> 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?
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".
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 $HOME folder.
In fact, this is what I've been doing in other distros, like Debian stable, nevertheless I have no real control of the few updates to the base system with side effects.
This is not the first immutable distro, but it comes from the people who develop my favourite desktop environment, so I'm tempted to give it a try. Especially as it looks more approachable than something like NixOS.
A few years ago I switched to KDE and the experience has been so absolutedly seamless and good, and the upgrade to Plasma 6 took some time to propagate down to distros it was well worth the wait!
It seems to be that a project like KDE might be in a very good position to make a very competitive distro simply because they are starting from the point of the user experience, the UI if you will. Think M$ 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!
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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'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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
KDE launches its own distribution
(lwn.net)666 points by Bogdanp 10 September 2025 | 518 comments
Comments
So it's basically a SteamOS sibling, just without Steam?
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
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.
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!
"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...
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.
GNOME doesn’t maintain Ubuntu or Fedora, but it still dominates the Linux desktop experience.
If yes, what are some good options for someone looking for a replacement to ChromeOS Flex on an old but decent laptop?
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 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.
Funny; sounds more like a BSD (a prebuilt single-artifact Arch "base system" + KDE Builder-based "ports collection") than a Linux.
I think the concept has promise (see: ChromeOS) but the execution today is still way too rough.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Fedora atomic kde is close to perfect. Where is the need to reinvent the wheel?
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.
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.
Nothing else compares. Why reinvent the wheel?
> 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.
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.
Doesn't sound too bad for work.
But hey, more power to them.
Will this impact me?
/s
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.
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
Absolutely insane suggestion.
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.