Rex Dieter today announced that there will be no KDE 4 for Fedora 8. That’s sad but understandable. But now I wonder where I will get my KDE 4 from.
Rex Dieter, one of the main KDE persons of the Fedora project, today announced that there will be no KDE for Fedora 8. The “KDE 4 in Fedora” plan was changed and now targets Fedora 9.
This is sad since I was expecting to switch to KDE 4 and Fedora 8 at the same time but I must admit that the current KDE 4 Beta versions do not look like that they will be ready in time for the Fedora 8 release. Also the feature freeze of the Fedora 8 release cycle simply would not allow major changes in the packages but KDE will still see some major changes until the October release (think of the system bar here, afaik there is still no system tray).
From my personal point of view this is indeed a bit troublesome because while I am a Fedora user I am first and foremost a KDE user. And while Fedora is already maybe the worst possible distribution a KDE user could take I hoped that KDE 4 would give this a push into a new direction. But without KDE 4 packages I need to compile the stuff by myself or have to check for other opportunities, something which I don’t really want to do…
Update
Just to make it clear: while Fedora 8 will not come out with KDE 4 as the default KDE desktop it is very likely that there will be packages available after the release to add it as another option. Fedora often adds new packages and even updates them to new versions during a life cycle of a distribution version (although KDE 4 will be most likely introduced as an option for parallel installation, not as an update to KDE 3).
/home/liquidat 
Well, no KDE4 at all or just the visible part ? I bet there will at least be some packages for KDE4 development isn’t it ?
Debian ‘testing’ will likely have KDE4 since the very first months of 2008 – there’s already some package in the ‘experimental’ repository. 🙂
If you decide to look for other opportunities,I suggest you check out Sidux, in case you want to try out KDE 4.0 as soon as it is out.
http://www.sidux.com
A recent review:
http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/19352
This is indeed unfortunate (although I understand the reasons). I was considering switching to Fedora with the release of Fedora 8 – I toyed with both Fedora and Debian a bit recently and following the release of KDE 4 was going to switch one each of my desktop and laptop to Fedora and Sidux (both currently openSUSE since their 10.2 release). I may have to rethink that, although I still feel inclined to give Fedora a proper try anyway.
Question – for you, as a KDE user, how did you end up on Fedora and what keeps you there? I’m just interested to see the strengths as you see it as someone who ahs used Fedora for a while.
Cheers,
Simon
Typo in above comment: ahs –> has
To be clear, this only means that kde4 will not be the default kde desktop environment for f8.
This does not mean work won’t continue or that a kde4 runtime + development environment won’t get done in F8’s lifetime (it most certainly will!).
Rex, although I now that I add a note for others who might get the wrong impression.
Simon, the strength in Fedora is first of all that it is quite close to the system. I can modify everything I want with an editor without braking anything. It feels really close to the heartbeat of the system.
Also, Fedora keeps really up2date. As mentioned by Rex you can expect KDE 4 packages as soon as KDE 4 is in an appropriate shape. There are also many package updates during the life time of a distribution version (KDE 3.5.6->3.5.7, X.Org 7.1 -> 7.2, etc.) and I like that.
Also the idea behind the most developments pushed by Red Hat (not Fedora but the company) are aimed at including them upstream. A good example is the work done at X or with hal. I like that approach and it often works. In return you get such stuff just a bit earlier with Fedora.
Another point is the fact that Fedora is rpm based – I’m used to rpm and can build packages quite easily myself. I’ve looked at building Debian packages and it gave me the creeps. The entire concept is very, very strange from my point of view.
Last but not least I am used there are multitudes of small cool things. Like the idea to create and really use one file for one repository. That is exactly how it should be, and it is done that way (apt can do that, but no one uses it). Or the Live CD creator. I know OpenSuse’s project, but Fedora is already one step further (in terms of the GUI, not of functionality).
Yeah, I understand that the KDE4 packages will become available for Fedora 8 (as pre-release packages already are for F7, I believe? – thanks Rex for all your work on KDE in Fedora by the way, without it I wouldn’t even be considering Fedora). KDE 4.0 as the default on install would have been great but I have absolutely understand the approach you are taking.
