KDE's 'Other' Distro - KDE Linux - Now Available To Download In Pre-Alpha

"KDE Linux is an all-new desktop Linux distro being developed as a showcase for the KDE desktop project," reports The Register.

"The project is still in a pre-alpha testing stage, but recently went public on the KDE website. Versions are available to download and try out." KDE Linux is an entirely new and experimental OS. There's lots of room for confusion here, because KDE already has a demonstration distro, KDE Neon. KDE Linux is a totally separate and far more ambitious project. In terms of its underlying design, it's intended to be a super-stable end-user distro. This is in contrast with Neon, which is an experimental showcase for the latest and greatest code. Neon isn't meant to be anyone's daily driver...

Several aspects of [KDE Linux's] design are clearly influenced by Valve's SteamOS 3. Like SteamOS 3, KDE Linux is an immutable distro, with dual read-only Btrfs-format root partitions that update each other alternately... KDE Linux isn't based on Ubuntu or Debian. It's built using Arch Linux, but it's different enough that it doesn't really count as an Arch variant. As an immutable distro, there's no package manager, for instance, so the user can't install Arch packages... You can only install sandboxed apps that go in their own corner of the OS, and here the plan is that users will install Flatpak (and possibly Snap, "if it's not too hard and the UX is OK") packages using the KDE Discover app store. Aside from them, you won't be able to update individual packages. OS updates come as a whole new system image, with all components updated at once.
"This is intended to one day be a bulletproof daily driver, not a demo system, which is the intended purpose of KDE Neon..." the article concludes.

And while their test of current work-in-progress/test version kept crashing, "the promise is considerable, and this could turn out to be one of the most radical end-user distros out there."

Thanks to Slashdot reader king*jojo for sharing the news.

flatpak issue with the pre "pre-alpha" release

[nickwinlund77]

I'm going to check out the pre-alpha release! I was having just one install problem:

My attempt at installing KDE Linux several days ago complained about a /system/@flatpak configuration that went awry. The read-only filesystem KDE Linux uses creates an interesting problem for the user if something internal is not working correctly during the Linux installation. I didn't know or couldn't understand how to take out entries that were using flatpak IN THE INSTALLER itself (likely due to the read-only filesystem). I was only able to somehow modify a *.conf file and doing this did nothing to fix the broken installer.

"You can only install sandboxed apps that go in their own corner of the OS, and here the plan is that users will install Flatpak (and possibly Snap, "if it's not too hard and the UX is OK") packages using the KDE Discover app"

Re:

[nickwinlund77]

Saw this on KDE Linux's webpage: "Lots of internal Plasma-aligned apps haven't been Flatpak'd yet (Icon Explorer, Emoji Picker, Info Center, etc) and should be."

This could mean that the installer is itself a Plasma-aligned app. Maybe that's why I encountered a fatal install error. I don't think it's my GPU because the system launches into desktop mode quickly.

I'm just a software progressive -- I don't work directly with KDE Linux's developers. I also won't tell -- or really push the envelope in any way. I'm

Re:

[allo]

I think what they want to do is to have arch + KDE on the immutable root and flatpak for installing programs. Flatpak programs can cleanly be deleted when something went wrong and the alternating roots are just not switched when the update failed, so both methods don't break things.
The weird thing is only, that the flatpak runtime is half of an Ubuntu system and doesn't use much of the host system at all. It also has some issues for sandboxed programs interacting with each other, which mostly come from the

What is the difference

[hcs_$reboot]

with Kubuntu?

Re:

[nickwinlund77]

One difference is that KDE Linux uses flatpak. It can take a bit of getting used to! I'm already learning how to use flatpak in place of apt.

Re:

[nickwinlund77]

I was unable to find Python 2.7 after running updates via flatpak, so I'm using Homebrew on my "pre pre-alpha" KDE Linux.

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

And in Kubuntu, you can go into the exact same KDE Discover app and install flatpak support. And then you have all the same flatpak stuff plus the same apt package management some of us have been using for 20 years.

It doesn't have to be either / or.

So Android, then

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

So KDE wants to get in on the walled garden money that Apple and Google are already dominating. I have enough problems with Flatpaks not running properly on distro where I can go in and patch the issues that this is a complete non-starter for me.

