> KDE Linux is an immutable distribution that uses Arch Linux packages as its base, but Graham notes that it is ""definitely not an 'Arch-based distro!'"" Pacman is not included, and Arch is used only for the base operating system.
So it's basically a SteamOS sibling, just without Steam?
Sounds like a good distro to use with your parents and grand parents, if they're not solely using iPads...
That might be their target audience.
What appeals to me about linux is the hackability and configurability. This takes it all away in some way, but that's not to say that they won't find a market for it.
Seems targeted at office workplaces. A locked-down system that cannot even be corrupted or tampered with. Consider a workplace of a receptionist at a medical office, or a library computer.
Linux is wonderfully flexible, which allows to create distros like that, among other things. Linux is also free as in freedom, which may be very important for trusting the code you run, or which a governmental official runs.
I bet that past the alpha stage they will offer a configuration tool to prepare the images to your liking, and ways to lock the system down even more. Would work nicely over PXE boot.
That seems like a good niche to exist indeed and many people would probably misunderstand its purpose by it being called a “KDE distribution”. It would perhaps have been better if it were created by some independent group for this purpose and just happened to settle upon KDE as its interface, or rather offer multiple choices to be honest.
It doesn't necessarily take much hackability away. You might find it makes it easier.
You can overlay changes to the read-only rootfs using the sysext mechanism. You can load and unload these extensions. This makes experiments or juggling debug stuff a lot easier than mucking about in /usr used to be.
A lot of KDE Linux is about making updates and even hackability safe in terms of making things trivial to roll back or remove. A goal is to always be able to unwedge without requiring a reinstall.
If you know you can overlay whatever over your /usr and always easily return to a known-good state, hackability arguably increases by lowering the risk.
It makes hacking easier in some ways too. Overlay any hacks. It will be gone by reboot unless you want otherwise. Also see blue-build.org <- It helps you to put all your hacks in the immutable image.
I think Aurora Linux[1] is more suitable for this purpose.
However, while I love the approach of having an immutable distribution, I don't see the attack vector of ransomware handled in a good way. It does not help, if your OS is intact, but your data is irrecoverably lost due to a wrong click in the wrong browser on your system.
I think the backup and restore landscape has enough tools to fix this (cloud + restic[2] or automated ZFS snapshots[3]), but it takes a bit time / a script to setup something like this for your parents in your favorite distro.
I mean, nothing stops you from building your image of KDE Linux (or any immutable distro) with a built-in restic config.
This is more about preventing the user from messing up their computer than it is about data safety.
I've been using Bazzite for 2 years now (an immutable distro based on Fedora Silver blue) and I just love the fact that I can "unlock" the immutability to try something that could mess up my systemd or desktop environment, and I can just reboot to erase it all away.
I also have a github action to build my custom image with the packages I want, and the configuration I want.
And this makes adding a backup setup even easier, it can be baked-in the distro easily with a custom image ! Your grandparents don't have to do anything, it will auto update and auto apply (and even rollback to the n-1 build if it fails to boot)
> I mean, nothing stops you from building your image of KDE Linux (or any immutable distro) with a built-in restic config.
I hear you. The problem is, that basically nothing stops you from building anything yourself. The difference is, that there is no easy-to-use build-in solution (like time machine) and ease of use is what makes the difference. Especially a TIME difference. Of course there is software SIMILAR to time machine, but it seems to be hard to write something rock solid and easy-to-use.
In fact I also have built it myself: https://github.com/sandreas/zarch
A script that installs Arch on ZFS with ZFSBootMenu and preconfigurable "profiles" which packages and aurs to use. Support for CachyOS Kernel with integrated ZFS is on my list.
I already thought putting together a Raspberry PI Image that uses SSH to PULL backups over the network from preconfigured hosts with preconfigured root public keys and is easily configurable via terminalUI, but I did not find the time yet :-) Maybe syncthing just is enough...
If a distribution is immutable (and thus omits the package manager) and pre-configured for a specific purpose (here, ensuring that KDE works), how much does the base really matter?
It does I believe? I've never tried it myself but I've heard multiple voices say that once you go into the terminal the entire Gentoo stack is just there with portage, equery, qapps and such.
In fact, from what I understand it is in fact not really Gentoo based but Portage-based, as in they for the most part write their own ebuilds and software and from what I know have their own custom init system and display system that's not in Gentoo but they found that Portage was simply very convenient for automating their entire process. The claim that “gentoo is just Portage” is not entirely true, there's still a supported base system that's configured as offered by Gentoo but it's far more flexible than that of most systems of course, granting the user choice over all sorts of fundamental system components.
How's Flatpak doing in terms of health of the tech and the project maintenance?
Merely 4 months ago things didn't look too bright... [1]
> work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, and that there were too few developers able to review and merge code beyond basic maintenance.
> "you will notice that it's not being actively developed anymore". There are people who maintain the code base and fix security issues, for example, but "bigger changes are not really happening anymore".
Flatpak works pretty well. I try to prioritize my distribution's repositories but some software is not packaged. I've taken the easy way out and installed the flatpak. I guess I could go and package them, but I've been too lazy so far.
I recently installed Debian 13 and went with the default partition sizes for /, /var, swap etc. I had two flatpaks installed and my entire /var partition was filled up with 10gb of flatpak data. Frankly very bad default partition sizes and I should not have been so trusting, but flatpak is an unbearably hot mess.
Absolutely. I should have verified partition sizing, and I should never have allowed even one flatpak. That doesn't make Debian default sizes and installation process anywhere close to good.
Ask the Debian maintainers. That was their recommendation, and I trusted them - presuming they would recommend something that would work more than two weeks on a rather standard laptop installation. I will have to re-partition within the next year, because their / partition is too small as well.
Flatpak installs and shares runtimes. That's what makes it so stable, regardless of your distro.
So yes, if you install 1 KDE app from Flatpak, you will have the KDE runtime. But that is true if you install 1 KDE app while on Busybox as well. It's the subsequent KDE apps that will reuse the dependencies.
That was what was insane to me. I expected a couple hundred mb each for my first couple of apps. Not a pleasure in itself, but I was blindsided by the 10gb. The apps were clearly also part of the problem - they should not have so many dependencies. However even after I removed them, flatpak was using 8gb+, I had to purge it to reclaim space. That is why I called it a hot mess.
> KDE Linux is Wayland-only; there is no X.org session and no plan to add one.
Does this mean they're testing that all the Wayland bugs are fixed? I haven't updated to the new Debian stable quite yet but all the previous times I've switch to Wayland under promises of "it's working now" I've been burned; hopefully dogfood helps.
Has any distro ever promised that there are zero bugs in the software they use? I don’t particularly like Wayland but a lot of people have been using it for years at this point…
The issue is that you are using Debian stable. Software quickly becomes out of date, sometimes by years, with the exception of security fixes and occasional backports.
