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KDE GNOME

Both KDE and GNOME To Offer Official Distros (theregister.com) 30

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."

Both KDE and GNOME To Offer Official Distros More | Reply

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.

  • 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
  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • 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

  • 12 years too late. (Score:3)

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

  • 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:3)

    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

  • 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, 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

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