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Sunday, 14 September 2025

Despite the lack of posts (which we apologise for) the builds have continued to happen on the neon build servers. Packages for Plasma 6.4.5, coupled with KDE frameworks 6.18, and KDE release service 25.08.1 built on top of Qt 6.9.2 have just been released to the neon user archives. Live Image ISO’s and containers are available for download from the usual location.

The builds will continue to happen for the foreseeable future and hope that everyone enjoys the latest and greatest KDE created software, if that’s your cup of tea. 😉

Saturday, 13 September 2025

This year’s Akademy was in Berlin at the Technical University of Berlin. The experience, as usual, was amazing. Unlike in previous years, there was a huge emphasis on styling, unification, and graphical work. This whole wave of talks was invigorating.

As a side note, this year our A/V was vastly improved and this should make it much easier for our contributors and viewers online to see and understand what we did. As part of the organization, I will help process these recordings and make sure they are awesome.

Once again I spoke on the progress with the design system. This year’s talk focused on our progress on icons. Definitively, one of the lengthiest pieces of work coming from the Foundations portion of the design system.

In addition to speaking on these topics, I shared the newly created (and definitively experimental) Ocean color scheme, light/dark, Ocean Plasma Style, and Ocean icon pack. In case you missed these assets, here you go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oLVq0SViOFB6lur3qn0bwV7_gHzqu2KM/view?usp=sharing

One thing to note, and after much discussion during Akademy, we have aligned more properly on the way that we should work in light of the addition of the design system.

In our current process, we use GIT as the source for our icons. Anyone can download and apply the icons on their Plasma system. However, this process is not quite geared toward designers. After all, all icons located in the repo are exported icons. They are one-layer graphics that only function with node work. If a designer needed to work with these assets, they would have to likely recreate them to gain the appropriate shape control needed to make desired changes.

This leads to overhead work and style inconsistencies. Above all, it leads to a state where the real source of the icon doesn’t exist unless we dig through each individual computer where the icon was developed.

With the use of applications like PenPot or Figma, that question is resolved. Users are able to download an asset library owned by the design team at Plasma. The source is protected but it’s also distributed in away that doesn’t affect the master copies. If changes are needed, change requests can be submitted to master and the design team can decide to apply those changes or not.

Effectively, this means a change in the way that icons are stored. Moving the work from Git to PenPot/Figma seems like the best choice.

This requires communication, habit changes, risk management, etc. While I am speaking of this right now, we are “not” changing our current process to obtain Breeze icons from its repo. However, it means more information will come in the future as we develop a more effective way to work with a design system.

I am so excited to see the progress done in Union, and even more excited to start passing on design system components into Union to see how they fare against the newly created engine. Union is also under heavy development. I encourage you to watch Arjen Hiemstra’s presentation at Akademy when it’s published.

When this happens, this would be the second set of graphical controls that are executed via Union. I am sure many challenges lay ahead but I feel energized by it. I am sure we are on our way to resolving long-standing design and development issues that have slowed us down.

As a result of this year’s Akademy, I created a set of action items for myself that I have to review to be able to continue. One major item for me is to develop our master component source in PenPot. Even though Ocean icons are not 100% executable in PenPot, other assets like buttons, sliders, progress bars, inputs, etc are executable. I will dedicate the time to create these items and leave Figma for components behind, shedding also any legacy branding coming from the design system sources and only focusing on what we need for Ocean styles.

With that, Akademy has been a thrill. I go home energized and happy for what we have accomplished. All this while keeping a vibrant community and a vibrant free desktop system for all Linux users.

Once again, all KDE nerds had their yearly gathering around somewhere in the world. We call this gathering Akademy and this year it was in Berlin.

I don't really have anything in-depth to share, except for my first talk I had. I spent a lot of time listening to talks and chilling at BoFs. Since I was with my wife, we also went around Berlin looking for fun things, such as the Aquarium at the zoo.

TL;DR: I don't remember much, but I had a lot of fun and I had my first talk!

Day 1

We arrived around ~13.00 at Berlin airport and spent some time getting to our hotel. After a good nap, we went to the welcome event, where I had a nice hotdog and chatted with various folks.