Wayland, KDE, and several other pieces of software evolve rapidly. What may be broken in one release will very likely be fixed a few releases after the last debian stable release.
I'll run Debian on a server if I need predictability and stability with known issues. I won't run Debian on a desktop or workstation for the same reason.
I used to "hate" Wayland, but that was because I was stuck on an ancient kwin_wayland implementation that didn't get updated for years on Ubuntu.
When it comes to big changes like Wayland and Pipewire, you really want the latest versions you can get. Like the OP, I only use rolling releases on my machines for that reason.
I've tried distros with faster cadences. All that means is that I get an endless stream of new bugs, rather than a few that I can find workarounds for (such as just reverting to the still-good X11).
I think "most" are fixed. I use quotes because I've seen people say they have issues that I have never run into myself.
I'm currently stuck on Windows for some old school .NET work, but otherwise have been running Wayland on either arch or fedora for 8 or so years, no real problems specific to Wayland. With that said, I've also always had X to fall back to for the odd program that absolutely only worked in an X session. At this point, though, I don't even recall what they were (probably something that didn't like running under Swaywm because wlroots), so even that might not be an issue.
I'm in a similar boat - i tried the Wayland session in Debian 10 and 11 and lasted less than a day; in Debian 12 i toughed it out for about a week before hitting a showstopper; but this time in Debian 13 i've used it since release without a single nit to pick.
When was the last time you tried Wayland? I switched to KDE Plasma a couple years ago not knowing anything about display server protocols and haven't had a single issue.
The last time I tried it extensively was on Debian Bookwork (12.1 and later; I always wait for the first point release), released July 2023 but freezing sometime around February 2023.
Yes, this was a while ago now. But just as now, people said then "all the bugs are fixed and missing features added"; all that really means is "we're in the long tail". I might've put up with it if not for the fact that there were 2ish major bugs that directly affected my main workflow (e.g. temporarily swapping to non-Latin text input).
Bugs in the window manager or shell (both shipped by KDE) are somewhat more common, but even if they are crashes, due to X11 being better-designed for isolated faults they are easily recovered-from without loss of session.
X11 not supporting modern display technologies is arguably a bug, and it's not likely to get resolved at this point (e.g. it can't do mixed DPIs, or VRR with multiple displays, or HDR in general).
I don't care about any of those things, since computers are about productivity for me.
But I'm pretty sure at least half of them actually do work under X11, it's just that some UI libraries refuse to use it on the grounds of "X11 is outdated, I won't support features even though it does".
(also, having played around with DPI stuff on Wayland, it's pretty broken there in practice)
No. HDR will never come to X11. This is because the X protocol defines a pixel as a CARD32, that is an unsigned 32-bit integer. So the highest depth you could theoretically go is R10G10B10, and forget about floating-point HDR. Fixing this would require rewriting the entire protocol. Which has effectively already been done; it's called Wayland.
Perhaps people ought to listen to the Xorg devs when they say X11 is broken and obsolete, and you should be using Wayland instead. Every single one of them says this.
All sorts of things in X11 are "defined" as a particular thing in the base standard, then changed in protocol extensions. You really shouldn't be writing raw pixels anyway (and most people don't since breaks if your monitor is using 8-bit or 16-bit, for example).
Ultimately it doesn't matter now, because Xorg is kind of in a state of "active abandonment", that is to say, the only maintenance being done is to ensure that no more bugs are being fixed aside from critical security issues on distros Red Hat still supports. In open source, you go where the developer energy is, and right now that's Wayland.
If you're about to tell me that XLibre is a viable alternative, no you're not because it isn't.
Works fine in current KDE master branch, and it's been working for quite a while so it should be in the current release. Note that I run Teams in MS Edge for Linux, which is my dedicated Teams runtime environment and sandbox.
this bit is a no-go for me. they've decided what goes in the immutable base os and allowed a set of kde apps citing subpar experience flatpak versions. I'm guessing they haven't tested all flatpak apps as they tested their apps.
"Well, we’re kind of cheating a bit here. A couple KDE apps are shipped as Flatpaks, and the rest you download using Discover will be Flatpack’d as well, but we do ship Dolphin, Konsole, Ark, Spectacle, Discover, Info Center, System Settings, and some other System-level apps on the base image, rather than as Flatpaks.
The truth is, Flatpak is currently a pretty poor technology for system-level apps that want deep integration with the base system. We tried Dolphin and Konsole as Flatpaks for a while, but the user experience was just terrible."
Nathan (who is a QA person with user-visible breakage ever-present on his mind) is talking about the alpha and the present-day situation, which naturally isn't set in stone. KDE is a Flatpak contributor. One of the little skunkworks projects within KDE Linux is even exploring further evolution of Flatpak that would allow putting Plasma itself into one, etc. This is an ongoing story, you shouldn't assume dogma.
I wish them the best of luck. I never used Neon since it was a rolling release distro. This one I also won't be using because it immutable and relies on Flatpaks which are very buggy. Standalone binaries or AppImages are fine with me but Flatpaks and Snaps are garbage.
Not only is Arch also a rolling distro (despite them saying "not Arch!"), Arch is one of the most horrible rolling distros in terms of stability. Their general principle for package breakage is "you should have checked it on our (site) release log". They don't throw an error or a warning, if something is a breaking change and you pull it into your system, you basically get a "hehe should have checked the release log", and you're hosed.
If you want a good, actually professional rolling release, use SUSE Tumbleweed. They test packages more thoroughly, and they actually hold back breaking or buggy changes instead of the "lol read log and get fucked" policy.
Anecdote: 12 years with Arch, including a laptop with 9 years on one install. Zero issues. But yeah, there’s a low volume mailing list. Get on it. Read it, it’s very short and to the point, and it’s only a few times per year.
> Arch is one of the most horrible rolling distros
We've had different experiences. I've been using Arch for about 8 years and have had to scour the forums no more than thrice to find the magic incantations to fix a broken package manager. In all cases, the system was saved without a reinstall. However, it is certainly painful when pacman breaks.
Thats a very different experience from me. I've had quite a few broken packages easily over 10 in the last year and a half. It was easy enough to find them and roll them back but I dont know how people can say arch is stable. Do you update regularly?
I don't want to manually have to scroll through all the release logs on every single upgrade, in case their might be a landmine in there this time. Nor does any rational person that values their time or their system stability.
It is a million times more sane to have a package manager throw a warning or an error when a breaking change is about to be applied, rather than just YOLO the breaking change and pray people read the release log.
It is one of the most stupid policies ever, and the main reason why I will steer everyone away from Arch forever. Once bitten, twice shy.
I've been using Arch Linux for over a decade and have literally never once consulted release logs, and never got into any serious trouble.
I do subscribe to the arch-announce mailing list which warns of breaking changes, but that receives around 10 messages per year, and the vast majority aren't actually all that important.
I've also gone multiple months between updates and didn't have any problems there either.
