On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 10:21 PM Gerald Henriksen <ghenriks(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, 2 Nov 2018 22:11:20 -0400, you wrote:
>I suggest to this community that we have arrived at a crisis. In six
>years, according to /The Register/, Red Hat Enterprise Linux /will not
>support/ a KDE installation or maintenance.
I would argue that this is a benefit to KDE on RHEL.
The Desktop enviornment is really inherently unsuited to the long term
unchanging RHEL (or LTS from others) where the changes year to year
are simply too significant to allow a 4+ year old installation to
remain relevant.
If it was unchanging in RHEL, I'd agree with you...
By removing KDE from RHEL 8 this makes it easier for somone like the
Fedora KDE group to provide KDE in a form that remains relevant
through the lifecycle of RHEL 8. Unless a company using RHEL really,
really wants that Desktop support they may well find the KDE option
(perhaps on a more corporate friendly 12 month cycle instead of the
Fedora 6 month, who knows) to be a better option than the Gnome
installation that will at some point become hopelessly out of date.
I would agree with you, except Red Hat has been rebasing GNOME every
other RHEL 7 point release (basically, once a year). As of RHEL 7.6,
the version of GNOME shipped in RHEL 7 is v3.28, which is what shipped
in Fedora 28...
They did actually give the same treatment to KDE (bump from 4.8 to
4.14). But, KDE SC 4 went EOL and Plasma 5 became the focus of the KDE
community in 2015, so that was the end of the line for RHEL 7.
I can't fault Red Hat for pulling out of KDE, since even I've had
trouble "keeping the faith" until Plasma 5.8, where it seemed like
things finally stopped breaking on each upgrade. I do wish that they
hadn't let go their KDE engineers over the last couple of years,
though. It was nice having Red Hat engineers care about KDE a little
bit...
However, we're in a great spot in Plasma 5 now, Providing KDE Plasma 5
in EPEL for EL7 may be possible if Red Hat rebases Qt 5 to 5.12 LTS
once it releases. As for EL8, we'll have to wait and see...
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!