It was a bit of a blur, I was so sleepy. But I do remember having fun.

Also I was super happy that our planes were finally on time this year, unlike last time...

Day 2

I arrived to Akademy venue around 9:30 and spent the whole day going to talks and taking notes of said talks. I will share those notes later in the post.

I also had a lot of discussions with other KDE devs about Union and the like.

Day 3

I spent so much time just being anxious about my talk, so that I don't remember much else.

I have embedded the talk in here.

Here's also a link to the talk: Youtube link.

I rushed the talk a bit due to worrying it would take too long, I tend to go "hummmm" a lot.. So I forgot to mention two bits:

  • The cosplay in the intro slide is what I wish I wore for the talk.. :D
  • We should warn newcomers about any of the possible negativity their contributions may gather.

Other than that, it went fine I think.

Later in the evening we visited c-base and it was really cool looking hackerspace. Though I was already out of any energy at that point, we left a bit early.

My Akademy Notes file

Here's a link to the notes, excuse my bad handwriting: Akademy 2025 notes.pdf

Day 4

First we went to the aquarium, which was fun. We saw very cool sharks and other huge fish there. I did not even know Koi fish could grow that big. We also saw a lot of different lizards, toads and insects. I tried my best to befriend the iguana in there... But I don't think they spoke Finnish.

Me chatting to an iguana

We then also had a korean sandwich, I bought myself a pair of new cool pants and we visited a Lego store.

Later in the evening, I went to a dinner with my coworkers, which was really fun.

Day 5

Went to more Akademy BoFs. One of the more interesting ones was the BoF around KDE Linux so we chatted about it and any related issues with it.

I also went to a BoF around KIO + Sandboxing, to see what we can do to make tools that depend on KIO work better in sandboxed environment, such as Flatpaks.

Sadly I don't have much notes from either, since they were rather speedy and I missed parts of them all because I was busy tinkering on my KomoDo app.

Day 6

On the last day, we had a scavenger hunt in the morning and then went to a game museum. I was so exhausted that I couldn't even think of walking around Berlin anymore, so I just joined the game museum part. It was rather cool and I spent some time playing various arcade games they had set up.

There was also some "PainGame" that was basically pong but with pickups that would cause actual pain to the other player. The players had to hold their hand on some panel that would heat up, cause electric shocks and whip the hand with some plastic bit.

Well I tried it and pulled my hand off the moment I felt it heating up. I already had enough anxiety at the moment, didn't need to contribute more to it.

After a pizza at a nice little pizza place, we went back to hotel and slept.

The next morning we went to a plane at 5 am and were soon back home.

Ramblings and thoughts

Berlin is not a good place for me to go to. It's very loud, uh.. fragrant and there's a lot of things moving constantly.

My nerves were constantly shot. I kept constantly looking around for bad shit to happen, I could not relax at all. I managed to mask it to the best of my abilities, but that just drained me further.

So, uh, sorry anyone who thought I was rather hard to approach. I was just constantly anxious. Akademy itself was really nice and people there were really friendly and fun, but Berlin just was too much for me.

I also really enjoyed every single talk and BoF I went to!

I just can't deal with big cities well, I suppose. Next year I will have to limit the time I'm traveling, preferably ~4 days or so. Anything more is out of my limits.

Still, looking forward to where it will be next year. :)

Thanks for reading, I know there wasn't much actual knowledge in this blogpost, but maybe you liked my talk and/or my notes.

Friday, 12 September 2025

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-37.