Re: So Android, then

[simlox]

KDE is not a company and won't force you into one appstore like Ubuntu tries with Snap. But compartmentisation with Flatpak or similar container-lite system is a really good idea security wise. And also for stabilitet and easy distribution because those apps are not linked with system libraries and runtime.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

It's really not that much like Android. Not even all Android devices have an A/B system, although they probably should. For the devices which don't, the system is mutable if you have root access. Also, Android has its own unique display server system. This doesn't.

Re:

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

Fair enough. I've definitely done an A/B setup manually for significant upgrades, and it has saved me a lot of headaches. I don't see anything that indicates whether root would be available out of the box; that is a wait and see. I would expect the display system to be Wayland, so nothing magical there.

Access to both Flatpak and Snap would leave a wide selection of OSS available. I'm not a fan of either in their current form, I've run into too many issues with both - mostly due to assumptions made by the pa

Re:

[drinkypoo]

I am sympathetic to both the just-want-it-to-work view and the want-to-customize-all-the-things view.

I just built new kernels for my Devuan systems (one on daedalus, the other on excalibur) so clearly I like to customize. But I would rather have someone else do it and I'm only doing it because even excalibur's kernel is too old to have the features I want at the moment. I had a boot error with Debian which I couldn't conveniently troubleshoot because of systemd, which is the only reason I even installed Dev

Re:

[scalptalc]

I don't see any reason you couldn't make deep system changes on a system with an A/B setup though, and in fact it should make it less risky to do so.

Maybe you could even set up an A/B/C system... where C was testing

Imagine, you can do that now. You could have been doing that for quite a while using, at least, FreeBSD, or one of the OSes based on Illumos, and all supporting Boot Environments. The only thing stopping you is the price of a cheap "disk" and your own ossification. So you "like to customize", so try it. The water's fine.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

I have literally no reason to run FreeBSD, the also-ran of Desktop Unix.

I had history with SunOS and Xenix when I tried to install FreeBSD the first time around. At the time, there was no meaningful install documentation, and my attempts to get assistance from the community were met with noob mockery.

I installed Slackware with zero assistance and zero problems and have never felt a need to look back, and I doubt I ever will.

1999 Called...

[Joz]

I remember this being the rumor back then when KDE was about to take over not only Linux first, but then all of desktop computing.

Will this support AppImage?

[Schoenlepel]

My favorite application is either an AppImage or a .deb. As this doesn't have a regular package manager, I hope this will support AppImages.

Re:

[nickwinlund77]

Incidentally, the pre "pre-alpha" releases of KDELinux are available only in raw (not ISO) format, and so one has to use an AppImage program called KDE ISO Image Writer on another Linux machine or your other Windows machine to burn the *.raw KDELinux installation image to your USB thumb drive.

why?

[Espectr0]

why spend resources on this? just grab one or two well established desktop distros, and ensure your packages work as good as possible. leave the distro itself up to the distro teams.

for good or worse, this means ubuntu. i have used arch before and i really like it, but it's not meant to be for the average user (if there's such a thing with linux)

Re:

[ahoffer0]

Immutable distros are the hot new thing. What next? Maybe immutable containers? And users interact with a container a manager instead of interacting with an OS?

Re:

[allo]

That's KDE neon. Ubuntu LTS + official KDE packages.

Re:

[test321]

why spend resources on this? [...] Leave the distro itself up to the distro teams.

The very idea of this distro is that it uses very little resources. Typical distros spend their efforts in packaging. KDE Linux only manages an infrastructure, the distro works on its own with packages and bug reports managed upstream.

Offtopic

[willoughby]

Debian 13 Trixie released today.

Thanks, Debian people.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Exciting. Now Excalibur can get finalized :)

Thanks to both the Debian and the Devuan people.

I've got Excalibur on an AMD MiniPC with Kernel 6.14.11 and it's working very well.

Not that new

[RUs1729]

It is, like the vast majority of Linux distributions, just one of the few major ones with added eye candy, and not much more. It is beyond me why so many out there seem to be so keen on having their "own" Linux distribution.

Stopped reading at..

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

..there's no package manager...

Sorry kiddies, it's not a distro.

Neon is actually my daily driver

[insurgioFather]

Neon is actually my daily driver has been for years. I'd recommend zfs (btrfs with the windows driver if you dual boot). Major distro versions sometimes get wacky bugs buy usually it's fine

Re: Neon is actually my daily driver

[insurgioFather]

I do wanna check this distro out though.