KDE developers have announced that you can now test KDE Linux, a completely new Linux distribution currently in a “pre-alpha” phase. It’s big news for KDE enthusiasts like myself, as it’s meant to be a pure KDE Plasma experience free from the meddling of third-party distro developers.
The new KDE Linux distro is available now for testing purposes from the official KDE Linux website. The distro previously has gone by the title “KDE OS” and by its fruity code name “Project Banana.” If you visit the install page, the developers report:
Currently the Testing edition is available, showcasing the latest and greatest in-development versions of KDE’s Plasma desktop environment and apps.
Expect frequent changes and regressions, and use it in a production environment at your own risk!
Other editions suitable for the general public are in progress.
This brand-spanking new distro is not meant to be a daily desktop driver for anyone, at least for now. The KDE team seems enthusiastic about it, though, with detailed FAQs, and multiple builds uploaded over past few days. It looks to me right now like a distro that won’t just spring up and fade into the ever-growing mass of Linux distributions like many that have come before it.
KDE Linux is not to be confused with KDE Neon or Kubuntu, both of which have existed for years as something akin to the default KDE Plasma distro. While Neon and Kubuntu both rely on Ubuntu as their package base, KDE Linux has its own package based that’s been derived from Arch Linux. It’s not technically an Arch distro, though. It doesn’t use the Pacman package manager, and like SteamOS and Fedora Silverblue, it has a read-only base system with “atomic updates,” making it an immutable Linux distro.
The wiki page reports that “OS updates are some degree of rolling; snapshot based releases with relatively recent libraries.” It sounds like packages are bleeding edge-ish, but perhaps not the newest you’d see on a full-blown rolling release distro like Garuda. Importantly, KDE Linux is available with Wayland only; X11 holdouts will have to pass on this one.
According to the developers, KDE Linux is meant to be a “reference implementation,” meaning it’s designed to give you the exact experience that KDE Plasma developers intend. It’s a KDE distro put together by the people developing KDE, without a third party in the middle making decisions about what to include and what to tweak.
If you’ve tested many Linux distros, you know that even if you choose only ones with a KDE desktop, the experience can vary quite a bit. In fact, I just installed the KDE edition of openSUSE Tumbleweed, and I was surprised by how many KDE apps and add-ons I had to manually install that on other distros came pre-packaged. Many distros ship with custom themes too, and I can tell you from first-hand experience those sometimes result in ugly and broken user interfaces on certain apps.
If you want to try KDE Linux yourself, get the newest RAW image from the KDE Linux download directory and follow the instructions on the KDE Linux installation page. The official site doesn’t mention how KDE Linux works in virtualized environments, so plan on making a bootable USB drive for a successful test.
Sources: OMG! Linux, KDE Linux, KDE Community Wiki
