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KDE launches its own distribution

• NuclearPM 1y ago
  I don’t understand the differences between each distribution. Is there a real difference?
  • IlikeKitties 1y ago
    Yes, depending on the distributions you are comparing the differences are trivial to radical to the point of making comparisons impossible.
  • rcxdude 1y ago
    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.
  • CuriouslyC 1y ago
    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.
    • tracker1 1y ago
      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).
  • lucasoshiro 1y ago
    > 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.
• Propelloni 1y ago
  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.
  • sho_hn 1y ago
    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.
  • Vogtinator 1y ago
    > For example, Aeon (of openSUSE MicroOS vintage) looks like all KDE Linux is aiming for, just with Gnome as DE. And Kalpa is that just with Plasma as DE.
• CartwheelLinux 1y ago
  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.
  • mintplant 1y ago
    What was Cartwheel Linux? A quick search doesn't turn up anything related.
  • achierius 1y ago
    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.
    • apfsx 1y ago
      I agree with you. When I read that my first thought was "the one area"? Personally I think its the complete opposite, like really strongly. like really really strongly. I'm certain for at least 10 years now, once a week I think "I miss old desktop operating systems". Any of them. 7,vista,xp. snow leopard,leopard,tiger. I even stopped using Ubuntu when it went from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 and other options at that time were pretty bad so I ended up getting back into mac's for my home desktop. I still use all 3 daily, but hate all of them.
  • criddell 1y ago
    > 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?
    • positron26 1y ago
      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.
• alabhyajindal 1y ago
  I love using KDE Plasma. All the best to the team!
• dismalaf 1y ago
  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.
  • sho_hn 1y ago
    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.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
    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.
• o11c 1y ago
  > 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.
  • jacobsenscott 1y ago
    Wayland works great for me. I use a rolling update distribution so everything is the latest version and I only use Firefox, a terminal, and emacs. Debian tends to be pretty far behind.
  • alabhyajindal 1y ago
    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.
    • o11c 1y ago
      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).
    • dboon 1y ago
      Same experience. I switched back to Linux a few months ago after a few years hiatus. Installed Arch and KDE Plasma. Literally didn’t even know I was using Wayland until I had to fiddle with something and realized X wasn’t even installed
  • zdragnar 1y ago
    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.
• shmerl 1y ago
  So this replaces Neon (Ubuntu based) with Arch based distro.
• CuriouslyC 1y ago
  A well maintained KDE Arch distribution sounds very nice. I love KDE and tolerate Kubuntu.
  • mintplant 1y ago
    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.
    • LawnGnome 1y ago
      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.)
  • topspin 1y ago
    > 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.
• danudey 1y ago
  > 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.
• diabllicseagull 1y ago
  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-release-of-kde-linux/ https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/06/announcing-the-alpha-r...
  • sho_hn 1y ago
    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.
  • nine_k 1y ago
    This definitely looks like a system intended to be configured by an administrator, not the user. It shouts "secure office use", much like Silvetblue.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • bmicraft 1y ago
      Installation is exceptionally easy, other than timezone, install disk and user account. I'd also expect installing flatpaks offline would be a hassle.
  • edoceo 1y ago
• j1elo 1y ago
  > [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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068400
  • sgc 1y ago
    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.
    • tredre3 1y ago
      I don't think Debian creates a separate /var by default, only /, /boot, swap, and uefi.
      • stonogo 1y ago
        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.
        • sgc 1y ago
          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.
          • WD-42 1y ago
• derefr 1y ago
  > 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.
• bobajeff 1y ago
  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.
  • spooneybarger 1y ago
    I never got neon to work in a way that wasn't unpleasant.
    • pharrington 1y ago
      Neon is explicitly a bleeding edge KDE testbed (but I'll agree that their website undersells this fact)
      • mcosta 1y ago
        Neon has 2 flavors, developer and user. The user one is stable.
        • pharrington 1y ago
          Sorry for the late reply. Earlier this year, I tried KDE Neon User Edition. It offers updates everytime any KDE software you've installed gets an official update, meaning you're shown updates practically everyday. That isn't stable. Again, the website copy undersells this, saying it "Featuring the latest officially released KDE software on a stable base (emphasis mine)." edited for clarity
    • mcosta 1y ago
      I love neon, so it is a tie.
  • jorvi 1y ago
    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.
• blinkingled 1y ago
  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?
• ajross 1y ago
  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.
