> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

    $ cat /etc/issue
    Antergos Linux \r (\l)

;-)

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.

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.

So not rolling? I too have never had to open Windows Task Manager on macOS.

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.

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.

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)

> [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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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’m in Arch and I generally struggle to get video acceleration in a browser with an Nvidia GPU.

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).

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 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)

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.

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.

> 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.)

> 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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.