🇪🇺YES: Germany is not supporting ChatControl

Tags: tech, surveillance, politics

Se might have dodged a bullet here… Until next time. Thanks to the coalition of countries which opposed this bill.

https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/115184350819592476


How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

Tags: tech, wikipedia, knowledge, processes, culture, community, bias

Very nice article on the Wikipedia success. Or why being boring and the ultimate process pettiness became the crucial part of the formula. This community really developed a fascinating culture which so far resists to mounting political pressure… But will the editors morale hold?

https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales


The SIFT Method - Evaluating Resources and Misinformation

Tags: tech, fake-news, information

Nice and to the point little guide on how to evaluate source of information.

https://guides.lib.uchicago.edu/c.php?g=1241077&p=9082322


A Secret Web

Tags: tech, web, search, blog

This is nice to see the energy still bubbling in the traditional web. It’s still there, next to the big mall pushed by search engines. You just need to know where to look and it’s not that hard.

https://blog.clew.se/posts/secret-web/


E-Paper Display Refresh Rate Reaches New Heights

Tags: tech, e-ink

Clearly that’s interesting progress around this kind of display. This should make it easier to create devices using them going forward.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/e-paper-display-modos


AI Darwin Awards 2025 - Celebrating Spectacularly Bad AI Decisions

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, funny

OK, this is an interesting way for the Darwin Award to branch. Some of the 2025 nominees are indeed funny. Now I wonder which ones will win the award!

https://aidarwinawards.org/


We all dodged a bullet

Tags: tech, dependencies, supply-chain, security

It’s indeed surprising that this compromised npm account didn’t lead to more damage. It’s a good reminder that you better regularly audit what happens in your ecosystem.

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/we-dodged-a-bullet/


ServerlessHorrors

Tags: tech, infrastructure, cloud

Want to scare yourself with what might happen when you completely let go of your infrastructure? Here is an aggregator for that.

https://serverlesshorrors.com/


term.everything: Run any GUI app in the terminal❗

Tags: tech, command-line, gui, wayland, funny

Very fun an impressive experiment of making a Wayland compositor rendering in the terminal with surprising refinements. Now it feels totally useless too of course.

https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything


All You Need Is SSH

Tags: tech, tools, ssh, infrastructure, complexity

And a bunch of tool to use with it… But you can indeed do a lot with just SSH. This post gives a few good ideas.

https://wrongthink.link/posts/all-you-need-is-ssh/


C++26: erroneous behaviour

Tags: tech, c++, safety

C++26 really looks like a step in the right direction in term of safety. Undefined behaviours are too often neglected in that conversation.

https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2025/02/05/cpp26-erroneous-behaviour


Batched Critical Sections

Tags: tech, multithreading, performance

A few ideas to dig deeper into for better multi threaded throughput.

https://kprotty.me/2025/09/08/batched-critical-sections.html


Use singular nouns for database table names

Tags: tech, databases

Maybe time to change habits on table naming? I’m still on the fence myself but there are interesting arguments there.

https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/use-singular-nouns-for-database-table-names.html


Many Hard Leetcode Problems are Easy Constraint Problems

Tags: tech, algorithm, constraint-solving

Or how a problem is represented matters a lot. Going for a constraint solver might be what you want sometimes.

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/many-hard-leetcode-problems-are-easy-constraint/


Liquid Glass in the Browser: Refraction with CSS and SVG

Tags: tech, graphics, web, css, svg, physics, ux

I think this effect is a usability nightmare. That said it’s interesting to see which CSS and SVG tricks can be used to simulate it. This opens the door to other effects.

https://kube.io/blog/liquid-glass-css-svg/


Is It the People or the System?

Tags: management, system

It is indeed often the system. Now what the article is not talking about is that sometimes people do everything they can so that the system doesn’t change.

https://managementblog.org/2025/08/27/is-it-the-people-or-the-system/



Bye for now!

Thursday, 11 September 2025

Since the ninth of October 2025’s “Big Tent” comments by frame.work about how they don’t care whether the people they sponsor are racist and transphobic, my happiness with my 12 has dropped below zero. Don’t buy frame.work, people.

https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986/2

Since 2023 my laptop situation has been pretty awful… I had two laptops (okay, I admit, that doesn’t sound that awful), a Windows Lenovo Yoga laptop and an Apple Macbook Pro. Powerful machines, of course, but the Yoga has a ghastly keyboard that’s that prone to double registering single keypresses, and way worse touchpad. The touchpad was so bad that the touch screen was really necessary. The Macbook Pro is fast, has nice hardware, a nice screen (no touch, though…) but: it runs MacOS. And the Yoga runs Windows. First 11, now 10, because 11 is torture.

