A new petition is calling for Canonical to make KDE Plasma Ubuntu’s next desktop.

It follows news that Ubuntu is to drop the Unity desktop for its future releases in favour of a ‘vanilla GNOME’ desktop.

KDE fans say Plasma will give Ubuntu developers ‘finer-grained control’ over the overall desktop experience than GNOME, and cite Canonical’s previous effort working with Qt on Unity 8 and Ubuntu Phone as a positive reason to embrace the DE.

“Moreover, the KDE community seems like a community more open to symbiotic collaboration than the GNOME community,” the petition adds.

At the time of writing, the change.org petition has attracted just 19 signatures in the 4 days it has been running.

One of those who has signed the petition agrees with its aim, commenting that “…with KDE ubuntu will be more useful than Gnome Shell. KDE is a good platform as alternative of Unity.”,

The petition is likely inspired by, but is otherwise unrelated, a recent video from Linux Educational and Information channel TuxDigital, which lays out a number of reasons ‘why Ubuntu 18.04 should use KDE Plasma instead of GNOME’:

An Ubuntu developer we spoke to said that while the petition is well intentioned it’s unlikely to result in a change of course.