RedHat to drop KDE support

[Thomas00]

I just stumbeled over this one https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/1...eprecates_kde/
Seems odd that distro after distro (Mint recently, now RH) is dropping kde while Plasma gets better and better?

[claydoh]

Mint's KDE was nothing more than a community-built, warmed over version of Kubuntu that stopped having volunteers create and maintain it., and Red Hat have long been a Gnome shop, and as an enterprise focused commercial outfit, sticking to one desktop sort of makes sense.

It is not like Fedora dropping Plasma, or anything.

[GreyGeek]

+1, Claydoh.

Certainly a storm in a tea pot.
RH also "depreciated" Btrfs, but IBM, the new owner, will be (forced?) to support both KDE and Btrfs for years to come due to contractual obligations.

Also, with IBM as the new owner I suspect that there will be major re-allignments in their business model, employee structure and focus. In 5 years we won't be able to recognize RH.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Whenever I read IBM, I think OS/2 and the OS wars... I'll watch this, but I don't plan on switching to RH anytime soon.

[GreyGeek]

OS/2 was a great OS and Win3.11FWG ran in its DOS box faultlessly, or so it appeared because if Win3 crashed OS/2 would phantom reboot it and you rarely noticed that something happened.

I ran a subscribed RH server for almost two years at work, before I retired. It cost the department, IIRC, $1,700/server, and renewal was $1,500/yr/server. The documentation was nothing more than the man pages three hole punched and put into a very large 3 ring binder. That was it. However, it ran faultlessly. Never crashed once. Part of that price included email support with guaranteed 3 day turnaround. I had a problem while running a script that I wrote to create tar'd backups of the data. The compressed tar files were always truncated at 2GB. I sent them an email explaining the problem. I also went onto the Internet to the "open source" support group, not associated with RH in any way. Within about 30 minutes I had a reply that it was due to a limit in the tar program and links to two URLs were given. With that information and within an hour the problem was fixed and I was on my way creating incremental tar files. Three days later I got an email from RedHat support that supplied the same two links I had been previously directed to. RH support, nor any other support, was ever needed after that problem. The RH server was so stable and reliable that the suits decided to send one of the support staff to RH school. When he came back he was a Linux enthusiast. That started the conversion of our NetWare4 servers to RH Linux. Just a year later a newly elected governor appointed a new Tax Commissioner who had an assistant who only knew how to use Windows. Her law degree apparently made her an expert in computers because within a year the department's 30 servers and 450 workstations were all running Windows Servers and Windows DE's and 10,000 out of 13,000 employees had to abandon their Lotus Groupware licenses, emails, databases, calanders and such in exchage for Windows software. Networking speed easily dropped by a factor of 2. Waiting for IE to show the files in a directory took ages. Productivity cut by more than half. License fees skyrocketed. $130K annual license fees went to over a million, and this was before Oracle went to per cpu license fees.