Wanted to give my perspective from the Marketing Team, though opinions are my own.
I do hope that Plasma 6 will be in a place to where artists and graphic designers can use only Wayland to get their work done. Otherwise it could look like we’re alienating a group of users that in their view is often ignored, among them David Revoy, a well known FOSS artist, who currently uses Fedora KDE.
Other artists have chimed in here and in the thread in the KDE forum, so I’ll let their feedback speak for itself. I also know that @ngompa is targeting creatives with his recent work per his guest appearance on Tech Over Tea[1] and I know he’s aware of this.
The only thing I might add that is new in this convo is that members of the Fedora Design Team work to host the Creative Freedom Summit. It was a big success at the beginning of this year and is likely to happen at the beginning of next year. Even David Revoy was there! We cover the event on our social media in the same way as we do for Flock or our release parties. It might be the closest we get to associating Fedora with art and design, so it would be unfortunate to run against it by losing support for something they depend on.
I hope and I am reasonably confident there’s a solution out there that helps Fedora advance Wayland while not leaving artists behind, but I also understand the need to get off Wayland because X11 is a dead project.
I’ll leave David Revoy’s comment below when he thought that this change was coming sooner rather than later. He did calm down once he learned that this is for Fedora 40 and not Fedora 39, but it shows how important it is to get this change right.
Oh dear. I just read this…
A distro without colour management and that super limited tablet support screams to all artists, graphists and designers that they are no longer welcome in this community.
It is so sad and infuriating to feel rejected by the Fedora KDE community in this way. I thought that I had finally found a good distro and I was happy to be able to advocate for it…
But decisions like this clearly show that we’re not important and that it’s OK to sabotage our tools and workflows. We are litteraly pushed to the exit door.
That’s why from now on I don’t want to read any more about a dev of this community crying about why there aren’t more artists, graphists or designers in the free/libre and open source movement, when it is clearly designed that way. I’ll also have to communicate why this distro is a terrible choice and put a header ‘warning’ on all my previous guides and publications on the topic.
I don’t buy the myth of “release unfinished and let the community fix it”. It’s been 14 years I see this toxic pattern and every time it just drives users away. Getting monitor calibrated and profiled is a basic necessity for me, something I could do on any distro in 2009. It hurts to see such regression.
Well, I’m done. I’ll move all the tools for my community project Pepper&Carrot to another distro. I’m in shock because it’s an unexpectedly large amount of study and work todo suddently falling on my plate, and it will have a big impact on my productivity… and thus on my delay to deliver, and thus on my income in an already difficult time.
Very cool ↩︎