Jonathan Riddell is a longtime KDE developer who writes about KDE releases, Plasma, packaging, and software freedom issues.
HN links it for KDE news and Ubuntu licensing policy. Commenters debate Wayland versus X11 in Plasma and react to his farewell post on 25 years of KDE.
> KDE feels a lot smoother and more responsive when using Wayland than when using X11
Or, the X11 code is more complex and they prefer Wayland because it is simpler. Fewer features. Is it a surprise that wayland would be faster, if it does less?
> by this point most stuff has been updated to work properly on Wayland
Really? Strange how comments on reddit do not confirm this. Admittedly they did fix various issues. I don't see how this equates KDE on wayland being better than KDE on xorg - even more so as they abandoned xorg now, as that blog post shows. So how can this even be compared?
> I don't notice any breakage or missing features in day-to-day usage
Why is this contradicting what others report then?
> I think the blog post would have been better if he had some specific examples in mind that he could have shared here.
David and Nate are all about marketing buzz. I am hardly the only one to have noticed this already. Then again if you are too critical of them on reddit, you get banned. I found that out when I critisized Nate's obsession with money. :)
Though, I am hardly the first with that either:
https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/
Edit: Interesting, the above URL no longer works. Guess jriddell took down his old criticism some weeks ago. Anyone able to show how the old content looked like?
Edit2: Hah, found it - wayback machine is so great; people would have thought I made the above URL in error, but here is the old content from…
Python 2 was deprecated in RHEL 7.5 at least, maybe earlier[0]
The news the submitter thought was interesting is about 90% down an excruciatingly long webpage... maybe linking instead to a story specifically about this news would be better?[1][2]
Here's the release note tidbit:
"KDE has been deprecated
KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE), which has been provided as an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment has been deprecated. A future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the default GNOME desktop environment."
[0] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.5_release_notes/chap-red_hat_enterprise_linux-7.5_release_notes-deprecated_functionality
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde/
[2] https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/
For those like me who read the article and still had no idea what KDE Gear is:
> KDE Gear is the new name for the app (and libraries and plugins) bundle of project that want the release faff taken off their hands. It was once called just KDE, then KDE SC, then KDE Applications, then the unbranded release service and now we’re banding it again as KDE Gear.
(https://jriddell.org/2021/03/22/kde-gear-21-04-apps-send-us-your-features/)
> https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/
That was.. ..an interesting read. The seemingly perpetual need of defaulting back to greed and authoritarianism never ceases to amaze me.
I was thinking about switching back to KDE. Well, maybe not after all. Cheerio, as they say.
A few followups:
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/07/15/ubuntu-ip-policy.html
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/35969.html
http://jriddell.org/2015/07/15/ubuntu-policy-complies-with-gpl-but-fails-to-address-other-important-software-freedom-issues/
The KDE 1 release is now available as a Docker image.
http://jriddell.org/2016/10/14/kde-1-neon-lts-20-years-of-supporting-freedom/