KDE launches its own distribution

Sounds like a good distro to use with your parents and grand parents, if they're not solely using iPads...

That might be their target audience.

What appeals to me about linux is the hackability and configurability. This takes it all away in some way, but that's not to say that they won't find a market for it.

If a distribution is immutable (and thus omits the package manager) and pre-configured for a specific purpose (here, ensuring that KDE works), how much does the base really matter?

It sounds like how ChromeOS is Gentoo based but does not ship the package manager.

But without the steam side

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.

This definitely looks like a system intended to be configured by an administrator, not the user. It shouts "secure office use", much like Silvetblue.

Flatpak works pretty well. I try to prioritize my distribution's repositories but some software is not packaged. I've taken the easy way out and installed the flatpak. I guess I could go and package them, but I've been too lazy so far.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are all X11 bugs fixed?

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.

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.

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

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.

The article already talks about Neon and the pros/cons of running that kind of distro in more detail than pointed out here.

> GNOME doesn’t maintain Ubuntu or Fedora

What differentiates GNOME from KDE in that regard (other than it'd be Kubuntu and the Fedora KDE spin from the other perspective)?

Fedora is a side gig for GNOME maintainers, same as Neon for KDE (:

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.

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.

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/

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.

> 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.

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.

I did not realize anyone outside of Ubuntu used snap. When I was on Ubuntu, I had many annoyances with snap, but not sure if they have since improved the experience.

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.

> find Debian Testing good enough for latest KDE Plasma

Latest as in "lagging for weeks while people in Ubuntu eat the bugs".

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.

Pretty sure you're talking about ChromeOS