One Week With KDE Plasma Workspaces 6 on Fedora 40 Beta (Vol. 1)
As my readers may be aware, I have been a member of the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) for over a decade. One of the primary responsibilities of this nine-person body is to review the Fedora Change Proposals submitted by contributors and provide feedback as well as being the final authority as to whether those Changes will go forth. I take this responsibility very seriously, so when this week the Fedora KDE community brought forth a Change Proposal to replace GNOME Desktop with KDE Plasma Workspaces as the official desktop environment in the Fedora Workstation Edition, I decided that I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t spend some serious time considering the decision.
As long-time readers of this blog may recall, I was a user of the KDE desktop environment for many years, right up until KDE 4.0 arrived. At that time, (partly because I had recently become employed by Red Hat), I opted to switch to GNOME 2. I’ve subsequently continued to stay with GNOME, even through some of its rougher years, partly through inertia and partly out of a self-imposed responsibility to always be running the Fedora/Red Hat premier offering so that I could help catch and fix issues before they got into users’ and customers’ hands. Among other things, this led to my (fairly well-received) series of blog posts on GNOME 3 Classic. As it has now been over ten years and twenty(!) Fedora releases, I felt like it was time to give KDE Plasma Workspaces another chance with the release of the highly-awaited version 6.0.