Originally published at: https://www.cyberciti.biz/linux-news/kde-deprecated-in-rhel-7-6-future-version/
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is well known to set defaults across the industry. For example, RHEL pushed systemd so hard that all other Linux distro adopted for good or bad reasons. Now Red Hat announced that KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE) been deprecated from RHEL 7.6 and all future version of RHEL.
It’s sad but understandable from an engineering perspective. You wouldn’t expect Elementary OS to support GNOME or KDE even though you can install them instead of the default Elementary desktop.
Red Hat is larger and can afford more resources but the amount of packages offered in RHEL is huge! In pretty sure up until now they didn’t actually support all of the things in there - they might make a best effort but I doubt even RedHat can have a dedicated support person expert on every single one of the software they provide out of the box.
As RedHat are getting serious about their commercial SLAs (they have to, now that they are an IBM company), I’m sure we’ll see a lot more (though less high profile) software being moved from the official RedHat repositories to EPEL and friends - though I’m sure it’ll make a lot of current RHEL users unhappy to discover that non-mainstream software that they rely on in their day to day production operations have just been moved out of the SLA and out of the main repos.
I myself have been burned too many times by RHEL non future compatible nature - just look at the hell that is upgrading a RHEL 6 that is almost EOLed to a modern RHEL 7, and you’ll know not to put your eggs in that basket ever again. I’m going full Ubuntu.
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When I think of Red Hat, I don’t think of Desktop nor Workstation. Ubuntu comes to mind for a better Desktop/Workstation experience.
Red Hat never did too much for the Desktop community in general outside of funding the GNOME project. Red Hat is a great Server distribution, and that’s their focus and bread and butter. From a business perspective, it makes sense to focus only one Desktop Environment and that should probably have been KDE right from the beginning. The Windows world would be more familiar with it, the KDE community is huge, responsive and talented. KDE has produced a high-level experience with very little funding compared to GNOME.
My ideal scenarios for an enterprise would be:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the Servers
- KDE Suse Linux for Workstations
- Managed by Katello (the Open Source version of Red Hat Satellite)
- Integrated with FreeIPA (the Open Source version of Red Hat Identity Management)
I’d like to see other Enterprise distros (OpenSuse and Ubuntu) step up their KDE game!
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