You probably got here from an old repository URL. Those repos shut down around 2013, and this page preserves their story. The domain now hosts a field guide for the RHEL and Fedora world.
The kde-redhat project
A decade of KDE packages for the Red Hat world
What it was
In the early 2000s, if you ran Red Hat Linux or the young Fedora Core and wanted a current, complete KDE desktop, the distribution itself would not give you one. Red Hat shipped GNOME as the default and its KDE packages lagged behind upstream, arrived stripped down, or both. The kde-redhat project, maintained by Rex Dieter with a small group of contributors, existed to fix exactly that: high quality, up-to-date KDE packages for Red Hat Linux, Fedora and later RHEL and its rebuilds, built with care and shipped through this domain.
For about a decade, adding the kde-redhat repository was the standard advice on forums, mailing lists and howtos whenever someone asked how to get a proper KDE on a Red Hat family system. Thousands of pages across the web still link to the old repository URLs on this domain, which is how many people find this page today.
How people used it
Setup was one repo file away. A typical configuration looked like this:
$ cat /etc/yum.repos.d/kde.repo
[kde-redhat-stable]
name=kde-redhat: stable
baseurl=http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/stable
enabled=1
The project offered stable, testing and unstable channels, tracking KDE releases much closer than the distribution did. The apt in the hostname is a fossil worth keeping: in the earliest days the packages were served for apt-rpm, the port of Debian's apt to RPM systems, before yum became the standard on this side of the fence.
Why it mattered
Beyond serving packages, kde-redhat was where the craft of packaging KDE for Red Hat systems got worked out in public. That work did not disappear: it flowed into Fedora itself. The project preceded and helped seed what became the Fedora KDE SIG, the special interest group that maintains KDE in Fedora to this day, with Rex Dieter as one of its long-time core members. As Fedora's own KDE packaging matured, the reason for a third-party repository faded, and kde-redhat wound down around 2013.
The long arc is a quiet vindication: in 2024 the Fedora project promoted Fedora KDE to a full official Edition. The desktop this project kept alive on Red Hat systems, decades ago and against the default, is now a first-class citizen.
What this domain is now
Honesty first: this site is not run by the original maintainers, and it does not continue their packaging work. The domain expired and we picked it up in 2026 as its new custodians. We keep this page as a record of what kde-redhat was, we redirect the old repository URLs here instead of letting them rot into errors, and we publish new, hands-on guides for the same world this project served: RHEL and its rebuilds, Fedora, and the KDE desktop on them.
The new content follows the spirit of the old project: built by people who actually run these systems, tested before shipping, and specific about versions. Start at the home page if that sounds useful to you.