The idea that Arch Linux breaks all the time is just complete nonsense.
That’s three times too many. I have been running an Ubuntu server at home for 10 years and went through probably 4 LTS releases and the number of times apt flaked out on me - exactly zero.
I'm running Ubuntu 24.10 and they broke the upgrade to 25.04 if you're using ZFS on the boot drive. Their solution was to prevent the upgrade from running, and basically leave behind anyone stuck on 24.10 to figure it out for themselves.
There has been an increasing trend in the use of up votes as likes instead of user moderation which results in worthwhile discussion sinking to the bottom and stuff like this being at the top and setting the general tone of the discussion.
Without being too negative, I'd like to point out that Neon, ElementaryOS etc tried the same thing. A project thinks we need our own distro but ends up pulling resources away from improving the desktop environment itself.
GNOME doesn’t maintain Ubuntu or Fedora, but it still dominates the Linux desktop experience.
Yes, the key difference is GNOME has strong downstream partners that treat it as the default (e.g. Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu). This way GNOME gets a lot of testing, polish, and feedback without having to maintain its own dist.
I guess I'm confused on what the difference between "being the most popular Linux DE" and "being the default DE of the most popular Linux distros" is. Other than "already being most popular", what was/is KDE's partnership with these distros lacking that GNOME wasn't/isn't? Since this all happened 10-20 years prior to either Neon or KDE Linux, and KDE has long had these kinds of partnerships, I'm assuming there is some other reason/thing KDE you think KDE should be looking at.
Adding on from this new comment: Given whatever differences you see for GNOME in the above, why do you think GNOME has maintained its own testing OS for the last 5 years despite this?
To add something useful, OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation.
It's a complete strip down and an opportunity to change or do things that previously had a lot of friction due to the amount of change that would occur.
On the DE, we just struggle with polish. This is paradoxically both an issue of not enough fruitful innovation and not enough maturity of good innovations that happen and take forever to be adopted.
As far as the actual OS, the new sheaves and barns thing in Linux is neat. We need innovation in RAM compression and swapping to handle bursty desktop memory needs better.
The main problem, and the one I'm trying to solve, is that as a software engineer, you have little incentive to make something that millions of people will use on the Linux desktop unless you have some other downstream monetization plan. You will have tons of users who have questions, not code contributions. To enable users to better organize into their own support structures and to make non-code contributions, I'm building PrizeForge.
What makes you say "the one area"? There are plenty of areas that have enough development friction / inertia such that the same principle applies. Even generally, I think the reason why people caution against reinventing the wheel isn't because it prevents innovation, but because it wastes time / incurs additional risk.
KDE made me fall in love with Linux. The familiar UI to Windows, the insane customizability, the snappiness - each and every one of their contributors are legendary.
If I'm able to do everything I can in my regular arch Linux installation, it would be nice to try an arch derivation that is immutable by design.
What I'm affraid is to start experimenting and finding more and more that my workflow is hindered either by some software not working because the architecture of the OS is incompatible, or by KDE UX design choices in the user interface.
That's not to say that it wouldn't be interesting, and it would say nothing about the quality of the software if I'd hit such walls, only that I'm not its target audience.
I find that I really like using an immutable distro with a custom image (built with github actions).
So I can really separate the system-level changes (in the image, version-controlled) from my user changes.
It's a nixos-like experience without using nix at all.
There have been a couple of things to have in mind, with my Bazzite installation, for creating users or adding groups for example, this pointed me to use systemd-sysusers but it was simple.
I've been wanting to do this! The plan was to modify the Bazzite DX version build script, but ultimately Fedora being base was a deal breaker for me. With KDE Linux this might finally be a dream come true.
> KDE Linux is an immutable distribution that uses Arch Linux packages as its base, but Graham notes that it is "definitely not an 'Arch-based distro!'" Pacman is not included, and Arch is used only for the base operating system. Everything else, he said, is either compiled from source using KDE Builder or installed using Flatpak.
Funny; sounds more like a BSD (a prebuilt single-artifact Arch "base system" + KDE Builder-based "ports collection") than a Linux.
> Unlike Fedora's image-based Atomic Desktops, KDE Linux does not supply a way for users to add packages to the base system. So, for example, users have no way to add packages with additional kernel modules.
But then, since / is rw and only /usr is read-only, it should be possible to install additional kernel modules, just not ones that live in /usr - unless /lib is symlinked to /usr/lib, as happens in a lot of distros these days.
Well, as long as they're either updating frequently or you're not using nvidia drivers (which are notoriously unpleasant with Wayland) I guess it's fine for a lot of people.
Note that it's not necessarily an "Arch distribution" in the sense you might expect:
> KDE Linux is an immutable distribution that uses Arch Linux packages as its base, but Graham notes that it is "definitely not an 'Arch-based distro!'" Pacman is not included, and Arch is used only for the base operating system. Everything else, he said, is either compiled from source using KDE Builder or installed using Flatpak.
This is where I've been for the last 7 years. Very happy with it. I'm looking forward to an Arc Pro machine with SR-IOV GPU capability for VMs. That is pretty much my dream desktop, as much as I care to have one.
I love using KDE and use it on all my desktop machines. I even have a source compiled version ready to test / hack on if I need - utterly fun and easy to build using kde-builder and works on most distros including Ubuntu/Debian, Arch and Fedora.
That said, I don't think having yet another immutable distro is a great idea if they are only going to punt and use Flatpaks. They can run flatpaks on any distro out there. So not really understanding the idea behind this. Nothing really stands out from the article - they still need to make KDE work great with most other modern versions of the distros so it isn't like Flatpaks based KDE is going to give them an edge in having the best KDE on their own distro.
I wouldn't say they are reinventing the wheel. Putting a new set of rims on them, maybe...
"KDE Linux is an “immutable base OS” Linux distro created using Arch Linux packages, but it should not be considered an “Arch-based distro”; Arch is simply a means to an end, and KDE Linux doesn’t even ship with the pacman package manager."
This has been hammered on by very prominent voices a lot. Stop making new "distros". Especially if you just want different defaults. You should be able to declare the defaults and apply them to your base distro, and if you can't there's your problem.
Most distros could be NixOS overlays. Don't like satan's javascript? Try Guix. Bottom line, the farther I get away from binaries discovering their dependencies at runtime, the happier I am.
The big one: a different combination of packages, i.e. which versions are available, and how they're configured and integrated. This generally also means they will have different package managers and configuration tools. Things have gotten a lot more regular between distros but there's still notable differences in philosophy between them, how much you notice kind of depends on how much of a power user you are and how prone to breakage your use-case and preferred applications are.
Distributions are like cars. They all get you from point A to point B, some of them will suit you less than others, and some people are really picky about which one they use for reasons.
Shifting on the wheel, floor, knob, buttons, etc. I've stuck mostly to Ubuntu/Debian based distros because I'm more comfortable with them and they have tended to be more sturdy/stable for my own usage (currently Pop COSMIC alpha though).
