lack of standards so the OS is still strongly coupled to he vendor, hampering longevity, and google are definitely doing shitty stuff, but n

    • Re:Not the year of Linux on the desktop (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nukenerd ( 172703 ) on Saturday November 30, 2024 @05:37AM (#64980837)

      Slashdot - land of Linux - everyone here keeps asking "will this be the year of Linux on the desktop?

      Only as a standing joke. I don't believe most here want a year of Linux on the desktop because they realise it would enshittify it, like Windows has become enshittified, and the internet has become enshittified, as they try to cater for the lowest common denominator. It would be Linux's Eternal September.

    • Linux is racism against average Joe's? I haven't encountered such a gem here for ages.

      Making something that average Joe's cannot access with the ease they expect isn't racism. It's called choice.

      Eliminate choice, tune everything to the average Joe's and enjoy your Idiocracy. Don't forget to ban teaching theory of relativity, because it's very existence is a grave offence to the average Joe's and their inability to get it.

      By the way, I don't care a bit when and if the year of Linux on Desktop will come. And

  • I, for one, will carry on ignoring both KDE and Gnome as I have done for many years now: there are far better alternatives, as far as I am concerned. I hope they both die a painful death.

  • With any luck this will kill both those ridiculous projects, and we can just use the 20 other desktop environments that are much simpler, smaller, and better

  • Let me guess: considering how many GNOME developers are paid by Red Hat, the GNOME distro will be based on Fedora

  • The article (and summary) aren't really accurate and are quite out of date. GNOME has had its own distro for a few years now. It's called GNOME OS. It's intended for beta testing only, it's not maintained for public use.

    KDE has had KDE neon for ages and it's slightly more public-oriented. The new project KDE is looking at is called KDE Linux and it'll likely replace KDE neon, but it's not an entirely new distro. It's Arch Linux with vanilla KDE packages installed on top of it.

    Neither of these project

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