• eek2121 1y ago
  The best KDE implementation that I have seen is on Arch based distros (Arch, SteamOS, CachyOS, etc.). Nothing else compares. Why reinvent the wheel?
  • MegaDeKay 1y ago
    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/ https://kde.org/linux/
  • somewhatjustin 1y ago
    Have you tried KDE on Fedora? I'm very happy with it.
  • s20n 1y ago
    What exactly is missing from say, KDE on debian? I recently installed it for my family computer and have had zero qualms with it.
  • tamimio 1y ago
    CatchyOS is great, been using it for months and been good overall. There is also garuda linux, it looks great too, only tested it for a little though, worth trying if you are in your distro-hopping phase: https://garudalinux.org https://garudalinux.org
• gyudin 1y ago
  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
  • erikw 1y ago
    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.
    • 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
      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.
      • selkin 1y ago
        Microsoft did both.
    • gyudin 1y ago
      Yeah, probably the problem is nobody has figured out how to monetize Desktop OSes properly.
  • OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
    Pretty sure you're talking about ChromeOS
  • 1y ago
• righthand 1y ago
  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.
  • chupasaurus 1y ago
    > find Debian Testing good enough for latest KDE Plasma Latest as in "lagging for weeks while people in Ubuntu eat the bugs".
    • righthand 1y ago
      People on Arch are eating the bugs too. I think KDE would go MUCH farther if they just made their tooling a little easier and bundled that well enough. They wouldn't need a separate distro.
      • chupasaurus 1y ago
        Ubuntu and Debian have the same maintainers for KDE and nearly identical packages so bugs are shared.
        • righthand 1y ago
          And? Regardless most bugs probably get fixed before landing in Debian. I also never said “latest” packages. That is some heavy lifting done by you.
• ashirviskas 1y ago
  > 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?
  • zahlman 1y ago
    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?
  • jasonfrost 1y ago
    But without the steam side
    • throwaway314155 1y ago
      SteamDeck also ships with pacman.
  • ryao 1y ago
    It sounds like how ChromeOS is Gentoo based but does not ship the package manager.
    • seiferteric 1y ago
      Your telling me google uses Gentoo for ChromeOS but doesn't even host a Gentoo mirror? jeez...
      • apfsx 1y ago
        If that's true I think its genuinely disrespectful. Truly.
      • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        Won't someone please think of the multi trillion dollar company?
• coffeecoders 1y ago
  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.
  • zamadatix 1y ago
    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)?
    • coffeecoders 1y ago
      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.
      • zamadatix 1y ago
        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?
        • lproven 1y ago
          > 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. You put the things in quotation marks but I do not see these phrases in the thing to which you're commenting. KDE is roughly a year older than GNOME. Snag: KDE was built in C++ using the semi-proprietary (dual-licensed) Qt. Red Hat refused to bundle Qt. Instead, it was a primary sponsor of GNOME, written in plain old C not C++ and using the GIMP's Gtk instead of Qt. This fostered the development of Mandrake: Red Hat Linux with built in KDE. In the late 1990s and the noughties, KDE was the default desktop of most leading Linux distros: SUSE Linux Pro, Mandrake, Corel LinuxOS, Caldera OpenLinux, etc. Most of them cost money. In 2003, Novell bought SUSE and GNOME developer Ximian and merged them, and SUSE started to become a GNOME distro. Then in 2004 along came Ubuntu: an easy desktop distro that was entirely free of charge. It came with GNOME 2. Around the same time, Red Hat discontinued its free Red Hat Linux and replaced it with the paid-for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free, unsupported Fedora Core. Fedora also used GNOME 2. GNOME became the default desktop of most Linuxes. Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, even OpenSolaris, you got GNOME, possibly unless you asked for something else. KDE became an alternative choice. It still is. A bunch of smaller community distros default to KDE, including PC LinuxOS, OpenMandriva, Mageia... but the bigger players all default to GNOME. Many of the developers of GNOME still work for Red Hat today, over 25 years on. They are on the same teams as the developers of RHEL and Fedora. This is a good reason for GNOME OS to use a Fedora basis.
• OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
  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.
• fbhabbed 1y ago
  [flagged]
• gchamonlive 1y ago
  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.
  • LelouBil 1y ago
    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.
    • ashikns 1y ago
      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.