Roland, re Fedora in general, I last really tried it properly back in 2003 when I first started playing with Linux and didn’t really understand why things with non-free drivers didn’t work out of the box and didn’t know how to get around those issues (and how easy that was) or how to go about finding answers. Plus I’ve chosen my hardware a lot more carefully since then and so don’t have many of those issues any more. But I do like a system that is up to date and I also like the way in which AIGLX was developed out in the open and quickly found its way into the main X.org. With regard to rpm/deb I’m quite agnostic – I like apt, especially compared to recent software management on suse (I know that’s not strictly an rpm/deb issue) but haven’t used yum or pirut seriously – and I have not tried creating either debs or rpms so am not aware of the differences in the internal structure.
I’ll certainly have a Fedora 8 install, if I don’t get around to it before – I installed 7 on an old (and slightly unreliable) hard drive and quite liked it but have not really had the time to set it up for proper full-time use as I tend to tweak things around quite a bit and I’ll need to find my way around the Fedora repositories and set up tools.
Anyway, thanks for the info.
no KDE4 sux. I saw this coming tho and I know that Rex and the rest of the KDE SIG at Fedora is doing what’s possible. I know that KDE4 won’t be ready (enough) for F8, still I was really looking forward to it.
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel – I really hope there’s going to be a F8-KDE4-release (not only liveCD, please) as soon as KDE4 is ready for it.
And if not – well, I guess KDE4 could need the 6 more months to the F9 release to get a bit more stable and stuff. It’s as It specialists say about WinVista: Wait at least for the first SP until you adopt it.
Btw, I wonder if it’d be a good idea to fork some “kde fedora”. Fedora is really putting much more effort into gnome support than into kde stuff and that really sux. We should really think about how to change this the best.
MEPIS has a KDE4 version.
Getting KDE4 won’t be hard..
openSUSE 10.3 will come with KDE4 preview which will be easily upgradable to final and later releases.
Kubuntu have promised semi-official KDE4 CDs.
Mepis, Ark and others are working on stuff..
But if I were you I’d think twice before wishing to have KDE 4.0.0 as primary desktop. The guys at Fedora have made the right decision – it’s surprising they took so long.
It appears that the KDE 4.0 release will be delayed anyway: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=118856879831611&w=2 so none of the upcoming distro releases around October time will have a non-beta KDE 4
Well, looks as if F9 might be the first distro to bring KDE 4.0 Gamma (you know, that after-final-release release that’s supposed to be mroe stable).
Release has been delayed until December now anyway.
Simon, one thing about apt: the apt4rpm of today can handle the same repository formats as yum can (XML package metadata). So you don’t need specific created repositories or anything like that, you just have to know how to add the repositories to your apt-repo files.
And in case of the main repositories (Fedora standard and livna if installed by installation rpm) the apt-configuration is already in place – just do “yum install apt” and you are ready to go!:)
Some background is explained here (a bit outdated, but most stuff should still be right).
red_alert: You’re right, current KDE 4 is definitely not in a release ready state. And the shifted release schedule (thanks Troy and Simon) makes this more than clear. I wonder how other distributions will deal with that problem…
Roy: Yes, I might have a look at it 🙂
Don’t forget you can always build kde from source… so even if it’s released after FC8 ur not SOL.
If I would build from source I would not use Fedora.
They could release two version of fedora 8. Stable one using kde 3 for office using, unstable one using kde 4 beta for funny/develope purpose.
I think it is a good idear if when i install fedora 8, i could choose kde3 or kde4 as my default destop enviroment.
yarco, while there won’t be a KDE 4 option at release date in Fedora 8 it might be that there will be a KDE 4 spin-off after some time with KDE 4 as the default desktop.
Hi, I have compiled KDE 4 on a F7 so it should work also for F8, if someone is interested.
http://www.go2linux.org/forums/how-to-install-kde-4-on-fedora-t-8.html
Any alternative that i can use KDE with fedora 8.