Yes, the key difference is GNOME has strong downstream partners that treat it as the default (e.g. Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu). This way GNOME gets a lot of testing, polish, and feedback without having to maintain its own dist.

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zamadatix 4 days ago | parent [-]

I guess I'm confused on what the difference between "being the most popular Linux DE" and "being the default DE of the most popular Linux distros" is. Other than "already being most popular", what was/is KDE's partnership with these distros lacking that GNOME wasn't/isn't? Since this all happened 10-20 years prior to either Neon or KDE Linux, and KDE has long had these kinds of partnerships, I'm assuming there is some other reason/thing KDE you think KDE should be looking at.

Adding on from this new comment: Given whatever differences you see for GNOME in the above, why do you think GNOME has maintained its own testing OS for the last 5 years despite this?

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lproven 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I guess I'm confused on what the difference between "being the most popular Linux DE" and "being the default DE of the most popular Linux distros" is.

You put the things in quotation marks but I do not see these phrases in the thing to which you're commenting.

KDE is roughly a year older than GNOME.

Snag: KDE was built in C++ using the semi-proprietary (dual-licensed) Qt. Red Hat refused to bundle Qt. Instead, it was a primary sponsor of GNOME, written in plain old C not C++ and using the GIMP's Gtk instead of Qt.

This fostered the development of Mandrake: Red Hat Linux with built in KDE.

In the late 1990s and the noughties, KDE was the default desktop of most leading Linux distros: SUSE Linux Pro, Mandrake, Corel LinuxOS, Caldera OpenLinux, etc. Most of them cost money.

In 2003, Novell bought SUSE and GNOME developer Ximian and merged them, and SUSE started to become a GNOME distro.

Then in 2004 along came Ubuntu: an easy desktop distro that was entirely free of charge. It came with GNOME 2.

Around the same time, Red Hat discontinued its free Red Hat Linux and replaced it with the paid-for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free, unsupported Fedora Core. Fedora also used GNOME 2.

GNOME became the default desktop of most Linuxes. Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, even OpenSolaris, you got GNOME, possibly unless you asked for something else.

KDE became an alternative choice. It still is. A bunch of smaller community distros default to KDE, including PC LinuxOS, OpenMandriva, Mageia... but the bigger players all default to GNOME.

Many of the developers of GNOME still work for Red Hat today, over 25 years on. They are on the same teams as the developers of RHEL and Fedora. This is a good reason for GNOME OS to use a Fedora basis.

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carlwgeorge 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Around the same time, Red Hat discontinued its free Red Hat Linux and replaced it with the paid-for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free, unsupported Fedora Core.

This is a common misconception. RHEL and RHL co-existed for a bit. The first two releases of RHEL (2.1 and 3) were based on RHL releases (7.2 and 9). What was going to be RHL 10 was rebranded and released as Fedora Core 1. Subsequent RHEL releases were then based on Fedora Core, and later Fedora.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/fedora-and-r...

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lproven 2 days ago | parent [-]

IMHO a summary a few paragraphs long of a decade of events in a complex industry must simplify matters.

Sure, there was overlap. Lots of overlap. You highlight one. Novell bought SUSE, but that was after Cambridge Technology Partners (IIRC) bought Novell, and after that, then Attachmate bought the result...

But you skip over that.

I think as a compressed timeline summary, mine was fair enough.

It is really important historical contact that KDE is the reason that both Mandrake and GNOME exist, and it's rarely mentioned now. Mandrake became Mandriva then died, but the distros live on and PC LinuxOS in particular shows how things should have gone if there was less Not-Invented-Here Syndrome.

I don't think "well, actually, this happened before that" is as important, TBH.

No?

	▲	carlwgeorge 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> But you skip over that. It's pretty common to reply to specific aspects of a comment. That's what the markdown quote notation is for (even if it doesn't render properly on this site). > I think as a compressed timeline summary, mine was fair enough. But it's not merely compressed, it's factually incorrect. > I don't think "well, actually, this happened before that" is as important, TBH. That tracks considering you write for a tabloid with a tumultuous relationship with accuracy.

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zamadatix 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> You put the things in quotation marks but I do not see these phrases in the thing to which you're commenting.

Quotes are overloaded in that they are used for more than direct citation. In this case: to separate the "phrase" from "the sentence talking about it" (aka mention distinction - as used here as well). "s are also seen in aliases, scare quotes, highlighting of jargon, separating internal monologue, and more. If it doesn't seem to be a citation it probably wasn't meant to be one. On HN, ">" seems to be the most common way to signal a literal citation of something said.

This is a fair enough, even more detailed, summary of the history, but I'm still at a loss for stitching this history to what KDE should be doing today. Similarly, for why this relationship results in good reasons for GNOME OS to exist but KDE Linux? E.g. are you saying KDE Linux should have been based on something like openSUSE (Plasma is the default there) instead of Arch, that they should have stuck to several more decades of not having a testing distro, or that they should do something completely different instead?

I don't use GNOME or KDE as my DE, so I genuinely don't know what GNOME might be doing that KDE should be doing instead (and vice versa) all that deeply. The history is good, but it's hard for me to weed out what should be applying from it today.

Or maybe I completely read to far into it and it was only a statement that GNOME has historically been more successful than KDE. It's known to happen to me :D.

	▲	lproven 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I thought I spelled it out clearly. Let me emphasise the executive summary: 1. KDE was first. 2. KDE used to enjoy significant corporate backing. 3. Because of some companies' actions, mergers and acquisitions, etc., other products gained ascendancy. 4. KDE is still widely used but no longer enjoys strong corporate backing. 5. Therefore KDE is going it alone and trying something technologically innovative with its showcase distro, because the existing distro vendors are not. The KDE Linux section of this recent article of mine spells out my position more clearly: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/10/kde_linux_and_freebsd...