      • LelouBil 1y ago
        It seems like KDE linux uses a different way to provide a system image than ostree on Fedora Silverblue, so I have no idea how easy it is to make changes on top of. But for Bazzite (and other universal blue distros) you better use BlueBuild https://blue-build.org/ https://blue-build.org/ In the end it's an OCI container image, so you could technically just have a Dockerfile with "FROM bazzite:whatever" at the top, but bluebuild automates the small stuff that you need to do on top of it, and allows you to split your config in files. You can have a look at my repository to see how easy it is ! https://github.com/LelouBil/Leloublue https://github.com/LelouBil/Leloublue
• samuelec 1y ago
  It seems that they are going to divert development effort from KDE. If so, it's really a bad move
• positron26 1y ago
  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.
  • bee_rider 1y ago
    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.
    • positron26 1y ago
      And let's also imagine what compels people to recommend enthusiasts onto paths where they will be more successful. Maintaining distros that are not some kind of overlay that can track the underlying base automatically is just asking for more maintenance than people will want to do while also Balkanizing options for users because while overlays can be composed, distro hopping very much does not compose.
  • vaylian 1y ago
    Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/359/ https://xkcd.com/359/
• gnubet 1y ago
  KDE GNU/Linux
  • OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
    What you're referring to as KDE GNU/Linux, is in fact, KDE Wayland GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it..
• tonyhart7 1y ago
  would it be better than fedora kde???
  • xedrac 1y ago
    Other than being immutable, I doubt it. Immutable distros tend to rely on flatpaks to dynamically install new packages. Unfortunately the flatpak codebase is largely unmaintained at this point, and nearly impossible to get changes merged in.
    • flanked-evergl 1y ago
      Nope: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pulse https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pulse
    • noisem4ker 1y ago
      Reference to Flatpak allegedly not being "actively developed" anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068400
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
      There is already an immutable Fedora with KDE called Kinoite https://www.fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/ https://www.fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
• TekMol 1y ago
  I'm using Debian with the Plasma desktop, so I have a taskbar. Will this impact me?
  • akho 1y ago
    no
• Joel_Mckay 1y ago
  > installed using Flatpak So essentially people are abandoning the memory/speed efficiency of the .so ecosystem, and seeking exe/msi style convenience... You know... a dump of legacy dll/static-so-snapshot versions with endless CVEs no one will ever be able to completely fix or verify. Should be fun, and the popcorn is waiting =3
  • akimbostrawman 1y ago
    If you ever used flatpaks you would know that they are very noisy about dependencies being not up to date. They also gain substantial amount of security by being sandboxed by default unlike majority of native packages.
    • Joel_Mckay 1y ago
      Snap and Flatpaks only real legitimate use-case is legacy compatibility: 1. Current release applications on deprecated OS (Mostly good) 2. Deprecated applications on current OS (Mostly bad) The Windows style packaging architecture introduces more problems than it solves. Fine for running something like Steam games with single shot application instances using 95% of system resources each power cycle, but folks could also just stick with Windows 11 if convenience and security-theater is their preference. Some people probably won't notice the issues, but depends what they do. Arch Linux itself is a pretty awesome distro for lean systems. =3
      • akimbostrawman 1y ago
        >single shot application instances using 95% of system resources each power cycle Source? There is no measurable energy or efficiency difference at least for flatpak on any semi recent hardware. I know that snaps do take couple seconds longer at first start. I prefer flatpaks for proprietary and internet facing applications because of there easy sandboxing capabilities. There is also the advantage on archlinux not needing to do a full system update for a single application.
        • 1y ago
• abdellah123 1y ago
  sounds like an omarchy competitor
• jdasdf 1y ago
  -What about KDE NEON?
  • rbits 1y ago
    From the article: > Neon has ""served admirably for a decade"", he said, but it ""has somewhat reached its limit in terms of what we can do with it"" because of its Ubuntu base. According to the wiki page, neon's Ubuntu LTS base is built on old technology and requires ""a lot of packaging busywork"". It also becomes less stable as time goes on, ""because it needs to be tinkered with to get Plasma to build on it, breaking the LTS promise"".
    • vid 1y ago
      I run KDE Neon and this checks out. However, it's a terrible idea to create another distro. The Linux world needs more cohesion. I might go back to Ubuntu if their KDE 6 is decent now. I use the DE for the purpose of running programs in the environment and that includes being able to easily set up things like CUDA, which is easiest with Ubuntu, a PITA with other options.
