Popular desktop Linux environment due for deprecation in RHEL… by 2024<\/b>
\nWhile everyone was distracted by IBM’s $34bn takeover bid, Red Hat quietly wrote a death-note for KDE \u2013 within Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to be precise.
On October 30, the Linux distro biz emitted Fedora 29 and RHEL 7.6, and in the latter’s changelog the following appears, which a Reg reader kindly just alerted us to:
In other words, if you’re using RHEL on the desktop, at some point KDE will not be supported. As our tipster remarked: \u201cRed Hat has never exactly been a massive supporter of KDE, but at least they shipped it and supported you using it.\u201d
Hats off to our sharp-eyed vulture: Red Hat’s long list of deprecated features isn’t particularly user-friendly, because a great many deprecation announcements are carried over from previous releases.
Steve Almy, principal product manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, told El Reg in an email: \u201cBased on trends in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer base, there is overwhelming interest in desktop technologies such as Gnome and Wayland, while interest in KDE has been waning in our installed base.\u201d
Almy added that while Red Hat made the deprecation note in the RHEL 7.6 notes, KDE has quite a few years to go in RHEL’s roadmap:
RHEL 7.6 features not buried in the minutiae of release notes \u2013 in other words, the stuff Red Hat wants highlighted \u2013 include better disk encryption, various other cryptography improvements, and better firewall management.
Network Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE) gets TPM 2.0 support and a policy-based decryption capability for hybrid-cloud operations. There’s also improved nftables support for easier firewall management, and ten strong ciphers added to RSA by default.
Other enhancements include better management and automation, including a collection of Ansible modules called RHEL System Roles; and a container toolkit including Buildah, Skopeo, CRI-O and Podman.
To be clear, Red Hat heavily backs the Linux desktop environment GNOME, which is developed as an independent open-source project and is also used by a large bunch of other distros. And although Red Hat is signalling the end of the road for KDE support in RHEL, KDE is very much its own independent project that will continue on its own, with or without future RHEL editions’ blessings. \u00ae
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