Soon, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) won’t support KDE

Later last week, Red Hat announced that RHEL has deprecated KDE (K Desktop Environment) support. KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE) is an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment for RHEL.

Major future release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the default GNOME desktop environment. In the 90’s, the Red Hat team was entirely against KDE and had put lots of effort into Gnome. Since Qt was under a not-quite-free license that time, the Red Hat team was firmly behind Gnome.

Steve Almy, principal product manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, told the Register, “Based 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.”

Red Hat heavily backs the Linux desktop environment GNOME, which is developed as an independent open-source project. Also, it is used by a large bunch of other distros. Although Red Hat is indicating the end of KDE support in RHEL, KDE is very much its own independent project that will continue on its own, with or without support from future RHEL editions.

Almy said, “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.”

This is simply a warning that certain functionality may be removed or replaced from RHEL in the future with functionality similar or more advanced to the one deprecated. Though 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.

Read more about this news on the official website of Red Hat.