      • rbits 1y ago
        What do you mean by cohesion? I feel like cohesion with Linux would mean cohesion on Desktop Environment (which we have with GNOME and KDE being so popular) and packaging format (which we have with Flatpack)
        • vid 1y ago
          I mean "Linux" (as a user OS) should for the most part be a common experience, so if a very technical or very non technical person wants to do something or someone wants to support someone doing ordinary things using a different distro, they aren't on a whole new arbitrary mini-adventure full of surprises, except at the desktop level. Mind you even though I've been running Linux for decades, I have lost the enthusiasm for the low level details and am happiest when I can use apt for everything and have the OS manage dependencies and updates. I see a lot of negative comments about Flatpack and my experiences haven't been great, so I don't know if it is comprehensively good and will solve issues like low level drivers (GPUs).
• torginus 1y ago
  I approve of this - Linux distributions need to go and they needed to go about 20 years ago. They are the fundamental reason why Linux is not successful. Distributions are literally the worst thing about Linux - and by worst I really mean it in a way that is filled with the most amount of disgust and hate possible, like one feels toward a literal or social parasite. Linux distros provide little to no value (after all these people just package software), they are just vehicles for petty losers to build their own fiefdoms, where they can be rules. They are (and the people who run them) acid on the soul, they poison the spirit of openness and sharing, by controlling who gets to use what There existence was always political and the power they wielded over who gets to use and see your software was stomach-churningly disproportional to the value they provided. Much like petty internet forums with pathethic power tripping mods, a given linux distro's maintainers get to decide that you, the dear programmer, the actual creator of value, gets to have his work judged, and his right to deliver his software to users by a distro maintainer a petty tyrant who might not have the time or might have some weird mental hangup about shipping your software. And even if they do, they might fuck up your package and the distro-crafted bugs will reflect badly on you. I can shit on Microsoft and Apple all I want and it'll never impede my ability to deliver software to my users. This is why open source failed on the desktop, and why we have three orders of magnitude more open-source zealots, and ignorant believers than actual programmers who work on useful stuff. Why no one with actual self-respect actually builds software for the Linux desktop out of their own free will, and why garbage dumps and bugs and missing features persist for decades. Imagine the humiliating process it takes for a dev to ship a package on Linux - first you have to parlay with maintainers to actually include your stuff. Then they add a version that's at best half-year out of date to jive with their release cadence. You're forced to use their vendored and patched libraries which are made bespoke for their use cases, and get patched for the 5 apps that they care about, and can break your stuff at a drop of a hat. And no, you can't ship your own versions, because they'll insta reject your package. This is literal Windows 98 dll hell, but Microsoft was at least a for-profit company you could complain to and they actually had a financial stake in making sure users software worked. Not so with Linux distros, they just wanna be in charge and tell everyone what they get to use. Then you have First, Ubuntu and snap should burn in hell. Much like their other efforts, they made an universal system that's hated by everyone and used by no one except for them and they keep pushing it with their trademark dishonest tactics copied from other dishonest vendors, like even if you get rid of the excrement that is snap, they keep reinstalling it via updates. Flatpak was meant to work like a reasonable package manager would - you assume a stable OS base and demand and provide that, full stop. This is how Windows and Mac OS worked forever, and it doesn't even occur to devs that people using these OSes will have trouble running their software.
• foobarkey 1y ago
  Does it support Gnome?
• lloydatkinson 1y ago
  > I think all the major producers of free software desktop environments should have their own OS Absolutely insane suggestion.
• precompute 1y ago
  Not called "Kinux" or "Linuks" or something? Missed opportunity.
  • qiine 1y ago
    or kinos ;p
    • precompute 1y ago
      kOS!
• theanonymousone 1y ago
  Does immutability mean something like ChromeOS, where you cannot install packages on the system itself, but you can create containers on which you can freely install software, including GUI? If yes, what are some good options for someone looking for a replacement to ChromeOS Flex on an old but decent laptop?
  • amelius 1y ago
    I don't have good experiences with snap and flatpak, so I hope this is not it.
  • bmicraft 1y ago
    Yes, that's exactly what immutable means for Linux distros. Sometimes they're also called atomic for mostly the same reasons.
• skrebbel 1y ago
  I'm not a Linux user (yet) and I'd like to understand what "immutable" means here. Does it mean that I can't, eg, install Elixir or an IDE on it? I have absolutely no interest in deeply tuning the OS, which is why I'm interested here - I've been on Windows for decades for a reason. But if installing applications is blocked, or cumbersome, then who is this for?
