KDE launches its own distribution
64 comments
·September 10, 2025diabllicseagull
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...
sho_hn
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.
bobajeff
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.
jorvi
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.
thangalin
> 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)
glitchc
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.
mynegation
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.
Lex-2008
To be fair to Arch, you can always subscribe to their RSS or mailing list if you want to be notified about breaking changes
temp0826
I swore off arch when an update surprised me by switching to systemd (years ago obviously) and trashing my system in the process
pkulak
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.
spooneybarger
I never got neon to work in a way that wasn't unpleasant.
pharrington
Neon is explicitly a bleeding edge KDE testbed (but I'll agree that their website undersells this fact)
j1elo
> [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".
sgc
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.
coffeecoders
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
> GNOME doesn’t maintain Ubuntu or Fedora, but it still dominates the Linux desktop experience.
What's the difference for KDE in these 2 examples?
o11c
> 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.
mappu
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.
zdragnar
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.
therealfiona
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.
alabhyajindal
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
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).
eek2121
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.
vlovich123
I’m in Arch and I generally struggle to get video acceleration in a browser with an Nvidia GPU.
o11c
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).
Almondsetat
Are all X11 bugs fixed?
o11c
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.
jsheard
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).
bitwize
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.
danudey
> 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.
CuriouslyC
A well maintained KDE Arch distribution sounds very nice. I love KDE and tolerate Kubuntu.
mintplant
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
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.)
derefr
> 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.
blinkingled
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?
alabhyajindal
I love using KDE Plasma. All the best to the team!
eek2121
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
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."
> 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?