The main differences are related to packages. The package format (.deb, .rpm, etc), the package manager (dpkg/apt, pacman, dnf, etc), how frequently the packages are updated, if they focus on stability or new features, etc.
New Linux users that are used to Windows or Mac sometimes dislike a distro and like other, but actually what they really disliked what the desktop environment. For example, Kubuntu uses KDE Plasma as its desktop environment and its user experience are almost the same as Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, OpenSuSE and so on, while it's very different to the default Ubuntu (that uses GNOME). But, under the hood, Ubuntu and Kubuntu are the same (you can even uninstall KDE and install GNOME).
Actually, other Unix-based systems can install the same desktop environments that we have on Linux, so, if you have a FreeBSD with KDE you won't even notice the difference to Kubuntu at first, even though it's a completely different operating system.
tl;dr: there's a real difference, but from a user perspective it's mostly under the hood, not exactly in usability.
KDE seems to reinvent the wheel here and I wonder where they are going with that. There are pretty mature "immutable" distributions out there that could serve as a foundation and offer a lot of the same features that KDE Linux is supposed to support. For example, Aeon (of openSUSE MicroOS vintage) looks like all KDE Linux is aiming for, just with Gnome as DE.
There's a fair amount of overlap and collaboration in the engineering communities behind the different image-based/appliance OS projects, so it's not necessarily as redundant as you might think it is. E.g. the developers behind the distro tech behind KDE Linux, Gnome OS and Kinoite are pretty friendly with each other.
And of course the distros end up sharing the gross of the application packages - originally a differentiator between the classic distros - via e.g. Flatpak/Flathub.
One reason we're doing KDE Linux is that if you look at the growth opportunities KDE has had in recent years, a lot of that has come from our hardware partners, e.g. Slimbook, Tuxedo, Framework and others. They've generally shipped KDE Neon, which is Ubuntu-based but has a few real engineering and stability challenges that have been difficult to overcome. KDE Linux is partly a lessons-learned project about how to do an OEM offering correctly (with some of the lessons coming out of the SteamOS effort, which also ships Plasma), and is also pushing along the development of various out-of-the-box experience components, e.g. the post-first-boot setup experience and things like that.
According to kde.org/linux it comes with Flatpak and Snap. Distrobox and Toolbox. They don't seem to just pick a lane to be consistent, it's all kind of random.
I did not realize anyone outside of Ubuntu used snap. When I was on Ubuntu, I had many annoyances with snap, but not sure if they have since improved the experience.
It's at an alpha stage; it's reasonable to see what people will use, also because having an immutable base and needing tools to install things on top is still somewhat new.
KDE and Gnome are footing Flathub together and a lot of the community effort goes into Flatpak packaging.
There really is no such thing as a "new distro" these days. Everyone with the itch to roll their own is Debian or arch, with a tiny handful of cool kids hacking on nix instead. Scanning down:
> KDE Linux is an immutable distribution that uses Arch Linux packages as its base, but Graham notes that it is "definitely not an 'Arch-based distro!'"
Honestly find Debian Testing good enough for latest KDE Plasma. I have never understood the need for a specific distro for your desktop software and have never found Neon useful.
The only pain point I really found even developing for KDE on Debian was the the switch from qt 5 to 6 but that is always a risk and you can just compile qt from src.
Another pain point is their dev package manager doesn’t have a way to conveniently target library/package branches. So you can spend a fair amount of time waiting for builds to fail and passing in the library or package version to the config file. Very tedious and no doubt cost me lots of time when trying to build on top of Akonadi for example.
After decades of development and billions of dollars in investments can we have just 1 distro that works as smooth as MacOS and then we can get back to having 2000 others for that one time we need to run it on a coffee maker
I don't know that that will happen- not even Windows is as smooth as MacOS. But that's because Microsoft and Linux developers are tackling a more difficult problem- getting an OS to work with effectively infinite hardware permutations. Apple has given themselves an easier problem to solve, with just a handful of hardware SKUs and a few external busses.
That said, Android is pretty stable, because a given Android distro typically only targets a small hardware subset. But I don't think that's the kind of Linux distro that most people contributing to FOSS want to work on.
Apple has also yanked backwards compatibility a few times. I bet Microsoft would love to trash a few legacy API decisions from decades ago.
That being said, I still think Microsoft should have developed a seamless virtualization layer by now. Programs prior to X year are run in a microVM/WINE-like environment. Some escape hatch to kill off some cruft.
> KDE Linux is an immutable distribution that uses Arch Linux packages as its base, but Graham notes that it is ""definitely not an 'Arch-based distro!'"" Pacman is not included, and Arch is used only for the base operating system.
So it's basically a SteamOS sibling, just without Steam?
Sounds like a good distro to use with your parents and grand parents, if they're not solely using iPads...
That might be their target audience.
What appeals to me about linux is the hackability and configurability. This takes it all away in some way, but that's not to say that they won't find a market for it.
Seems targeted at office workplaces. A locked-down system that cannot even be corrupted or tampered with. Consider a workplace of a receptionist at a medical office, or a library computer.
Linux is wonderfully flexible, which allows to create distros like that, among other things. Linux is also free as in freedom, which may be very important for trusting the code you run, or which a governmental official runs.
I bet that past the alpha stage they will offer a configuration tool to prepare the images to your liking, and ways to lock the system down even more. Would work nicely over PXE boot.
That seems like a good niche to exist indeed and many people would probably misunderstand its purpose by it being called a “KDE distribution”. It would perhaps have been better if it were created by some independent group for this purpose and just happened to settle upon KDE as its interface, or rather offer multiple choices to be honest.
It doesn't necessarily take much hackability away. You might find it makes it easier.
You can overlay changes to the read-only rootfs using the sysext mechanism. You can load and unload these extensions. This makes experiments or juggling debug stuff a lot easier than mucking about in /usr used to be.
A lot of KDE Linux is about making updates and even hackability safe in terms of making things trivial to roll back or remove. A goal is to always be able to unwedge without requiring a reinstall.
If you know you can overlay whatever over your /usr and always easily return to a known-good state, hackability arguably increases by lowering the risk.
It makes hacking easier in some ways too. Overlay any hacks. It will be gone by reboot unless you want otherwise. Also see blue-build.org <- It helps you to put all your hacks in the immutable image.
I think Aurora Linux[1] is more suitable for this purpose.
However, while I love the approach of having an immutable distribution, I don't see the attack vector of ransomware handled in a good way. It does not help, if your OS is intact, but your data is irrecoverably lost due to a wrong click in the wrong browser on your system.
I think the backup and restore landscape has enough tools to fix this (cloud + restic[2] or automated ZFS snapshots[3]), but it takes a bit time / a script to setup something like this for your parents in your favorite distro.
1: https://getaurora.dev/en
2: https://github.com/restic/restic
3: https://zrepl.github.io/
I mean, nothing stops you from building your image of KDE Linux (or any immutable distro) with a built-in restic config.