  • tremon 1y ago
    It means the base system doesn't support individual package updates. Similar to a docker image, upgrading to the next version requires a complete base-image upgrade. In general, it shouldn't affect your ability to add additional software on top, but it may impact how you do so (e.g. Fedora Silverblue only allows Flatpak containers on top of the base OS).
  • Avshalom 1y ago
    Immutable here just means there is a base OS+libs that you don't touch. So now elixir or an ide would install in a sandbox with any needed libraries not included in that base instead of install all the libraries and stuff globally
    • skrebbel 1y ago
      So then if I do "mix deps.get" to fetch elixir libs, will that work? will it be able to compile files that are outside the sandbox?
      • Avshalom 1y ago
        if mix can work without sudo|root it will absolutely work in an "immutable distro" on the other hand: this particular immutable distro may not have all the c libraries BEAM/Elixir expect in that base and while SilverBlue does let you add to the base this doesn't sound like it will. So it might take some effort, hard to say at this point, though you can always add to your PATH
• amelius 1y ago
  Does it finally solve the package management problem?
  • lproven 1y ago
    Yes. The ChromeOS way. There's no package manager and you can't install, remove, or upgrade packages. You get whole-OS image updates from the distributor, just like iOS or Android.
    • amelius 1y ago
      But in Android/iOS you can install apps.
      • deafpolygon 1y ago
        The apps do not install or update any included libraries in the base image of the OS. It may rely on an specific or minimum version of the OS but that's it. Everything the software needs is installed into its own sandbox, and other applications cannot share it.
        • amelius 1y ago
          Ok. This makes me wonder: The original idea of shared libraries was that a computer system can save time and memory because they only need to be loaded once. Is that idea dead?
          • deafpolygon 1y ago
            If you want effective sandboxing, yeah.. pretty much. If no one can agree on which version of the library you're provided, then bring your own.
            • lproven 1y ago
              We should go back to static linking. With CI/CD generating new packages is trivially easy. Then we can throw out all these fancy packaging tools like Snap and Flatpak, all the fancy half-done COW filesystems like Btrfs, all the fancy hidden-delta-synching stuff like OStree, and just ship one honking great binary in a single file that works on anything, no matter what the libc so it even works on musl or whatever. Ha ha, only serious.
• tym0 1y ago
  I mean this is pretty much how people use MacOS: immutable base, individually packaged apps and brew on top for CLI things. Doesn't sound too bad for work.
• buster 1y ago
  The premise "we write software which is installed on operating systems, so we need our own operating system as well" doesn't make sense. Also the point that there are other operating systems like elementary or gnome OS out there is a moot point. At least for elementary OS i kind of get the promise of some high quality user experience focused MacOS competitor.. But KDE OS? Why should I not just install KDE on my distro? This distro doesn't seem to be born out of some real need for non-KDE-developers? Maybe it should be just some playground for KDE devs to test drive new tech?
  • sho_hn 1y ago
    > This distro doesn't seem to be born out of some real need for non-KDE-developers? It's born out of a few things: a) KDE as a community has increasingly focused on good and direct relations to end-users of late, which e.g. has resulted in most of the funding now coming from individual donors. Wanting to make more of their computer-using experience better isn't a strange impulse to have. b) The community has hardware partners (e.g. laptop makers) that want to collaborate on pre-installing something with a KDE-focused out of the box and user experience. That has so far been Neon, which has a number of engineering and stability issues that have been difficult to overcome. KDE Linux is an attempt to improve on that. c) It's also generally driven by a lot of the lessons learned from the SteamOS and Neon projects, and is attempting a lot of new solutions to risk-free updates and hackability, oob experience, and down the road likely also backups. The team does think there is a value prop to the distro as such beyond the KDE GUI. d) The developer audience isn't unimportant either. More KDE developers on an immutable+sandboxed apps distro will mean more eyeballs on e.g. Flatpak problems, improving that for everyone else. Many recent new distros that ship Plasma by default (e.g. SteamOS, Bazzite, CachyOS, etc.) benefit.
