On Wed, 2024-04-03 at 20:24 +0200, Marc Deop i Argemí wrote:Let's assume that we all agree with what you stated ( and I personally partly do). Why do we promote Workstation (with Gnome) over any other alternative that might arise? (in this case, a Fedora Workstation KDE)It's an interesting question. I would say my answer is "because it works better if we promote *something*". Forcing the choice on people who just want "desktop Fedora" is awkward. The reason we default to GNOME is because we ~always have. To me, this is a reasonable justification. Change is always uncomfortable and disruptive. If you have two equally good options and you already picked one, you should stick with it, not just switch between them every so often for the sake of it. If Plasma were demonstrably, markedly and uncontroversially *superior* to GNOME (please don't take this as an excuse to start a holy war, I am positing for the sake of this post that neither of the two is demonstrably, markedly and uncontroversially better than the other), the case would be different.
Obviously it's going to be hard to make a point for either of the desktops to be demonstrably (and especially uncontroversially!) better than the other in general, because there is no such thing. There are some situations where IceWM emerges as the absolute and clear winner above everything else, that doesn't mean that the world's greatest DE is IceWM. (Nor does it mean that IceWM is a DE but that's beside the point.)
Still, one could make some case for this. Plasma is, for one,
obviously going to be more familiar to newcomers to the Linux
world simply by virtue of the fact that the paradigms presented by
its initial configuration are more familiar to those coming from
the Windows or ChromeOS worlds, and (hopefully) those paradigms
aren't sufficiently different from MacOS to be too uncomfortable
for a user coming from the Apple world. GNOME is quite different
from both, making a new user's first reaction to the desktop more
likely to be one of "what on earth is going on, where is my
taskbar? What happened to my minimize buttons? What happened to my
application menus? Where is the Start button? How do I even turn
off the computer?" That's not to say GNOME's paradigms are bad -
indeed, once you know what you're doing, they provide a nice
environment to work from. They're just really different for
someone just coming to Linux.
That's not to say that the goal of any Linux distro should be to
appear like Windows - no amount of effort will make Linux
sufficiently close to Windows to be fully usable with zero
learning curve to a Windows user. Trying too hard will just lead
to confusion once a user digs deep enough in. But if the end goal
is higher download rate and better user retention, giving the user
a comfortable on-ramp into the new world of Linux will likely
fulfill that goal better than having them immediately climb a
mental cliff just to get started. The user will inevitably run
into the fact that drive letters don't exist, apps don't come from
random places on the Internet, new OS versions come out
frequently, etc., *but* they'll be more confident and have a
better foundation to work with if they have a semi-familiar
workspace from which to learn all these things.
Currently the way Fedora Workstation attempts to overcome this initial learning curve with the desktop is by presenting a "Tour" app to tell the user where things are. This is quite useful, but really it's kind of like throwing a rope to the user to help them climb the initial mental cliff. There's still a cliff to climb, and a steep one at that. KDE Plasma has no such tour because it doesn't need one. A user can glance at the desktop and figure out more-or-less what they're doing without even touching it. Ubuntu tries to make this "understood-at-a-glance" thing work with GNOME by adding some familiar elements (minimize and maximize buttons, an app menu, a visible dock where apps are, etc)., which *kinda* works, but I don't think that's the path Fedora Workstation wants to take since it requires adding GNOME shell extensions to make it happen. KDE Plasma, on the other hand, is familiar and ready-to-use out of the starting gate, no extensions needed.
Is Plasma going to be the best for everyone? Absolutely not. Is it even going to be the best for most? Debatable, controversial, let's not go there. Is it the best for newcomers? I would argue yes, far better than GNOME or any other major Linux desktop. Non-newcomers can find the spins or alternate editions and have the setup that's perfect for them. Newcomers can "just grab" the Workstation edition (which will be Plasma with this Change Proposal) and have the setup that will be best to get them started.
I understand that the Change Proposal is about switching the "Workstation" concept to using Plasma KDE and that approach might have been flawed but... how do we challenge the "status quo" where everybody assumes that Fedora's default is Gnome?Again personally, I would set a very high bar for this to happen, purely on the grounds of conservatism. Don't change for the sake of change. I would only support changing Fedora's default desktop if it was very clear that the current default was sufficiently flawed that it was hurting the project. I don't think we are at that point.And I am not arguing for the sake of arguing. I genuinely want to know how to make Fedora's default to be Plasma KDE because I do believe the whole *linux* (and Fedora's) community will benefit from having a major distro like Fedora not defaulting to Gnome.There already is at least one. The most prominent download option for openSUSE is their "Offline image" (equivalent of our old Everything DVD), and the top item in the list of possible "roles" for the system (effectively the choice we are discussing here) is "Desktop with KDE Plasma" (at least in the screenshot in the install guide).
-- Aaron Rainbolt Lubuntu Developer Matrix: @arraybolt3:ubuntu.com IRC: arraybolt3 on libera.chat and oftc.net GitHub: https://github.com/ArrayBolt3
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