Also… The Yoga is my Windows Krita dev and test device, the Macbook is my macOS dev and test device.

I wanted a laptop for myself. For watching videos, doing some sketching, writing RPG write-ups, managing my own stuff.

So, when Framework announced the Framework 12 I started getting interested: small, cute, colorful, not a build system powerhouse, but nice enough specs, touch screen, pen enabled, enough memory possible. And cute. I pre-ordered on, in bubble-gum with a lavender keyboard. Yeah, it clashes. I love it, it’s so colorful. I also knew I would love the upgradability, repairability, extensibility, and the looks. ‘Cause it’s cute.

Photo of the motherboard of the framework laptop. All components are labeled and there are qr codes to lead you to more information.

Some months after ordering, it arrived, last Monday. I was in hospital, after getting my SRS operation (succesful, recovery is going better than expected!), but today, I was home, and even groggy from recovery, I managed to put it together and install KDE Neon on it. It’s that easy to assemble the colorful, cute self-assembly version of the Framework 12. Fun, too.

And when I was installing Neon (I might switch later on, I don’t need to be too stable here, this one is mine, and it’s for fun!) I noticed something.

Something weird and unexpected.

The keyboard really is GOOD. It’s got good travel, it feels good, it invites typing. They keys have the right texture, and so has the palm rest. It’s the best laptop keyboard I’ve used in ages, and yes, that includes the Macbook Pro M2. If only for the keyboard, I’d buy it again.

The touchpad, too. Colorful, clearly demarcated from the palm rest, giving good feedback — it’s in every way that counts better than the Yoga’s touchpad. And there’s still a touch screen for when my four year trained reflexes take over. The screen is bright, clear and sharp. The resolution isn’t the highest, but then, this is 12″, so it is fine.

The plastic casing feels very solid, too. Sure, it’s not thin enough to shave with, like the Yoga or a Macbook Air, but then, I’ve already had laser treatment, so shavability isn’t an issue anymore.

Such a relief from all the black and grey hardware that has been surrounding me for years.

Photo of a round table. The table is covered with glass; underneath the glass is woven wickerwork. On the table, in the middle is the bubblegum pink framework laptop. Around the laptop are mostly black, sometimes gray tablets, e-readers and laptops.

The Ars Technica reviewer said “Sure, it’s cute and functional, but for the money you can get better specs”. Look… “Cute and functional” is a unique selling point if there’s ever one: is there any other laptop on the market that provides that? Better specs might mean faster whatever, but… It is perfectly functional. And cute, that too.

Joe Brokmeier’s review on Linux Weekly News was much closer to my opinion than the Ars review. He choose sage green, which is also quite delectable a colour.

Functional — it does everything I need now, and there’s already a CPU upgrade coming that I could install myself, if I wanted to.

Cute — I ordered a bunch of USB C modules so I can swap out colors according to my mood, too.

Halla is happy now!

The big picture matters! Based on popular requests, we are adding support to deliver additional context from the active project to the LLM.

Becoming the official Maintainer of Clazy

During this year’s Akademy in Berlin, I gave a talk about the awesome features & usecases of Clazy. Afterwards, I also talked with Ivan Čukić and the topic of maintainership. Sérgio Martins was the original author and long time maintainer. Ivan took over the role for a while, but since I became quite active in the project, he thought it would be a good idea for me to be the official maintainer.

I am very honored that he transferred maintainership of Clazy to me. I’ll do my best to continue pushing the project forward. Also thanks to Sérgio and Ivan for their previous work and KDAB for supporting it. Also thanks to all the other people who have contributed so far!

In case you want to get started in Clazy development, your contributions are welcome! Feel free to reach out to me if you have issues with getting started :)

Tuesday, 9 September 2025

I’ve just returned from this year’s Akademy in Berlin. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the entire conference that is still ongoing but the weekend of talks and welcome and social events have been magnificent. I’ve also meet a couple of fellow KDE hackers that I haven’t seen in a decade.

