Seems targeted at office workplaces. A locked-down system that cannot even be corrupted or tampered with. Consider a workplace of a receptionist at a medical office, or a library computer.

Linux is wonderfully flexible, which allows to create distros like that, among other things. Linux is also free as in freedom, which may be very important for trusting the code you run, or which a governmental official runs.

I bet that past the alpha stage they will offer a configuration tool to prepare the images to your liking, and ways to lock the system down even more. Would work nicely over PXE boot.

It doesn't necessarily take much hackability away. You might find it makes it easier.

You can overlay changes to the read-only rootfs using the sysext mechanism. You can load and unload these extensions. This makes experiments or juggling debug stuff a lot easier than mucking about in /usr used to be.

A lot of KDE Linux is about making updates and even hackability safe in terms of making things trivial to roll back or remove. A goal is to always be able to unwedge without requiring a reinstall.

If you know you can overlay whatever over your /usr and always easily return to a known-good state, hackability arguably increases by lowering the risk.

> What appeals to me about linux is the hackability and configurability.

Innovation happens on stable foundations, not thru rug pulls.

Yes, you have the freedom to make your system unbootable. When Debian first tried to introduce systemd, I've replaced PID 1 with runit, wrote my own init scripts & service definitions, and it ran like this quite well, until... the next stable release smashed me in the face.

It's absurd how hackable the Linux distros are. It's also absurd to do this to your workhorse setup.

I think Aurora Linux[1] is more suitable for this purpose.

However, while I love the approach of having an immutable distribution, I don't see the attack vector of ransomware handled in a good way. It does not help, if your OS is intact, but your data is irrecoverably lost due to a wrong click in the wrong browser on your system.

I think the backup and restore landscape has enough tools to fix this (cloud + restic[2] or automated ZFS snapshots[3]), but it takes a bit time / a script to setup something like this for your parents in your favorite distro.

1: https://getaurora.dev/en

2: https://github.com/restic/restic

3: https://zrepl.github.io/

It makes hacking easier in some ways too. Overlay any hacks. It will be gone by reboot unless you want otherwise. Also see blue-build.org <- It helps you to put all your hacks in the immutable image.

I like hacking Linux too.

But some people just want a computer to work.

It's not like you can't try a simple distro and move on to something more complex later.

>That might be their target audience.

Seems like a lot of effort and fanfare for such a niche market.

I don’t mean this as a gotcha, but have you tried an immutable/atomic Linux distro?

Immutable/Atomic Linux doesn’t take away any ability to hack and configure it. It’s just a different approach to package and update management.

There really isn’t anything you fans do with it that you can do on other Linux distros.

I’m using Bazzite which is basically in the Fedora Atomic family and all it really changes is that if I want to rpm install something and there’s no flatpak or AppImage then I just need to decide on my preferred alternate method to install it.

I find Bazzite’s documentation on the subject quite helpful: https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/

At the very worst case I’m using rpm-ostree and installing the software “traditionally” and layering it in with the base OS image.

Now you might be thinking, what’s the benefit of going through all this? Well, I get extremely fast and reliable system updates that can be rolled back, and my system’s personalization and application environment is highly contained to my home directory.

I’m not an expert but I have to think that there are security benefits to being forced into application sandboxing as well. Applications can’t just arbitrarily access data from each other. This isn’t explicitly a feature of immutable/atomic Linux but being forced into installation methods that are not rpm is.

Your telling me google uses Gentoo for ChromeOS but doesn't even host a Gentoo mirror? jeez...

It does I believe? I've never tried it myself but I've heard multiple voices say that once you go into the terminal the entire Gentoo stack is just there with portage, equery, qapps and such.

In fact, from what I understand it is in fact not really Gentoo based but Portage-based, as in they for the most part write their own ebuilds and software and from what I know have their own custom init system and display system that's not in Gentoo but they found that Portage was simply very convenient for automating their entire process. The claim that “gentoo is just Portage” is not entirely true, there's still a supported base system that's configured as offered by Gentoo but it's far more flexible than that of most systems of course, granting the user choice over all sorts of fundamental system components.

I think the fact that you try to prioritise the distros repos shows that it probably isn't quite ready. Presumably that's because you know that they'll work reliably but you aren't so sure about Flatpaks.

