What’s new in Fedora Kinoite 38

Tuesday, 18 April 2023 | Siosm’s blog

Fedora 38 has been released 🎉 (on time!) and Fedora Kinoite 38 alongside it.

Since the last “State of Fedora Kinoite” post was a while ago, here is a summary of the changes in this release and a look at what is coming in the next releases.

New Fedora Kinoite specific changes

Discover now supports updating the system via rpm-ostree

See my longer post on the topic (with lots of screenshots!). This is also included in Fedora Kinoite 37 so you can update to the latest Fedora Kinoite 38 release using Discover.

If you prefer to do it manually, you can follow the commands from the How to rebase to Fedora Linux 38 on Silverblue article, replacing silverblue with kinoite. Make sure to fully update your system before rebasing.

New applications in the base image

We have added Filelight, KFind and Krfb directly to the base image as they either not useful as Flatpaks or their functionality is too limited by the sandbox.

Initial-setup and Anaconda removed from the image

We removed initial-setup and anaconda from the base image as it was causing weird error messages on the first boot. In the future, a more KDE native replacement should let us do OEM installations for Kinoite. See the Fedora change for more details.

New changes shared with the KDE Spin

Latest KDE Plasma desktop and apps

We have included the latest version of the Plasma desktop (5.27.4), the latest version of KDE Gear (22.12.3) and the second to last KDE Frameworks release (5.104.0, soon updated to the latest release).

This includes the new Flatpak KCM which lets you configure the permissions that are granted your Flatpak applications. This is the result of a Season of KDE and GSoC project completed by Suhaas Joshi that I co-mentored with Aleix Pol i Gonzàlez.

SDDM using Wayland by default

With the work done upstream in SDDM to support using a Wayland based greeter and the introduction of SimpleDRM to fix the broken fallback when platform drivers are unavailable, it is now possible for the Fedora KDE variants (the regular spin and Kinoite) to move to Wayland for the login manager, which effectively completes the switch to Wayland for these variants.

See the Fedora change for more details.

New changes shared with the rest of Fedora

Those are other under-the-hood changes that come from Fedora:

  • The latest Linux kernel, version 6.2, brings extended hardware support, bug fixes and performance improvements.
  • The length of time that system services may block shutdown has been reduced. This means that, if a service delays your machine from powering off, it will be much less disruptive than in the past.
  • RPM now uses the Rust-written Sequoia OpenGPG parser for better security.
  • The Noto fonts are now the default for Khmer and Thai. The variable versions of the Noto CJK fonts are now used for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This reduces disk usage.
  • Profiling will be easier from Fedora 38, thanks to changes in its default build configuration. The expectation is that this will result in performance improvements in future versions.

Major bugs fixed since the last status report

A notable bug resulting in an unusable desktop when selecting the UTC/GMT timezone was fixed a while back in Fedora Kinoite 36.

Future changes

KDE Apps as Flatpaks from Fedora

KDE Apps have been available primarily from Flathub for now and if that works well for you then there is no need to change anything.

We however can not include applications from Flathub as pre-installed applications in Fedora. We thus need Fedora Flatpaks for that. The newly formed Flatpak SIG and Yaakov Selkowitz in particular did a lot of work to make that happen for KDE Apps. We will thus likely be able to add those applications to the default installation of Fedora Kinoite in the Fedora 39 release.

If you are interested in using those Flatpaks, we are looking for maintainers. Note that this is a different process than maintaining applications on Flathub or RPMs and requires less effort. Hopefully it will be automated in the future.

Better Flathub integration

We want to make it easier to use the new unfiltered Flathub view by adding it in Plasma Welcome and Discover. See issue #295 for details.

Qt 6 and Plasma 6

We have started working on Plasma 6 builds and once this reaches a working state, we will have Kinoite Nightly builds to try it out. Kinoite Nightly is thus temporarily not updated until this happens. See issue #13 for details.

Auto updates by default

With the rpm-ostree support in good shape in Discover, we are now looking at enabling auto-updates by default for Flatpaks and the system in Discover. See the draft Fedora change and issue #342 for details.

Unified core, bootupd, ostree native container

Those are core changes that will let us to things more easily in the future:

New website

With the new Fedora website now live, we want to merge the currently independent Fedora Kinoite website to benefit from the new design and offer a coherent layout across all Fedora variants.

This is a good way to help us if you have Javascript or HTML/CSS knowledge.

Good issues to get involved

Here are two good issues to get started in KDE development that will benefit Fedora Kinoite:

Feel free to reach out to me if you need mentoring.

Feedback and reporting issues

Feel free to drop by the Fedora KDE channel, the Fedora Kinoite channel, asks questions or start a development discussion in the Fedora forums, or open an issue in the KDE SIG tracker.