This is more about preventing the user from messing up their computer than it is about data safety.
I've been using Bazzite for 2 years now (an immutable distro based on Fedora Silver blue) and I just love the fact that I can "unlock" the immutability to try something that could mess up my systemd or desktop environment, and I can just reboot to erase it all away.
I also have a github action to build my custom image with the packages I want, and the configuration I want.
And this makes adding a backup setup even easier, it can be baked-in the distro easily with a custom image ! Your grandparents don't have to do anything, it will auto update and auto apply (and even rollback to the n-1 build if it fails to boot)
> I mean, nothing stops you from building your image of KDE Linux (or any immutable distro) with a built-in restic config.
I hear you. The problem is, that basically nothing stops you from building anything yourself. The difference is, that there is no easy-to-use build-in solution (like time machine) and ease of use is what makes the difference. Especially a TIME difference. Of course there is software SIMILAR to time machine, but it seems to be hard to write something rock solid and easy-to-use.
In fact I also have built it myself: https://github.com/sandreas/zarch A script that installs Arch on ZFS with ZFSBootMenu and preconfigurable "profiles" which packages and aurs to use. Support for CachyOS Kernel with integrated ZFS is on my list.
I already thought putting together a Raspberry PI Image that uses SSH to PULL backups over the network from preconfigured hosts with preconfigured root public keys and is easily configurable via terminalUI, but I did not find the time yet :-) Maybe syncthing just is enough...
I like hacking Linux too.
But some people just want a computer to work.
It's not like you can't try a simple distro and move on to something more complex later.
If a distribution is immutable (and thus omits the package manager) and pre-configured for a specific purpose (here, ensuring that KDE works), how much does the base really matter?
It sounds like how ChromeOS is Gentoo based but does not ship the package manager.
Your telling me google uses Gentoo for ChromeOS but doesn't even host a Gentoo mirror? jeez...
It does I believe? I've never tried it myself but I've heard multiple voices say that once you go into the terminal the entire Gentoo stack is just there with portage, equery, qapps and such.
In fact, from what I understand it is in fact not really Gentoo based but Portage-based, as in they for the most part write their own ebuilds and software and from what I know have their own custom init system and display system that's not in Gentoo but they found that Portage was simply very convenient for automating their entire process. The claim that “gentoo is just Portage” is not entirely true, there's still a supported base system that's configured as offered by Gentoo but it's far more flexible than that of most systems of course, granting the user choice over all sorts of fundamental system components.
But without the steam side
> [everything is] installed using Flatpak.
How's Flatpak doing in terms of health of the tech and the project maintenance?
Merely 4 months ago things didn't look too bright... [1]
> work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, and that there were too few developers able to review and merge code beyond basic maintenance.
> "you will notice that it's not being actively developed anymore". There are people who maintain the code base and fix security issues, for example, but "bigger changes are not really happening anymore".
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068400
Flatpak works pretty well. I try to prioritize my distribution's repositories but some software is not packaged. I've taken the easy way out and installed the flatpak. I guess I could go and package them, but I've been too lazy so far.
I recently installed Debian 13 and went with the default partition sizes for /, /var, swap etc. I had two flatpaks installed and my entire /var partition was filled up with 10gb of flatpak data. Frankly very bad default partition sizes and I should not have been so trusting, but flatpak is an unbearably hot mess.
I don't think Debian creates a separate /var by default, only /, /boot, swap, and uefi.
It defaults to one / for it all, but if you tell it not to it will suggest partition sizes for you. Regardless this is definitely self-inflicted.
Absolutely. I should have verified partition sizing, and I should never have allowed even one flatpak. That doesn't make Debian default sizes and installation process anywhere close to good.
Why, of all root directories, would you skimp out on /var? It literally stands for variable data.
Ask the Debian maintainers. That was their recommendation, and I trusted them - presuming they would recommend something that would work more than two weeks on a rather standard laptop installation. I will have to re-partition within the next year, because their / partition is too small as well.
Flatpak installs and shares runtimes. That's what makes it so stable, regardless of your distro.
So yes, if you install 1 KDE app from Flatpak, you will have the KDE runtime. But that is true if you install 1 KDE app while on Busybox as well. It's the subsequent KDE apps that will reuse the dependencies.
don't know why people are obsessing with the partition scheme interest of two apps using as much of a windows10 installation.
my full / for a desktop debian with ton of stuff is under 4gb.
That was what was insane to me. I expected a couple hundred mb each for my first couple of apps. Not a pleasure in itself, but I was blindsided by the 10gb. The apps were clearly also part of the problem - they should not have so many dependencies. However even after I removed them, flatpak was using 8gb+, I had to purge it to reclaim space. That is why I called it a hot mess.
> KDE Linux is Wayland-only; there is no X.org session and no plan to add one.
Does this mean they're testing that all the Wayland bugs are fixed? I haven't updated to the new Debian stable quite yet but all the previous times I've switch to Wayland under promises of "it's working now" I've been burned; hopefully dogfood helps.
Has any distro ever promised that there are zero bugs in the software they use? I don’t particularly like Wayland but a lot of people have been using it for years at this point…
The issue is that you are using Debian stable. Software quickly becomes out of date, sometimes by years, with the exception of security fixes and occasional backports.
Wayland, KDE, and several other pieces of software evolve rapidly. What may be broken in one release will very likely be fixed a few releases after the last debian stable release.
I'll run Debian on a server if I need predictability and stability with known issues. I won't run Debian on a desktop or workstation for the same reason.
This is the way.
I used to "hate" Wayland, but that was because I was stuck on an ancient kwin_wayland implementation that didn't get updated for years on Ubuntu.
When it comes to big changes like Wayland and Pipewire, you really want the latest versions you can get. Like the OP, I only use rolling releases on my machines for that reason.
I've tried distros with faster cadences. All that means is that I get an endless stream of new bugs, rather than a few that I can find workarounds for (such as just reverting to the still-good X11).
I’m in Arch and I generally struggle to get video acceleration in a browser with an Nvidia GPU.
Yup, same, using X, everything mostly works. Wayland - not so much.
I think "most" are fixed. I use quotes because I've seen people say they have issues that I have never run into myself.
I'm currently stuck on Windows for some old school .NET work, but otherwise have been running Wayland on either arch or fedora for 8 or so years, no real problems specific to Wayland. With that said, I've also always had X to fall back to for the odd program that absolutely only worked in an X session. At this point, though, I don't even recall what they were (probably something that didn't like running under Swaywm because wlroots), so even that might not be an issue.
I'm in a similar boat - i tried the Wayland session in Debian 10 and 11 and lasted less than a day; in Debian 12 i toughed it out for about a week before hitting a showstopper; but this time in Debian 13 i've used it since release without a single nit to pick.