Flatpak installs and shares runtimes. That's what makes it so stable, regardless of your distro.

So yes, if you install 1 KDE app from Flatpak, you will have the KDE runtime. But that is true if you install 1 KDE app while on Busybox as well. It's the subsequent KDE apps that will reuse the dependencies.

I don't think Debian creates a separate /var by default, only /, /boot, swap, and uefi.

Mind sharing which two apps you went with?

When installing just two apps, even if both are in the same (KDE or GNOME) realm, you can very easily end up with 8 flatpaks (including runtimes) or more. This is due to a variety runtimes and their versions: One for KDE or GNOME Platform release (about two a year) plus a yearly freedesktop base) and not all apps being updated to the latest runtimes constantly.

You then have to add at least 6 locale flatpaks to these hypothetical 8 flatpaks.

Especially with Debian, locales matter, of you don't do a `sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales` and pick what you need before installing flatpaks on a default install, you will get everything and thus gigabytes of translations you don't even understand, wasting your disk space.

I recommend always using LVM so you can grow/shrink filesystems easily.

Did you install the flatpaks for a user or system-wide?

don't know why people are obsessing with the partition scheme interest of two apps using as much of a windows10 installation.

my full / for a desktop debian with ton of stuff is under 4gb.

I've tried distros with faster cadences. All that means is that I get an endless stream of new bugs, rather than a few that I can find workarounds for (such as just reverting to the still-good X11).

This is the way.

I used to "hate" Wayland, but that was because I was stuck on an ancient kwin_wayland implementation that didn't get updated for years on Ubuntu.

When it comes to big changes like Wayland and Pipewire, you really want the latest versions you can get. Like the OP, I only use rolling releases on my machines for that reason.

I’m in Arch and I generally struggle to get video acceleration in a browser with an Nvidia GPU.

Stability is just as valuable for a workstation as it is for a server.

> What may be broken in one release will very likely be fixed a few releases after the last debian stable release

This joke is being told since 20 years. If it is fixed in KDE5, why do they need KDE6 ?

User adoption is not really a great metric when it ships as a default on common distros. Most people would rather deal with issues and wait for support than fix things in an unsupported way.

If it wasn't a default, it'd go back to barely being used.

The last time I tried it extensively was on Debian Bookwork (12.1 and later; I always wait for the first point release), released July 2023 but freezing sometime around February 2023.

Yes, this was a while ago now. But just as now, people said then "all the bugs are fixed and missing features added"; all that really means is "we're in the long tail". I might've put up with it if not for the fact that there were 2ish major bugs that directly affected my main workflow (e.g. temporarily swapping to non-Latin text input).

I haven't hit any for probably a decade now.

Bugs in the window manager or shell (both shipped by KDE) are somewhat more common, but even if they are crashes, due to X11 being better-designed for isolated faults they are easily recovered-from without loss of session.

Ultimately it doesn't matter now, because Xorg is kind of in a state of "active abandonment", that is to say, the only maintenance being done is to ensure that no more bugs are being fixed aside from critical security issues on distros Red Hat still supports. In open source, you go where the developer energy is, and right now that's Wayland.

If you're about to tell me that XLibre is a viable alternative, no you're not because it isn't.

> It's got an NVIDIA K1100M. The latest proprietary driver supporting it is 390 which is not supported by Debian 13. It was by Debian 11.

Tell me more, please.

Does it only have an nVidia or is it dual GPU and switching?

Because I have the latter and the lack of GPU drivers is keeping me on Ubuntu 22.04.

Is it possible you're just using the Intel GPU and your nVidia is inactive?

Works fine in current KDE master branch, and it's been working for quite a while so it should be in the current release. Note that I run Teams in MS Edge for Linux, which is my dedicated Teams runtime environment and sandbox.

The only time I've ever had screensharing working correctly is under Wayland

I use it via Chromium. Are there additional features in the Electron version?

They admit

> Flatpak is currently a pretty poor technology for system-level apps that want deep integration with the base system.

Therefore they ship those apps on the base image, rather than as Flatpaks. I don’t see what’s wrong with this approach.

Installation is exceptionally easy, other than timezone, install disk and user account.

I'd also expect installing flatpaks offline would be a hassle.