A view into an atrium with glass ceiling, marble columns, on three floors, a statue below
Lichthof at TU Berlin, just outside our conference rooms

Friday afternoon I arrived at Berlin Hauptbahnhof on an ICE that was, I kid you not, punctual to the minute. That of course meant there wasn’t much interesting to collect for KDE Itinerary. Nevertheless, I took an ODEG regional train to the hotel and tried to gather as much data from its onboard Wifi portal as I could from my phone between Hauptbahnhof and Alexanderplatz. Turns out: they use GraphQL for their live status website. While KPublicTransport has facilities for GraphQL, any other operator we support just polls a URL that yields a JSON feed. Therefore, a lot more work and testing is needed in order to support ODEG in KDE Itinerary’s live status page.

The welcome event at Schleusenkrug was fun and the weather was a lot better than anticipated. I was very glad I did pack a pair of shorts after all! Saturday the conference started with an interesting keynote on digital sovereignty. As always it was quite difficult to choose which of the parallel tracks to attend. I enjoyed Saturday’s “Lessons Learned” presentation on Plasma. Next, I was skeptical about the use of CSS in the Union styling effort (particular with me having had to deal with Qt CSS in Qt Widgets and GTK 3 CSS lately) but the current state looks fairly promising. The lightning talks on KPublicAlerts and Clazy were another personal highlight.

Edit Hotel Reservation page, edit fields for check in and check out time and date. Below, a description field with "Room 123" and "Door Code 123456" pointed at by the mouse cursor
Don’t forget your room number with Itinerary

During every conference, there’s some real world improvements to be made in our software stack. For instance, annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t just right-click a Wifi network in order to change its settings, I added functionality in ExpandableListItem to also show its expandable actions in a context menu. There was also an issue with the network connectivity monitor (what tells you that you need to log into a captive portal) sending spurious notifications about limited connectivity when in fact it was just losing connection before the laptop went to sleep. Finally, KDE Itinerary now lets you add a description to a hotel reservation so you can note down your room number and/or door key code. Unfortunately, Schema.org has no dedicated fields for that yet.

Sunday, I attended a talk on how to deal with negative feedback. I think many of us have unfortunately been in the situation where we were proud about a change or feature we made and then were almost burnt out by negative feedback and harassment on the internet. Another important presentation put emphasis on the fact that maintainers don’t grow on trees and how to make sure a project remains alive even when the original author had to move on with life. This evening’s social event took place at c-base. It’s a hacker space that cosplays as a fictional crashed space station. How cool is that?! While we were down low near the Spree, I could still grab a glimpse of the lunar eclipse that happened that evening. I hope you could, too.

On Monday, I made my way back home. Thanks to everyone involved in organizing this conference and the sponsors to make this event happen! I am looking forward to seeing you all again soon!

Saturday, 6 September 2025

This year, 2025, the KDE Community held its yearly conference in Berlin, Germany. On the way I reinstalled FreeBSD on my Frame.work 13 laptop in another attempt to get KDE Plasma 6 Wayland working. Short story: yes, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD works.

This time I followed the instructions from thesaigoneer on Codeberg. It did not feel different from any previous attempt of mine. However, it did work instead of hang, so that’s an important difference.

Here is my summary of those instructions:

  • Install FreeBSD 14.3 from the ISO
  • Change the package repositories to the latest branch
  • Install pkg install pkg and then update the base system with freebsd-update
  • Install the graphics drivers, pkg install drm-kmod
  • Adjust startup (loader.conf, rc.conf) configuration (with future settings):
    • sysrc kld_list+=amdgpu
    • sysrc dbus_enable="YES"
    • sysrc seatd_enable="YES"
    • sysctl net.local.stream.recvspace=65536
    • sysctl net.local.stream.sendspace=65536
    • Edit loader.conf
  • Install KDE Plasma 6 in a minimal way: pkg install seatd plasma6-plasma konsole
  • Ensure that your graphical users are members of video group
  • Reboot and login
  • Create a script for running KDE Plasma 6, with this content and make it mode 0755:
    #! /bin/sh
    /usr/local/bin/ck-launch-session \
      /usr/local/lib/libexec/plasma-dbus-run-session-if-needed \
      /usr/local/bin/startplasma-wayland
    

After logging in in text mode, run the script and enjoy a modern KDE Plasma desktop with your favorite desktop operating system (that’s FreeBSD, you know) underneath.