    • buster 1y ago
      So.. a) I get that a lot of users use KDE. And they love the Desktop Environment. But is there demand for an OS? Would those users switch? I hope so, but for such a big decision to build, support, maintain a whole OS, i'd expect some kind of poll maybe? Some input saying "30% of KDE users would switch to KDE OS"? Is there some kind of proof? I've been using Gnome OS for years but never felt i would want to switch to some Gnome OS. The Desktop Environment is one of many tools in my distro (for me, at least). b) Supporting lots of hardware (expecially Laptops!) seems to be a huge time sink for people not primarly involved in kernel/driver stuff, or not? c) ok.. d) Same as a): Will all KDE devs use KDE OS? And is it good to have the KDE Devs use KDE OS, when the majority of users use Arch/Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora? I'd rather have a good chunk of those devs use my distro...
• deafpolygon 1y ago
  KDE seems to be losing the plot here-- how does this help build the best possible DE for the community? I feel like they are fragmenting developer attention and time by futzing around with this. Meanwhile there are issues that haven't been solved for months; the latest Plasma version has barely any decent themes (the online community theme submissions seem to be wrought with spam), Discover is not really useful, needs curation, settings and configuration is everywhere to be found which is great for the average power-user, but hard to know what you can tweak without being overwhelmed. Flatpak is great, but really needs improving, more TLC and work towards cleaning up. It's looking more and more like the Android App Store every day. KDE needs to stop trying to be everything to everyone and start getting a little more opinionated. I'd rather have a few well maintained components of a DE than many components that are no better than barely polished turds. In any case, it's my favorite DE and each/every KDE developers are absolute legends in my mind.
  • sho_hn 1y ago
    > KDE seems to be losing the plot here-- how does this help build the best possible DE for the community? I feel like they are fragmenting developer attention and time by futzing around with this. A lot of the manpower working on this previously worked on KDE Neon, so it's perhaps better to think of it as a lessons-learned project that doesn't in fact do what you worry about (but it has already attracted new contribitors that also improve things elsewhere). KDE also does serve users (and hardware partners) with Neon that deserve improvement. There's also the fact that increasingly new users experience KDE software e.g. as Flatpaks on new distros that ship Plaama by default, e.g. Bazzite and CachyOS, and it makes sense to get more developer eyeballs on this to make sure it's a good experience.
• elAhmo 1y ago
  Oh yes, just what Linux needed, one more distribution. This will help accelerate year of the Linux desktop.
  • vascocosta 1y ago
    I agree with you in principle. However, this distro in particular makes use of an immutable base system, which although not new, is definitely not extremely common among Linux distros.
• vascocosta 1y ago
  Personally I'm interested in distros with an immutable base system. After decades of a lot of tinkering with all sorts of distros, I value a stable core more than anything else. If I want to tinker and/or install/compile packages I can do so in my $HOME folder. In fact, this is what I've been doing in other distros, like Debian stable, nevertheless I have no real control of the few updates to the base system with side effects. This is not the first immutable distro, but it comes from the people who develop my favourite desktop environment, so I'm tempted to give it a try. Especially as it looks more approachable than something like NixOS.
  • zozbot234 1y ago
    Aren't "immutable" distributions really just glorified "live CD's"? Not really seeing the point of them, tbh. It means that users will have to build a custom system image or fiddle with FS overlays just to do system management tasks that are straightforward on all other systems. The single interesting promise of "seamless" A/B updates is a vacuous one, that you could address more effectively on traditional systems by saving a temporary FS snapshot; this would even deduplicate shared data among the two installs, which is very hard to do with these self-contained images.
    • vascocosta 1y ago
      Or you can try to install whatever custom packages you need under $HOME, without the need for any special permissions or FS overlays? But yes, saving snapshots is also a good solution. I guess immutable distros such as this one target people who don't need much customisation and mostly just need what's already there anyway.
    • triknomeister 1y ago
      NO!!!! They are in practice more about keeping the core OS very small and stable and putting all packages outside.
    • mikae1 1y ago
      It has always been rather insane to me that user facing applications share packages with the base system. The atomic distro approach works a lot better for me. Would not go back to a "normal" distro from https://getaurora.dev https://getaurora.dev.
• ptrwis 1y ago
  For me it is natural that since the desktop environment is the most important part of the desktop operating system, it should have its own distribution.
