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Theme Radar

CartwheelLinux 2025-09-10 22:23 UTC link

Hey the reason behind my username!

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.

o11c 2025-09-10 22:50 UTC link

> 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.

CuriouslyC 2025-09-10 22:51 UTC link

A well maintained KDE Arch distribution sounds very nice. I love KDE and tolerate Kubuntu.

danudey 2025-09-10 23:00 UTC link

> 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.

diabllicseagull 2025-09-10 23:01 UTC link

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...

j1elo 2025-09-10 23:04 UTC link

> [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".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068400

derefr 2025-09-10 23:06 UTC link

> 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.

bobajeff 2025-09-10 23:12 UTC link

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.

blinkingled 2025-09-10 23:14 UTC link

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?

ashirviskas 2025-09-10 23:57 UTC link

> 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?

coffeecoders 2025-09-11 00:00 UTC link

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.

OsrsNeedsf2P 2025-09-11 00:38 UTC link

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.

gchamonlive 2025-09-11 01:15 UTC link

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.

theanonymousone 2025-09-11 07:56 UTC link

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?

skrebbel 2025-09-11 08:22 UTC link

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?

buster 2025-09-11 10:39 UTC link

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?

elAhmo 2025-09-11 10:52 UTC link

Oh yes, just what Linux needed, one more distribution. This will help accelerate year of the Linux desktop.

vascocosta 2025-09-11 11:16 UTC link

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.

_benj 2025-09-11 11:51 UTC link

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!

I'm looking forward to take this for a spin!

darrmit 2025-09-11 12:11 UTC link

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.

mintplant 2025-09-10 22:56 UTC link

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.

mintplant 2025-09-10 22:57 UTC link

What was Cartwheel Linux? A quick search doesn't turn up anything related.

zdragnar 2025-09-10 22:58 UTC link

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.

achierius 2025-09-10 23:00 UTC link

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.

sho_hn 2025-09-10 23:04 UTC link

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.

sgc 2025-09-10 23:11 UTC link

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.

spooneybarger 2025-09-10 23:22 UTC link

I never got neon to work in a way that wasn't unpleasant.

jorvi 2025-09-10 23:23 UTC link

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.

mappu 2025-09-10 23:30 UTC link

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.

eek2121 2025-09-10 23:35 UTC link

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.

pkulak 2025-09-10 23:43 UTC link

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.

zamadatix 2025-09-11 00:19 UTC link

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)?

ryao 2025-09-11 00:22 UTC link

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

chupasaurus 2025-09-11 00:27 UTC link

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

keyle 2025-09-11 00:39 UTC link

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.

rookderby 2025-09-11 00:43 UTC link

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.

zahlman 2025-09-11 00:56 UTC link

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?

nine_k 2025-09-11 01:02 UTC link

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

SbEpUBz2 2025-09-11 01:23 UTC link

GNOME maintains GNOME OS.

criddell 2025-09-11 01:31 UTC link

> OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation

To me, it seems like the opposite is true. Operating systems feel like a solved problem. What are some of the big innovations of recent times?

LelouBil 2025-09-11 02:18 UTC link

I find that I really like using an immutable distro with a custom image (built with github actions).

So I can really separate the system-level changes (in the image, version-controlled) from my user changes.

It's a nixos-like experience without using nix at all.

There have been a couple of things to have in mind, with my Bazzite installation, for creating users or adding groups for example, this pointed me to use systemd-sysusers but it was simple.

edoceo 2025-09-11 02:27 UTC link

Note: not Dolphin the GameCube+Wii emulator but Dolphin the file-browser/manager (a KDE native)

bee_rider 2025-09-11 02:30 UTC link

Has any distro ever promised that there are zero bugs in the software they use? I don’t particularly like Wayland but a lot of people have been using it for years at this point…

topspin 2025-09-11 02:55 UTC link

> Kubuntu

This is where I've been for the last 7 years. Very happy with it. I'm looking forward to an Arc Pro machine with SR-IOV GPU capability for VMs. That is pretty much my dream desktop, as much as I care to have one.

whatevaa 2025-09-11 04:12 UTC link

It's likely it's different people. It's volunteers mostly, they can do whatever they want.

kalaksi 2025-09-11 05:22 UTC link

On a desktop, I nowadays actually somewhat prioritize flatpaks. I can get recent versions, sandboxing and the configs and data are always in standard locations with predictable naming. They can be installed for user in home dir without root and are easy to move over in case of OS reinstalls.

IshKebab 2025-09-11 07:15 UTC link

They are both admitting that Flatpak gives a terrible user experience and making Flatpak the only way for users to install apps.

Strange design.

StopDisinfo910 2025-09-11 08:10 UTC link

Gnome has its own distribution called Gnome OS. It’s based on Fedora Rawhide.

It actually looks a lot what KDE is shipping here except Gnome provides it as a reference system for their developers at the moment but it’s totally usable as a user if you want to.

tremon 2025-09-11 08:28 UTC link

It means the base system doesn't support individual package updates. Similar to a docker image, upgrading to the next version requires a complete base-image upgrade. In general, it shouldn't affect your ability to add additional software on top, but it may impact how you do so (e.g. Fedora Silverblue only allows Flatpak containers on top of the base OS).

Avshalom 2025-09-11 08:36 UTC link

Immutable here just means there is a base OS+libs that you don't touch. So now elixir or an ide would install in a sandbox with any needed libraries not included in that base instead of install all the libraries and stuff globally

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