Today I have something very exciting to share: the Alpha release of KDE Linux, KDE’s new operating system!

Many of you may be familiar with KDE Linux already through Harald Sitter‘s 2024 Akademy talk about it (slides; recording), or the Wiki page, or its web page on kde.org.

For everyone else, let me briefly explain: KDE Linux is a new operating system intended for daily driving that showcases Plasma and KDE software in the best light, and makes use of modern technologies.

KDE Linux uses Arch packages as a base, but it’s definitely not an “Arch-based distro!” There’s no package manager, and everything except for the base OS is either compiled from source using KDE’s kde-builder tool, or Flatpak. Sounds weird, huh?! We’ll get to that later.

Harald has been leading the charge to build KDE Linux, assisted by myself, Hadi Chokr, Lasath Fernando, Justin Zobel, and others. We’ve built it up to an Alpha release that’s officially ready for use by QA testers, KDE developers, and very enthusiastic KDE fans.

What’s in the Alpha release?

Today we’re releasing KDE Linux’s Testing Edition. This edition provides unreleased KDE software built from source code; a preview of what will become the next stable release.

In practice, we’re being quite conservative, and it’s already pretty darn stable for daily use. In fact, I’ve had KDE Linux on my home theater PC for about six months, and it’s been on my daily driver laptop for one month. Since then, I’ve done all my KDE development on it, as well as everything else I use a laptop for. It really does work. It’s not a toy or a science experiment.

KDE Linux running on an HTPC, a 2 year-old laptop, and a 10-year old laptop — all pretty much flawlessly

Since KDE Linux offers unreleased, in-progress software, you’ll probably notice some bugs if you use it. Good, that’s the point of the testing edition! Report those bugs so we can fix them before they end up shipping to people using released software.

But where to?

  • If the bug appears to be caused by KDE Linux’s design or integration, use invent.kde.org. Ignore the scary red banner at the top of the page.
  • If the bug appears to be in a piece of KDE software itself, like Plasma or Dolphin (such that it would eventually manifest on other operating systems as well), use bugs.kde.org.

So if this is an Alpha release, what’s known to be broken?

Great question. To start with, some things are intentionally unsupported right now; see also https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux#Non-goals. For example:

  • Computers with only BIOS support (not UEFI)
  • Loading new kernel modules at runtime
  • proprietary drivers for pre-Turing NVIDIA GPUs

There are also quite a few things that need work. You can find specific notable examples at https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux#Current_state. A few are:

  • No secure boot
  • Pre-Turing NVIDIA GPUs require manual setup
  • Immature QA and testing infrastructure
  • User experience papercuts in Flatpak KDE apps and updating the system using Discover

We’d love your help getting these and other topics straightened out!

Just what the world needs, another Linux distro…

A sentiment I have in the past expressed myself.

However, there’s a method to our madness. KDE is a huge producer of software. It’s awkward for us to not have our own method of distributing it. Yes, KDE produces source code that others distribute, but we self-distribute our apps on app stores like Flathub and the Snap and Microsoft stores, so I think it’s natural thing for us to have our own platform for doing that distribution too, and that’s an operating system. I think all the major producers of free software desktop environments should have their own OS, and many already do: Linux Mint and ElementaryOS spring to mind, and GNOME is working on one too.

Besides, this matter was settled 10 years ago with the creation of KDE neon, our first bite at the “in-house OS” apple. The sky did not fall; everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Speaking of KDE neon, what’s going on with it? Is it canceled? If not, doesn’t this amount to unnecessary duplication?

KDE neon is not canceled. However it has shed most of its developers over the years, which is problematic, and it’s currently being held together by a heroic volunteer. KDE e.V. has been reaching out to stakeholders to see if we can help put in place a continuity or transition plan. No decision has yet been made about its future.

