KDE Linux hits alpha—ready for developers and power users, but ordinary Linux fans should hold off for now. What’s it is, what’s it isn’t, and why it matters.
Today at Akademy — KDE’s annual community conference, held this year in Berlin — the alpha release of KDE Linux was announced. This marks the project’s long-awaited entry into immutable Linux space.
If you’re a little confused because you think of KDE as a desktop environment — or that its Linux distro is Neon — I’ll explain it to you.
KDE e.V., the Berlin-based nonprofit in charge of KDE is most well known for its eponymous Linux desktop environment, as well as its related software stack, which it’s been developing and maintaining for nearly 30 years. In addition, since 2016 the organization has also released KDE Neon, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution purposed to showcase KDE and serve as a benchmark for other KDE-based distros.
Last September at Akademy 2024 in Würzburg, Germany, KDE announced “Project Banana,” an initiative to develop a new Linux distribution distinct from KDE Neon and based on Arch Linux and the Btrfs file system. It would be aimed at delivering an official upstream reference platform for KDE developers. The operating system would be immutable and atomic, meaning that everything except the home directory would be read only and that all system updates would be to the entire system instead of piecemeal.
In October, the Project Banana moniker was dropped for KDE Linux, the name that’s been used since. In August it reached its pre-alpha testing stage and became available for public download and experimentation. Then today at Akademy there was the announcement of the distro’s alpha release — a major milestone for any project, doubly so for one approaching its first stable release.
KDE Linux’s Long Road Forward
Today’s news doesn’t mean that a stable release for everyday Linux users is just around the corner, however — not by a long shot.
In the embargoed press release that KDE issued a few days ago in advance of today’s announcement, the organization cautioned:
This release is aimed at testers, developers, contributors, early adopters, and tech journalists. It is not ready for end users or production usage.
The fact is, at this stage of the game not only is the distro not ready to use to store the only copy you have of your last will and testament, you might even have trouble getting it to install at all, as developers grapple with a long list of components that are far from ready for prime time.
A wiki page that KDE has published on the project admits that “some things don’t work well yet” and presents an abridged list of “notable examples”:
- Secure Boot isn’t yet supported.
- The QA & testing infrastructure needs more thoroughness and automation. Until then, expect some bad builds from time to time that you’ll need to roll back.
- NVIDIA GPUs older than the GTX 1630 require manual work to use.
- Disk monitoring in System Monitor + widgets doesn’t work.
- KDE apps in Flatpaks have rough edges.
- Some scanners are not visible from Flatpak apps.
- System updates are huge because we ship a whole new OS image, and delta updates haven’t been implemented in Systemd yet. A bespoke delta updating system is in progress.
- Using Discover to update the system and install large Flatpaks has rough edges.
- The developer story for working on frameworks and libraries used in Flatpak apps is somewhere between “painful” and “non-existent”.
- Thus far, only a handful of KDE contributors have been using and testing KDE Linux, so there may be other significant issues.
If you’re new to open source, that last item is probably more important than you think, as it’s the reason why, in spite of all that’s broken right now, it won’t take years to get this project ready for it’s stable release.
Now that this alpha release is publicly available there will be a lot more eyes on the code, and a lot more hackers taking it apart and putting it back again. That means they’ll be finding and fixing more bugs. In other words: many eyes, many minds, and many hands will now be getting the code ready for its first numbered release.
There’s still a bit of road ahead, but prime time is probably not that far away.
KDE Linux’s Future
So, what does all this mean for the everyday Linux user?
If you’re not a developer — or a software vendor — even after this distro gets to the 1.0 release, KDE Linux is not what you’re going to use to play on Facebook, check your email, or write letters to send by snail mail if you still do such things. You might put the distro on an old machine in a closet to run as a server to supply your TV with streaming content or to host your own website, but it’s probably not going to be your go to daily driver for everyday desktop use. From where I sit, it’s not even being designed for that.
This is not to say that it will never be your daily driver, but that’s not the purpose KDE is targeting for now.
For the time being, this distro is basically being designed for KDE developers to use as a platform for developing both the core KDE DE, and the myriad assortment of apps that are designed to support it. The result of this should be a KDE desktop that is even more stable than the versions in production today.
I’ve seen no timelines yet as to when we’ll see a beta, or release candidates, or a stable numbered release. My guess is that long before then, KDE devs will be using it, not only for the DE, but to work on Neon.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Be First to Comment