When was the last time you tried Wayland? I switched to KDE Plasma a couple years ago not knowing anything about display server protocols and haven't had a single issue.
The last time I tried it extensively was on Debian Bookwork (12.1 and later; I always wait for the first point release), released July 2023 but freezing sometime around February 2023.
Yes, this was a while ago now. But just as now, people said then "all the bugs are fixed and missing features added"; all that really means is "we're in the long tail". I might've put up with it if not for the fact that there were 2ish major bugs that directly affected my main workflow (e.g. temporarily swapping to non-Latin text input).
Are all X11 bugs fixed?
I haven't hit any for probably a decade now.
Bugs in the window manager or shell (both shipped by KDE) are somewhat more common, but even if they are crashes, due to X11 being better-designed for isolated faults they are easily recovered-from without loss of session.
X11 not supporting modern display technologies is arguably a bug, and it's not likely to get resolved at this point (e.g. it can't do mixed DPIs, or VRR with multiple displays, or HDR in general).
I guess we’d have to see what the argument is. But, that looks more like a lack of features to me.
I don't care about any of those things, since computers are about productivity for me.
But I'm pretty sure at least half of them actually do work under X11, it's just that some UI libraries refuse to use it on the grounds of "X11 is outdated, I won't support features even though it does".
(also, having played around with DPI stuff on Wayland, it's pretty broken there in practice)
I suspect X11 can do mixed DPI and VRR with multiple displays if you do 1 display per xscreen, but nobody uses that configuration.
I suspect HDR support could be added if someone were to retrofit it like how VR support was added, but no one really wants to work on that.
I "suspect" all of the bugs that the parent comment complained about could be fixed too, but that wasn't the question.
No. HDR will never come to X11. This is because the X protocol defines a pixel as a CARD32, that is an unsigned 32-bit integer. So the highest depth you could theoretically go is R10G10B10, and forget about floating-point HDR. Fixing this would require rewriting the entire protocol. Which has effectively already been done; it's called Wayland.
Perhaps people ought to listen to the Xorg devs when they say X11 is broken and obsolete, and you should be using Wayland instead. Every single one of them says this.
Sure except Wayland doesn't work with nvidia so...
All sorts of things in X11 are "defined" as a particular thing in the base standard, then changed in protocol extensions. You really shouldn't be writing raw pixels anyway (and most people don't since breaks if your monitor is using 8-bit or 16-bit, for example).
Ultimately it doesn't matter now, because Xorg is kind of in a state of "active abandonment", that is to say, the only maintenance being done is to ensure that no more bugs are being fixed aside from critical security issues on distros Red Hat still supports. In open source, you go where the developer energy is, and right now that's Wayland.
If you're about to tell me that XLibre is a viable alternative, no you're not because it isn't.
Call me when I can run Wayland and share my full screen on M$ Teams. Last time I checked it was just individual windows.
Cross that hurdle and I can go back to trusting the Linux Desktop for business things.
Works fine in current KDE master branch, and it's been working for quite a while so it should be in the current release. Note that I run Teams in MS Edge for Linux, which is my dedicated Teams runtime environment and sandbox.
The only time I've ever had screensharing working correctly is under Wayland
this bit is a no-go for me. they've decided what goes in the immutable base os and allowed a set of kde apps citing subpar experience flatpak versions. I'm guessing they haven't tested all flatpak apps as they tested their apps.
"Well, we’re kind of cheating a bit here. A couple KDE apps are shipped as Flatpaks, and the rest you download using Discover will be Flatpack’d as well, but we do ship Dolphin, Konsole, Ark, Spectacle, Discover, Info Center, System Settings, and some other System-level apps on the base image, rather than as Flatpaks.
The truth is, Flatpak is currently a pretty poor technology for system-level apps that want deep integration with the base system. We tried Dolphin and Konsole as Flatpaks for a while, but the user experience was just terrible."
https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/06/announcing-the-alpha-r...
Nathan (who is a QA person with user-visible breakage ever-present on his mind) is talking about the alpha and the present-day situation, which naturally isn't set in stone. KDE is a Flatpak contributor. One of the little skunkworks projects within KDE Linux is even exploring further evolution of Flatpak that would allow putting Plasma itself into one, etc. This is an ongoing story, you shouldn't assume dogma.
This definitely looks like a system intended to be configured by an administrator, not the user. It shouts "secure office use", much like Silvetblue.
Note: not Dolphin the GameCube+Wii emulator but Dolphin the file-browser/manager (a KDE native)
Not Dolphin the Smalltalk, either.
http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html
I would be surprised if anybody who ever used kde would confuse the two.
I wish them the best of luck. I never used Neon since it was a rolling release distro. This one I also won't be using because it immutable and relies on Flatpaks which are very buggy. Standalone binaries or AppImages are fine with me but Flatpaks and Snaps are garbage.
Not only is Arch also a rolling distro (despite them saying "not Arch!"), Arch is one of the most horrible rolling distros in terms of stability. Their general principle for package breakage is "you should have checked it on our (site) release log". They don't throw an error or a warning, if something is a breaking change and you pull it into your system, you basically get a "hehe should have checked the release log", and you're hosed.
If you want a good, actually professional rolling release, use SUSE Tumbleweed. They test packages more thoroughly, and they actually hold back breaking or buggy changes instead of the "lol read log and get fucked" policy.
Anecdote: 12 years with Arch, including a laptop with 9 years on one install. Zero issues. But yeah, there’s a low volume mailing list. Get on it. Read it, it’s very short and to the point, and it’s only a few times per year.
> Arch is one of the most horrible rolling distros
We've had different experiences. I've been using Arch for about 8 years and have had to scour the forums no more than thrice to find the magic incantations to fix a broken package manager. In all cases, the system was saved without a reinstall. However, it is certainly painful when pacman breaks.
;-)Thats a very different experience from me. I've had quite a few broken packages easily over 10 in the last year and a half. It was easy enough to find them and roll them back but I dont know how people can say arch is stable. Do you update regularly?
I don't want to manually have to scroll through all the release logs on every single upgrade, in case their might be a landmine in there this time. Nor does any rational person that values their time or their system stability.
It is a million times more sane to have a package manager throw a warning or an error when a breaking change is about to be applied, rather than just YOLO the breaking change and pray people read the release log.
It is one of the most stupid policies ever, and the main reason why I will steer everyone away from Arch forever. Once bitten, twice shy.
I've been using Arch Linux for over a decade and have literally never once consulted release logs, and never got into any serious trouble.
I do subscribe to the arch-announce mailing list which warns of breaking changes, but that receives around 10 messages per year, and the vast majority aren't actually all that important.
I've also gone multiple months between updates and didn't have any problems there either.
The idea that Arch Linux breaks all the time is just complete nonsense.
That’s three times too many. I have been running an Ubuntu server at home for 10 years and went through probably 4 LTS releases and the number of times apt flaked out on me - exactly zero.