• thomasvm 1y ago
  I use Arch, btw
• _benj 1y ago
  A few years ago I switched to KDE and the experience has been so absolutedly seamless and good, and the upgrade to Plasma 6 took some time to propagate down to distros it was well worth the wait! It seems to be that a project like KDE might be in a very good position to make a very competitive distro simply because they are starting from the point of the user experience, the UI if you will. Think M$ windows, it IS GUI, and fully focused on how the user would use it (I'm thinking the days of XP and Win 7). A KDE distro might be less encumbered with "X11 vs Wayland" or "flatpak vs <insert package manager name here>" discussions and can fully focus on the user experience that KDE/Plasma desktop brings! I'm looking forward to take this for a spin!
  • vascocosta 1y ago
    That's exactly what's compelling to me as well. As an absolute fan of KDE and all its features, as well as stability. Who better to seamlessly integrate everything around a KDE desktop than themselves? KDE neon had potential as well, but I really like the notion of an immutable base system and less surprises during an upgrade.
• darrmit 1y ago
  Immutable distros today feel like someone read a CNCF "best of" publication and decided to throw it at desktop Linux to see what sticks. Not everyone wants to be a DevOps engineer. I think the concept has promise (see: ChromeOS) but the execution today is still way too rough.
• curtisszmania 1y ago
  [dead]
• heavenlyhash 1y ago
  Ah, yes, the KDE people are definitely the people I trust most to deliver a reliable system and not go crazy chasing incongruent rewrites of things while abandoning what works... /s
• giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I could have sworn they have had this for a while... Nice that it is Arch Based, I wonder if they bothered to look at Arkane Linux which is also atomic, and the maintainer has all his scripts on how to do it available for anyone to make their own spin. I feel like it could have been beneficial for both KDE and the maintainer of Arkane Linux to work together.
• samiv 1y ago
  Will this help KDE-Plasma finally move from pre-alpha more towards something that can be used daily, or will we still need another decade or two ? Asking this as a user who really would love to move away from X11, but everytime I try anything Wayland related it's just alpha or pre-alpha, endless graphics glitches, windows going black or flickering, (double the glitches after turning display off/on),multiple rendering issues with Firefox, Clion etc.. I think I'm mentally preparing to use X11 until retirement.... The thing is the first 90% of software is the easy part. Once you've done that you still need to do the other 90%. And the latter 90% is what separates little hobbyist weekend projects from products. It's a relentless boring grind of testing, fixing bugs and sharp edges and adding workarounds.
  • messe 1y ago
    When did you last try it? It's been rock solid for me since Plasma 6, and I use things like fractional scaling.
    • samiv 1y ago
      A week ago, KDE-Plasma 6 whatever is the latest on Arch. Using NVIDIA proprietary.. glitching like MOFO. Looks slick but just way too buggy to be used. Some things to try: * Try turning your display on/off * Try using several virtual displays and spread graphics apps on each one (I use 4 normally) * Try opening 20 firefox windows with ~50 tabs each * Try opening a 8k png in firefox tab (or in some other image viewer) So yeah... pre-alpha. P.s. I also tried XFCE and Enlightenment.. and those are not any better (not that claim to be anything but pre-alpha). Honestly.. on Windows11 the experience is just so damn smooth and slick. Nothing glitches or hangs. The Linux graphics stack just lags behind decade after decade... never catches up...
      • messe 1y ago
        > Using NVIDIA proprietary Ah, I haven't tried it on NVIDIA drivers in a while. I'm doing a reinstall on my gaming PC soon, so I'll give it a shot then. I've been using it on Intel and AMD systems, and haven't had issues. But you know, they actually have drivers that are designed for the modern linux graphics stack. > P.s. I also tried XFCE and Enlightenment.. and those are not any better (not that claim to be anything but pre-alpha). So... maybe the NVIDIA drivers then? And not KDE Plasma? > The Linux graphics stack just lags behind decade after decade... never catches up... Come on, you can't really blame NVIDIA's dogshit drivers that refuse to integrate into the rest of the stack on the KDE devs.
• smm11 1y ago
  Let's just run Haiku OS.
• FortuneIIIPick 1y ago
  Arch based? No thanks. Flatpak? Definitely no thanks.
• superkuh 1y ago
  I wish them luck. But going waylands only instead of supporting X11 means they're throwing away all accessibility support that is integrated into all linux software. Their toy distro won't be ADA compliant and I certainly won't use it since it lacks screen reader support.
• pt_PT_guy 1y ago
  Why tf is kde spending precious developer capacity with this? Fedora atomic kde is close to perfect. Where is the need to reinvent the wheel?
• Jotalea 1y ago
  can't wait for Hyprland Linux