While neon continues to exist, KDE Linux therefore does represent duplication. As for unnecessary? That I’m less sure about that. Harald, myself, and others feel that KDE neon has somewhat reached its limit in terms of what we can do with it. It was a great first product for KDE to distribute our own software and prepare the world for the idea of KDE in that role, and it served admirably for a decade. But technological and conceptual issues limit how far we can continue to develop it.

See also https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux#Differences_from_KDE_neon/Prior_art

Time will tell how these two products relate to one another in the future. Nothing is settled.

What are the architecture choices? Why did you build KDE Linux the way you did?

For detailed information about this, see https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux#Architecture.

We wanted KDE Linux to be super safe by default, providing guardrails and tools for rolling back when there are issues.

For example, KDE Linux preserves the last few OS images on disk, automatically. Get a bad build? Simply roll back to the prior one! It’s as easy as pie too; they show up right there on the boot menu:

It’s like being able to roll back to an older kernel, but for the whole OS.

To make this possible, KDE Linux has an “immutable base OS”, shipped as a single read-only image. Btrfs is the base file system, Wayland is the display server, PipeWire is the sound server, Flatpak gets you apps, and Systemd is the glue to hold everything together.

We also wanted to settle on a specific KDE software development story, with the OS built in the same way we compile our software locally — using kde-builder and flatpak-builder. This should minimize differences between dev setups and user packages that cause un-reproducible bugs (yes, this means we would love for you to use the Flatpak versions of KDE software!). There are genuine benefits for KDE developers here.

If these technologies aren’t your cup of tea, that’s fine. Feel free to ignore KDE Linux and continue using the operating system of your choice. There are plenty of them!

Why an immutable base OS? Isn’t that really limiting?

In some ways, yes. But in other ways, it’s quite freeing.

In my opinion, the traditional model of package management in the FOSS world has been one of our strongest features as well as our most bitter curse. A system made of mutable packages you can swap out at runtime is amazing for flexibility and customization, but terrible for long-term stability. I guarantee that every single person reading these words who’s used a terminal-based package manager has used it to blow up their system at least once. C’mon, admit it, you know it’s true! 😀 And in some distros, even using the GUI tools can get you into an unbootable state after an upgrade. If this has never happened to you on a traditional mutable Linux distro… I don’t believe you!

The pitfalls for non-experts are nearly infinite, their consequences can be showstopping, and the recovery procedures usually involve asking an expert for help. No expert around? Back to Windows.

Over the past 30 years, many package-based operating systems have made improvements to their own system-level package management tools to smooth out some of these sharp edges, but the essence of danger remains. It’s inherent in the system.

So in KDE Linux, we take on that risk and do the system-level package management for you, delivering a complete OS all in one piece. If it’s broken, it’s our fault, not yours. And then you’ll roll back to the previous build, yell at us, and we’ll fix it.

By delivering the OS in a complete image-based package, we can perform safe updates by simply swapping out the old OS image for the new one. There’s no risk of a “half-applied update” or “local package conflicts”, or anything like that. It’s also super-fast (once the new OS image is downloaded, that is), unlike the “offline update” system used by PackageKit, where you have to wait minutes on boot following an update. Those issues don’t exist on KDE Linux.

Wait… if the whole system is one piece and you can’t change it, how do you install new software?

Well, only the base OS in /usr is immutable; /etc is writable for making system-level config changes, and your entire home folder is of course yours to do what you want with, including installing software into it. So that’s what you do: use Discover to get software, mostly from Flathub at this point in time, but Snap is also technically supported and you can use snap in a terminal window (support in Discover may arrive later).

That’s fine for apps in Flathub and the Snap Store, but what about software not available there? What about CLI tools and development libraries?

Containers offer a modern approach: essentially you download a tiny tiny Linux-based OS into a container, and then you can install whatever that OS’s own package management system provides into the container. KDE Linux ships with support for Distrobox and Toolbx.

That’s right, after trashing package management, now I’m endorsing package management! The difference? This is user-level packaging and not system-level packaging. System-level packaging is what’s dangerous. Take away the danger by doing it in your home folder, and you regain almost all of the benefits, with almost none of the risks.

AppImage apps work too.

