KDE Launches Its Own Linux Distribution (Again) By Joe Brockmeier, September 10, 2025 At Akademy 2025, the KDE Project released an alpha version of KDE Linux, a new distribution aiming to provide an operating system featuring the best KDE technologies. It targets home users, businesses, OEMs, and more, though it currently has many rough edges. --- Development and Goals Introduced as “Project Banana” by Harald Sitter in 2024 Akademy. Developed by a team including Nate Graham, Harald Sitter, Hadi Chokr, Lasath Fernando, and others. Built as an immutable distribution using Arch Linux packages for the base but excludes pacman. Software is either compiled from source using KDE Builder or installed via Flatpak. Seeks to provide KDE developers with their own platform to distribute their software, inspired by projects like Linux Mint, ElementaryOS, and GNOME’s OS efforts. KDE Linux is a successor (or complement) to KDE neon, which is currently maintained by a single volunteer and limited by its Ubuntu LTS base. --- Architecture and Plans KDE Linux is a greenfield project designed to use modern technologies unrestricted by legacy compatibility concerns. It is Wayland-only (no X.org session), supports UEFI systems only, and requires manual configuration for some older NVIDIA cards. The root filesystem ( / ) uses read/write Btrfs, while /usr uses a read-only Enhanced Read-Only File System (EROFS), backed by a single file. Updates are atomic, swapping out the EROFS volume, caching up to five previous images for rollback. Uses systemd-sysupdate internally but lacks delta update support yet. Requires significant disk space (e.g., 30GB+) for caching multiple system images. Users cannot add packages to the base system; additional software comes via Flatpak or Snap (Snap is not integrated with Discover yet). Includes Distrobox (containerized environments), though Podman (which Distrobox depends on) has setup issues currently. System and Flatpak app updates are managed through KDE's Discover or command line (sudo updatectl update). Default install includes KDE applications (Gwenview, Okular, Haruna, Kate, Konsole) plus Firefox. Base system utilities include Bash 5.3.3, curl, Linux 6.16.5, GCC 15.2.1, Perl, Python 3.13.7, Vim 9.1, wget. Does not currently include commonly expected utilities like GNU Screen, Emacs, tmux, pip, or alternative shells like Fish. Custom images can be built using mkosi, the same tool used by the developers. --- Development Roadmap Three planned editions: Testing edition: Daily builds from Git for developers/QA; current release. Enthusiast edition: Beta or released software for KDE enthusiasts and power users. Stable edition: Only released software meeting quality metrics. Installation options: bare metal or virtual machine (using virt-manager). UEFI Secure Boot support is missing. Disk provisioning for virtual machines should consider the large cached image size (recommend 50-75 GB). Plans to move away from Arch User Repository (AUR) packages to official KDE infrastructure. No current security announcement mailing list; users should monitor Arch and KDE security advisories. Security updates will lag as they depend on Arch package updates and KDE rebuilds (~1 day delay expected). Absence of a package manager limits ability to query installed software. Governance follows a “Council of elders” model with Harald Sitter as final arbiter. --- Challenges and Philosophy KDE Linux embraces the developers' desire to ship software directly to users without intermediaries. The distribution may demonstrate the complexity involved in maintaining a modern desktop operating system. The project has an end-of-life plan in which a final update would convert KDE Linux into another distro, chosen based on compatibility and relationships.