Just as everyone’s attention has been drawn to IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of RedHat, Red Hat has quietly issued a death certificate for KDE; to be precise, KDE is the desktop environment in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
On October 30th, the well-known Linux distribution developer released Fedora 29 and RHEL 7.6, and the following appeared in the changelog:
KDE PlasmaWorkspaces (KDE) has been deprecated as an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment. The major version of RedHat Enterprise Linux released in the future will no longer support KDE, but will support the default GNOME desktop environment.
In other words, if you use RHEL on your desktop, KDE will not be supported at some point in the future. As our well-informed people put it: “Red Hat has never been a strong supporter of KDE, but at least it has released KDE and supported you to use it.”
Steve Almy, senior product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, said in an email, from the trend of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer base, there is an excellent interest in desktop technologies such as Gnome and Wayland, and our customer base has been weakening interest in KDE.
Steve Almy
added that although Red Hat mentioned in the RHEL 7.6 release notes that KDE was deprecated, KDE has been in the RHEL roadmap for several years. KDE, as well as anything listed in Chapter 51 of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 release notes, will continue to be supported for the life of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, currently planned through 2024.
Red Hat strongly supports the Linux desktop environment GNOME, which was developed as a stand-alone open source project and used by many other distributions. Although Red Hat conveys the signal that it will stop supporting KDE in RHEL, KDE itself is a stand-alone project that will continue to evolve on its own, whether Red Hat killing off KDE.