Homebrew also works; it’s an add-on system-level package manager that allows you to download tons of stuff you might want for power user and development purposes. Note that Homebrew packages are not segregated, so they can override system libraries and present problems. This should be considered an experts’ tool.

Compiling anything you want from source code is also possible — provided the dependencies are available, and Homebrew or containers can be used for this.

Finally, there’s nothing stopping folks from making command-line tools available via Flathub or another 3rd-party Flatpak repository. Some are already there. So this could be a potential avenue of improvement too.

But as you can see, the story here is fragmented, with a menu of imperfect options rather than a single unified approach. That’s a valid critique, and it’s something that needs more work if we want an obvious default choice here.

For more information about this topic, see https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux#Installing_software_not_available_in_Discover

That’s not enough power! I want to change the base OS!

Actually I lied. There’s another option for developers and super power users, one that does allow intermingling stuff: you can use systemd-sysext to overlay files of your choice on top of the base OS.

It’s a really cool tool you might not be aware of. I’ve started using it in KDE Linux to overlay my built-from-source KDE software on top of the base system for development and testing purposes, and it’s just been a super great experience. Way better than compiling stuff to a prefix in $HOME. No more weird random DBus and Polkit failures or stale file conflicts.

Now, this is quite a bit riskier as you can destabilize the OS itself by overlaying broken parts on top of working parts. But undoing any such changes is super simple, since, again, it’s all self-contained. That’s gonna be a common theme here.

However, I think the better answer for “I want to change the base OS” is “please get involved with developing KDE Linux!” That way if your changes are amazing, the whole world can benefit from them, and the burden of maintaining them over time can be shared with others.

See also https://kde.org/linux/#this-is-so-cool-how-can-i-get-involved-with-development

Still not enough power! I need to be able to swap out kernel modules and base packages at runtime!

Wow, you really are sounding like an OS developer. Maybe you want to help us develop KDE Linux? The OS could benefit tremendously from your skills and experience!

That said, there’s some truth to the idea that an immutable OS like KDE Linux isn’t the best choice for doing this kind of really low-level development or system optimization. That’s fine; there are hundreds of other traditional Linux-based operating systems out there that can serve this purpose.

If your goal really is to build your own OS for your own personal or commercial purposes, it’s hard to go wrong with Arch Linux; it’s one of the tools we used to build KDE Linux, in fact. In a lot of ways it’s more of an OS building toolkit than it is an OS itself.

If it’s all Flatpak and containers and stuff, does it really showcase Plasma and KDE software in the best light? Really?

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.

So for the Alpha release, these apps are on the base OS where they can properly integrate with the rest of the system. There’s no reason to torture people with issues that we know won’t be fixed anytime soon!

Other apps not needing as as deep a level of system integration are fine as Flatpaks right now, and we’re engaging with Flatpak folks to see how we can push the technology forward to work better for the deep integration use cases.

This is because one of KDE Linux’s other goals is to be a test-bed for bringing new technologies to KDE. Our software that behaves awkwardly when sandboxed or run on a filesystem other than Ext4 represents something for us to fix, because those technologies aren’t going away. We need to be embracing that future, not ignoring it. KDE Linux both helps and forces us to do it.

This should be exciting. New technology is fun! You get to help guide the future. Let’s not get caught up yelling at clouds here!

I’m a KDE developer. Why should I migrate to KDE Linux, and how does KDE development work?

Easy setup, speed, safety, DBus and Polkit finally work properly, space savings, consistent platform targets, and more. There’s a lot to like. See also https://kde.org/linux/#im-a-kde-developer-why-should-i-use-kde-linux-and-how-does-kde-development-work

Forget the haters, this project is cool! How can I help?

Great! For starters, install it on your computers. 🙂 We’re looking to get more feedback from daily drivers. The Matrix room is a great place to get in touch with us.

You can help out with some of the tasks and projects mentioned at https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux#Current_state. Those are high priority. And lots more easier, lower-priority tasks can be found here. You can submit Issues or Merge Requests on invent.kde.org.

And finally, help spread the news! If you couldn’t tell, I’m really excited about this project, and I think a lot of other folks will be as well… once they hear about it!