I'm running Ubuntu 24.10 and they broke the upgrade to 25.04 if you're using ZFS on the boot drive. Their solution was to prevent the upgrade from running, and basically leave behind anyone stuck on 24.10 to figure it out for themselves.
TBF, they can't be expected to support every potential configuration users may think of.
So not rolling? I too have never had to open Windows Task Manager on macOS.
YMMV. Manjaro's broken on me multiple times. I leave a machine alone for two years and it's next upgrade is almost guaranteed to break something.
Manjaro is not Arch, and its maintainers have repeatedly shown that they aren't very good at maintaining a distro: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
Actual Arch on two machines, no issues. The older one I've been using for 15 years now.
To be fair to Arch, you can always subscribe to their RSS or mailing list if you want to be notified about breaking changes
I swore off arch when an update surprised me by switching to systemd (years ago obviously) and trashing my system in the process
Why is a comment trashing a different project, in the most lazy way possible, at the top of the page?
EDIT: wow, all the comments are like that. I guess something has to come first.
There has been an increasing trend in the use of up votes as likes instead of user moderation which results in worthwhile discussion sinking to the bottom and stuff like this being at the top and setting the general tone of the discussion.
I never got neon to work in a way that wasn't unpleasant.
Neon is explicitly a bleeding edge KDE testbed (but I'll agree that their website undersells this fact)
Without being too negative, I'd like to point out that Neon, ElementaryOS etc tried the same thing. A project thinks we need our own distro but ends up pulling resources away from improving the desktop environment itself.
GNOME doesn’t maintain Ubuntu or Fedora, but it still dominates the Linux desktop experience.
The article already talks about Neon and the pros/cons of running that kind of distro in more detail than pointed out here.
> GNOME doesn’t maintain Ubuntu or Fedora
What differentiates GNOME from KDE in that regard (other than it'd be Kubuntu and the Fedora KDE spin from the other perspective)?
Yes, the key difference is GNOME has strong downstream partners that treat it as the default (e.g. Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu). This way GNOME gets a lot of testing, polish, and feedback without having to maintain its own dist.
I guess I'm confused on what the difference between "being the most popular Linux DE" and "being the default DE of the most popular Linux distros" is. Other than "already being most popular", what was/is KDE's partnership with these distros lacking that GNOME wasn't/isn't? Since this all happened 10-20 years prior to either Neon or KDE Linux, and KDE has long had these kinds of partnerships, I'm assuming there is some other reason/thing KDE you think KDE should be looking at.
Adding on from this new comment: Given whatever differences you see for GNOME in the above, why do you think GNOME has maintained its own testing OS for the last 5 years despite this?
Fedora is a side gig for GNOME maintainers, same as Neon for KDE (:
GNOME maintains GNOME OS.
Hey the reason behind my username!
To add something useful, OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation.
It's a complete strip down and an opportunity to change or do things that previously had a lot of friction due to the amount of change that would occur.
> OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation
To me, it seems like the opposite is true. Operating systems feel like a solved problem. What are some of the big innovations of recent times?
On the DE, we just struggle with polish. This is paradoxically both an issue of not enough fruitful innovation and not enough maturity of good innovations that happen and take forever to be adopted.
As far as the actual OS, the new sheaves and barns thing in Linux is neat. We need innovation in RAM compression and swapping to handle bursty desktop memory needs better.
The main problem, and the one I'm trying to solve, is that as a software engineer, you have little incentive to make something that millions of people will use on the Linux desktop unless you have some other downstream monetization plan. You will have tons of users who have questions, not code contributions. To enable users to better organize into their own support structures and to make non-code contributions, I'm building PrizeForge.
What makes you say "the one area"? There are plenty of areas that have enough development friction / inertia such that the same principle applies. Even generally, I think the reason why people caution against reinventing the wheel isn't because it prevents innovation, but because it wastes time / incurs additional risk.
What was Cartwheel Linux? A quick search doesn't turn up anything related.
KDE made me fall in love with Linux. The familiar UI to Windows, the insane customizability, the snappiness - each and every one of their contributors are legendary.
If I'm able to do everything I can in my regular arch Linux installation, it would be nice to try an arch derivation that is immutable by design.
What I'm affraid is to start experimenting and finding more and more that my workflow is hindered either by some software not working because the architecture of the OS is incompatible, or by KDE UX design choices in the user interface.
That's not to say that it wouldn't be interesting, and it would say nothing about the quality of the software if I'd hit such walls, only that I'm not its target audience.
I find that I really like using an immutable distro with a custom image (built with github actions).
So I can really separate the system-level changes (in the image, version-controlled) from my user changes.
It's a nixos-like experience without using nix at all.
There have been a couple of things to have in mind, with my Bazzite installation, for creating users or adding groups for example, this pointed me to use systemd-sysusers but it was simple.
I've been wanting to do this! The plan was to modify the Bazzite DX version build script, but ultimately Fedora being base was a deal breaker for me. With KDE Linux this might finally be a dream come true.
> KDE Linux is an immutable distribution that uses Arch Linux packages as its base, but Graham notes that it is "definitely not an 'Arch-based distro!'" Pacman is not included, and Arch is used only for the base operating system. Everything else, he said, is either compiled from source using KDE Builder or installed using Flatpak.
Funny; sounds more like a BSD (a prebuilt single-artifact Arch "base system" + KDE Builder-based "ports collection") than a Linux.
> Unlike Fedora's image-based Atomic Desktops, KDE Linux does not supply a way for users to add packages to the base system. So, for example, users have no way to add packages with additional kernel modules.
But then, since / is rw and only /usr is read-only, it should be possible to install additional kernel modules, just not ones that live in /usr - unless /lib is symlinked to /usr/lib, as happens in a lot of distros these days.
Well, as long as they're either updating frequently or you're not using nvidia drivers (which are notoriously unpleasant with Wayland) I guess it's fine for a lot of people.
A well maintained KDE Arch distribution sounds very nice. I love KDE and tolerate Kubuntu.
Note that it's not necessarily an "Arch distribution" in the sense you might expect:
> KDE Linux is an immutable distribution that uses Arch Linux packages as its base, but Graham notes that it is "definitely not an 'Arch-based distro!'" Pacman is not included, and Arch is used only for the base operating system. Everything else, he said, is either compiled from source using KDE Builder or installed using Flatpak.
This sounds fairly close to SteamOS in terms of structure. (Which seems to work well for its own use case, so I can see the logic.)
> Kubuntu
This is where I've been for the last 7 years. Very happy with it. I'm looking forward to an Arc Pro machine with SR-IOV GPU capability for VMs. That is pretty much my dream desktop, as much as I care to have one.
I love using KDE and use it on all my desktop machines. I even have a source compiled version ready to test / hack on if I need - utterly fun and easy to build using kde-builder and works on most distros including Ubuntu/Debian, Arch and Fedora.
