KDE vs Gnome for Fedora Jam

[Keith Smith]

Hello Eric;

I'm a long time Linux user (Mint and Fedora Gnome workstation).  I
recently setup Mint with JACK and Audour 6 to record my music using my
new MOTU M4, but experienced latency/buffer under run problems due to
my old PC.
So I'm building a new DAW that's super fast and I want to switch to
Fedora Jam. However, my experience is with Gnome and I'm not keen on
learning a new desktop environment + apps

Question: Why was KDE chosen for this spin and are there any
disadvantages to using a Gnome workstation spin instead and adding the
Fedora Jam packages?

Thanks, Keith (Bayan player)

[Erich Eickmeyer]

Hi Keith,

On 12/17/20 10:05 AM, Keith Smith wrote:
>  Hello Eric;
>
>  I'm a long time Linux user (Mint and Fedora Gnome workstation).  I
>  recently setup Mint with JACK and Audour 6 to record my music using my
>  new MOTU M4, but experienced latency/buffer under run problems due to
>  my old PC.
>  So I'm building a new DAW that's super fast and I want to switch to
>  Fedora Jam. However, my experience is with Gnome and I'm not keen on
>  learning a new desktop environment + apps
>
>  Question: Why was KDE chosen for this spin and are there any
>  disadvantages to using a Gnome workstation spin instead and adding the
>  Fedora Jam packages? 
Plasma was chosen prior to my involvement, so it's mostly
legacy. 
However, I did ping the Fedora development list a few months ago about 
perhaps switching, and the general consensus was that Jam should remain 
on Plasma since the chosen toolkit for most music apps seems to be Qt, 
and most creativity and music-based distributions (see KXStudio, Ubuntu 
Studio) have either traditionally used Plasma or have moved to Plasma 
with good reasons. Additionally, GNOME tends to be more 
resource-intensive than Plasma, so it seemed to be a better default with 
that opinion.

There is nothing stopping you from using the GNOME Workstation and 
adding the "Audio Production" group to it. However, there are three 
disadvantages to doing that: 1) By default, Jam has an additional kernel 
parameter to enable the lowlatency configurations of the kernel, 2) 
Plasma has lower overhead, and 3) You'd have to take the extra steps 
involved as a result of not having the software to begin with.

-- 
Erich Eickmeyer
Maintainer
Fedora Jam

[Brian Monroe]

IIRC A large part of the decision was based around the use of Pulse Audio
vs ALSA and conflicts around JACK audio service. We looked at Cinamon and
LXDE as well, but the consensus was that KDE was performing better overall
(even though it was more taxing on the system)

On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 10:05 AM Keith Smith <ksmith13(a)cox.net&gt; wrote:

>  Hello Eric;
>
>  I'm a long time Linux user (Mint and Fedora Gnome workstation).  I
>  recently setup Mint with JACK and Audour 6 to record my music using my
>  new MOTU M4, but experienced latency/buffer under run problems due to
>  my old PC.
>  So I'm building a new DAW that's super fast and I want to switch to
>  Fedora Jam. However, my experience is with Gnome and I'm not keen on
>  learning a new desktop environment + apps
>
>  Question: Why was KDE chosen for this spin and are there any
>  disadvantages to using a Gnome workstation spin instead and adding the
>  Fedora Jam packages?
>
>  Thanks, Keith (Bayan player)
>
>
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[Erich Eickmeyer]

On 12/17/20 10:28 AM, Brian Monroe wrote:
>  IIRC A large part of the decision was based around the use of Pulse 
>  Audio vs ALSA and conflicts around JACK audio service. We looked at 
>  Cinamon and LXDE as well, but the consensus was that KDE was 
>  performing better overall (even though it was more taxing on the system)
>  
Yeah, that might be part of it, but it's even lower in resources now 
than when it was chosen (in the Plasma 4 days), so that just adds to the 
advantage.

-- 
Erich Eickmeyer
Maintainer         Fedora Jam
Project Leader     Ubuntu Studio
Council Member     Ubuntu Community Council