Fedora has made a major change to its project, elevating the version running KDE Plasma from an Spin to an official Edition, alongside Fedora Workstation with Gnome.

A previous proposal had pushed for KDE Plasma to become the default desktop environment for Fedora 42, taking Gnome’s place. There was never much chance of that proposal passing, given that Gnome is the default desktop for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the downstream commercial distro based on Fedora, and that Red Hat is Fedora’s sponsor.

Nonetheless, the proposal started a conversation about the importance of the KDE Spin, which already has the ability to block/postpone a release of Fedora if show-stopping bugs are found in it. Elevating it to Edition status is a good compromise, especially since Gnome and KDE are the two most popular desktop environments in the Linux space.

The announcement was made on the Fedora issue tracker.

As discussed at Flock, the Fedora KDE SIG and the newly forming Fedora Personal Systems Working Group that will oversee the SIG are requesting that the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop spin be upgraded to Edition status for Fedora Linux 42.

This includes the following:

• Listing Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition at the same level as Fedora Workstation Edition on fedoraproject.org
• Production of a flagship site page for Fedora KDE similar to Fedora Workstation on fedoraproject.org
• Marketing support in a similar vein to Workstation at events

The Fedora KDE SIG will withdraw its Change for Fedora Linux 42 to replace GNOME with KDE Plasma on Workstation with the acceptance of this request.

Although KDE Plasma is in second place, in terms of usage, recent releases have seen it take a technological edge of Gnome, especially in the realm of graphics performance, as well as performance in general. Plasma also features a more traditional interface, compared to Gnome, making it a better option for users switching from Windows to Linux.

Elevating the KDE Spin to an Edition is a smart move, and should help bring more attention to arguably the best version of Fedora available.