That said, I don't think having yet another immutable distro is a great idea if they are only going to punt and use Flatpaks. They can run flatpaks on any distro out there. So not really understanding the idea behind this. Nothing really stands out from the article - they still need to make KDE work great with most other modern versions of the distros so it isn't like Flatpaks based KDE is going to give them an edge in having the best KDE on their own distro.
What am I missing?
I love using KDE Plasma. All the best to the team!
The best KDE implementation that I have seen is on Arch based distros (Arch, SteamOS, CachyOS, etc.).
Nothing else compares. Why reinvent the wheel?
I wouldn't say they are reinventing the wheel. Putting a new set of rims on them, maybe...
"KDE Linux is an “immutable base OS” Linux distro created using Arch Linux packages, but it should not be considered an “Arch-based distro”; Arch is simply a means to an end, and KDE Linux doesn’t even ship with the pacman package manager."
https://kde.org/linux/
This has been hammered on by very prominent voices a lot. Stop making new "distros". Especially if you just want different defaults. You should be able to declare the defaults and apply them to your base distro, and if you can't there's your problem.
Most distros could be NixOS overlays. Don't like satan's javascript? Try Guix. Bottom line, the farther I get away from binaries discovering their dependencies at runtime, the happier I am.
I can’t really imagine what compels those voices—if some group wants to make a distro, the should go for it. Worst case it will just fail.
I don’t understand the differences between each distribution. Is there a real difference?
The big one: a different combination of packages, i.e. which versions are available, and how they're configured and integrated. This generally also means they will have different package managers and configuration tools. Things have gotten a lot more regular between distros but there's still notable differences in philosophy between them, how much you notice kind of depends on how much of a power user you are and how prone to breakage your use-case and preferred applications are.
Distributions are like cars. They all get you from point A to point B, some of them will suit you less than others, and some people are really picky about which one they use for reasons.
Shifting on the wheel, floor, knob, buttons, etc. I've stuck mostly to Ubuntu/Debian based distros because I'm more comfortable with them and they have tended to be more sturdy/stable for my own usage (currently Pop COSMIC alpha though).
> Is there a real difference?
The main differences are related to packages. The package format (.deb, .rpm, etc), the package manager (dpkg/apt, pacman, dnf, etc), how frequently the packages are updated, if they focus on stability or new features, etc.
New Linux users that are used to Windows or Mac sometimes dislike a distro and like other, but actually what they really disliked what the desktop environment. For example, Kubuntu uses KDE Plasma as its desktop environment and its user experience are almost the same as Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, OpenSuSE and so on, while it's very different to the default Ubuntu (that uses GNOME). But, under the hood, Ubuntu and Kubuntu are the same (you can even uninstall KDE and install GNOME).
Actually, other Unix-based systems can install the same desktop environments that we have on Linux, so, if you have a FreeBSD with KDE you won't even notice the difference to Kubuntu at first, even though it's a completely different operating system.
tl;dr: there's a real difference, but from a user perspective it's mostly under the hood, not exactly in usability.
Yes, depending on the distributions you are comparing the differences are trivial to radical to the point of making comparisons impossible.
KDE seems to reinvent the wheel here and I wonder where they are going with that. There are pretty mature "immutable" distributions out there that could serve as a foundation and offer a lot of the same features that KDE Linux is supposed to support. For example, Aeon (of openSUSE MicroOS vintage) looks like all KDE Linux is aiming for, just with Gnome as DE.
But hey, more power to them.
There's a fair amount of overlap and collaboration in the engineering communities behind the different image-based/appliance OS projects, so it's not necessarily as redundant as you might think it is. E.g. the developers behind the distro tech behind KDE Linux, Gnome OS and Kinoite are pretty friendly with each other.
And of course the distros end up sharing the gross of the application packages - originally a differentiator between the classic distros - via e.g. Flatpak/Flathub.
One reason we're doing KDE Linux is that if you look at the growth opportunities KDE has had in recent years, a lot of that has come from our hardware partners, e.g. Slimbook, Tuxedo, Framework and others. They've generally shipped KDE Neon, which is Ubuntu-based but has a few real engineering and stability challenges that have been difficult to overcome. KDE Linux is partly a lessons-learned project about how to do an OEM offering correctly (with some of the lessons coming out of the SteamOS effort, which also ships Plasma), and is also pushing along the development of various out-of-the-box experience components, e.g. the post-first-boot setup experience and things like that.
So this replaces Neon (Ubuntu based) with Arch based distro.
Their distro seems somewhat confused.
According to kde.org/linux it comes with Flatpak and Snap. Distrobox and Toolbox. They don't seem to just pick a lane to be consistent, it's all kind of random.
I did not realize anyone outside of Ubuntu used snap. When I was on Ubuntu, I had many annoyances with snap, but not sure if they have since improved the experience.
It's at an alpha stage; it's reasonable to see what people will use, also because having an immutable base and needing tools to install things on top is still somewhat new.
KDE and Gnome are footing Flathub together and a lot of the community effort goes into Flatpak packaging.
There really is no such thing as a "new distro" these days. Everyone with the itch to roll their own is Debian or arch, with a tiny handful of cool kids hacking on nix instead. Scanning down:
> KDE Linux is an immutable distribution that uses Arch Linux packages as its base, but Graham notes that it is "definitely not an 'Arch-based distro!'"
Definitely not, indeed.
Honestly find Debian Testing good enough for latest KDE Plasma. I have never understood the need for a specific distro for your desktop software and have never found Neon useful.
The only pain point I really found even developing for KDE on Debian was the the switch from qt 5 to 6 but that is always a risk and you can just compile qt from src.
Another pain point is their dev package manager doesn’t have a way to conveniently target library/package branches. So you can spend a fair amount of time waiting for builds to fail and passing in the library or package version to the config file. Very tedious and no doubt cost me lots of time when trying to build on top of Akonadi for example.
> find Debian Testing good enough for latest KDE Plasma
Latest as in "lagging for weeks while people in Ubuntu eat the bugs".
[flagged]
After decades of development and billions of dollars in investments can we have just 1 distro that works as smooth as MacOS and then we can get back to having 2000 others for that one time we need to run it on a coffee maker
I don't know that that will happen- not even Windows is as smooth as MacOS. But that's because Microsoft and Linux developers are tackling a more difficult problem- getting an OS to work with effectively infinite hardware permutations. Apple has given themselves an easier problem to solve, with just a handful of hardware SKUs and a few external busses.
That said, Android is pretty stable, because a given Android distro typically only targets a small hardware subset. But I don't think that's the kind of Linux distro that most people contributing to FOSS want to work on.
Apple has also yanked backwards compatibility a few times. I bet Microsoft would love to trash a few legacy API decisions from decades ago.
That being said, I still think Microsoft should have developed a seamless virtualization layer by now. Programs prior to X year are run in a microVM/WINE-like environment. Some escape hatch to kill off some cruft.
Microsoft did both.
Pretty sure you're talking about ChromeOS