Just made a fresh reinstall of Rocky Linux 8 with KDE Plasma from EPEL.
SDDM hangs regularly on logout, meaning I have to open a virtual console with Ctrl-Alt-F5 or similar and then perform a Ctrl-Alt-Del three finger salute.
When you google this problem, you’ll find that it has been affecting several releases in several distributions.
As a long-time Linux user (who started out on Slackware 7.1) I bluntly admit I’m tired of this nonsense. How comes that regularly after updating to the next minor release, such basic functions as logout or shutdown have to be potty-trained again?
On a side note, this kind of thing never (ever) happened with Slackware and its bone-headed BSD Init.
Because RHEL/Rocky don’t provide KDE by default. It comes from a third-party repository that has lagged behind after 8.7 was released. SDDM also comes from Epel repository it seems.
Perhaps other distros, like Slack, or say Debian, or whatever that provides both Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, and other desktops/window managers don’t have this issue, because it’s all from their repositories and it’s all released at the same time.
Had EPEL been in sync, and had all the packages ready when 8.7 was released, then none of this would have happened. It’s not Rocky’s fault though.
Up to 2017, Slackware was my main distribution on both servers and desktop. But I’m also working as a Linux trainer. My training courses back then were based on Slackware, but using a niche distro in training courses can be a problem.
CentOS 7 was nice, and KDE 4 was just perfect in this branch. But then Red Hat decided to ditch KDE in favour of GNOME. My unfiltered views on this decision would probably earn me a lifetime ban from this forum.
I went with OpenSUSE on the desktop, but they also decided to pull the rug under our feet in the near future by discontinuing Leap and developing some container-based atrocity instead.
And so I gave Rocky Linux + EPEL a spin, in the hopes that something usable in production might come out of this.
Maintaining two DEs is probably not fun business-wise (although they did that for many major releases).
Was there ever a RHEL that did not default to GNOME?
From what I read, OpenSUSE Leap is replaced by ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform), which is supposed to have two parts - the first being able to run a distro on hardware, so just like you were doing with a normal desktop, and the second part being like Flatpak or container-based. Also, I don’t know if that still means that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed continues or not, or ALP replaces both. Either way there is still an option, just not Enterprise-like. TBH I’m not surprised, very much similar to what happened with CentOS. So if one could do it, it was pretty much only a matter of time before the other followed.
So yeah, I know Tumbleweed is probably more like Fedora, but still an option. Or Debian-based distros as well that also have everything. When customising it almost always starts to get problematic, dependency nightmares, etc.
I feel that you choose the distro for what it has and you use it as is. If one distro doesn’t have what you need, there are others that have it out-of-the-box. I use a mixture of distros, be it for servers or desktops, and choose appropriately for the task that I’m wanting to complete. If it means jumping through too many hoops using one particular distro, I use another. Keeping it simple.
For the last two decades, I’ve tried out and worked with pretty much every Linux distribution under the sun, starting from Slackware and then moving on.
OpenSUSE Leap was - and still is - perfect for the desktop, but the team made it clear it will be EOL in a year or two, and for the moment nobody knows what comes after that. As for Tumbleweed it has such an insane amount of updates - sometimes several updated ISO files in a day - with a weekly tsunami of several thousand (!) packages that it should be aptly named Tamagotchi instead of Tumbleweed. It’s perfectly usable if you have 1 GB/s bandwidth and NVMe disks everywhere. Otherwise forget it.
Apparently there’s a constant in the free software world. Whenever some component - be it an entire OS, a desktop environment or simply an application - reaches some form of perfection, developers and/or companies decide to wreck it only to start over again.
Thus anyone who is considering running openSUSE 15.4/5 LEAP probably should not worry… but I could be WRONG. You might know something I don’t. The ONLY reason I am interested is that my buddy and I are considering jumping to openSUSE. Right now we run both Rocky Linux 8.7 and openSUSE 15.4 together. Each distro has its pluses and minuses. I tend to like RL’s installer I find openSUSE’s to be a GIANT PITA; where SUSE takes the cake is for assortment of programs, which is where RL falls flat on its face. In short once you get SUSE installed and programs installed and configured, it is a dream machine; Rocky Linux is a far kinder diistro to install, but has far less programs you can install at least with ease. I tend to like RL with a “BUT”, while my buddy likes SUSE with a “BUT”. Here is my take away from my experiences; RL is better if you have a bunch of SERVERS, SUSE is better for running a WORKSTATION. YMMV