Not Dolphin the Smalltalk, either.

http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html

I would be surprised if anybody who ever used kde would confuse the two.

Very uncharitable perspective on people that do the work for free. I can understand not wanting to use a distribution where breakages can happen, but being a dick about it less so.

Anecdote: 12 years with Arch, including a laptop with 9 years on one install. Zero issues. But yeah, there’s a low volume mailing list. Get on it. Read it, it’s very short and to the point, and it’s only a few times per year.

To be fair to Arch, you can always subscribe to their RSS or mailing list if you want to be notified about breaking changes

> Arch is one of the most horrible rolling distros

We've had different experiences. I've been using Arch for about 8 years and have had to scour the forums no more than thrice to find the magic incantations to fix a broken package manager. In all cases, the system was saved without a reinstall. However, it is certainly painful when pacman breaks.

    $ cat /etc/issue
    Antergos Linux \r (\l)

You know you don't have to update it daily?

Gentoo is very stable in my experience and you get to choose exactly which packages you want to be unstable vs stable (the default).

I swore off arch when an update surprised me by switching to systemd (years ago obviously) and trashing my system in the process

> 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.

I am currently on Arch specifically because Tumbleweed shipped a broken Firefox build and refused to ship the fixed version for a month.

As a workaround I uninstalled the bundled firefox and replaced it with flatpak. And on next system update the bundled Firefox was back because for some strange reason packages on suse are bundled.

There has been an increasing trend in the use of up votes as likes instead of user moderation which results in worthwhile discussion sinking to the bottom and stuff like this being at the top and setting the general tone of the discussion.

Neon is explicitly a bleeding edge KDE testbed (but I'll agree that their website undersells this fact)

> It actually looks a lot what KDE is shipping here

No, it does not, in any way whatsoever.

GNOME OS does not have dual root partitions, Btrfs with snapshots and rollback, atomic OS updates, or any of the other resilience features which are the unique selling points of KDE Linux.

In case you are unfamiliar with the design of KDE Linux, I have described it in some depth:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/kde_linux_prealpha/

And I compared it and GNOME OS here:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros...

Yes, the key difference is GNOME has strong downstream partners that treat it as the default (e.g. Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu). This way GNOME gets a lot of testing, polish, and feedback without having to maintain its own dist.

A lot of the base for GNOME OS was also used for automated testing IIRC. I don't know if that is the case for KDE Linux (or Neon).

I've been wanting to do this! The plan was to modify the Bazzite DX version build script, but ultimately Fedora being base was a deal breaker for me. With KDE Linux this might finally be a dream come true.

I agree with you. When I read that my first thought was "the one area"? Personally I think its the complete opposite, like really strongly. like really really strongly. I'm certain for at least 10 years now, once a week I think "I miss old desktop operating systems". Any of them. 7,vista,xp. snow leopard,leopard,tiger. I even stopped using Ubuntu when it went from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 and other options at that time were pretty bad so I ended up getting back into mac's for my home desktop. I still use all 3 daily, but hate all of them.

> Operating systems feel like a solved problem

Even desktop environment is not solved. I'm typing this from a relatively new metod of displaying windows - a scrolling window manager (e.g. Karousel [1] for KDE). It just piles new windows to the right and it infinitely scrolls horizontally. This seems like a minor feature but changes how you use the desktop entirely and required a lot of new features at operating system level to enable this. I wouldn't go back to a desktop without this.

The immutable systems like NixOS [2] have been an absolute game changer as well. Some parts are harder but having an ability to always roll back and the safety of immutability really make your professional environment so much easier to maintain and understand. No more secrets, not more "I set something for one project at system level and now years later I forgot and now something doesn't work".

I've been on linux desktop exclusively for almost 15 years now and it has never been as much fun as it is today!

1 - https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel

2 - https://nixos.org/

On the DE, we just struggle with polish. This is paradoxically both an issue of not enough fruitful innovation and not enough maturity of good innovations that happen and take forever to be adopted.

As far as the actual OS, the new sheaves and barns thing in Linux is neat. We need innovation in RAM compression and swapping to handle bursty desktop memory needs better.

The main problem, and the one I'm trying to solve, is that as a software engineer, you have little incentive to make something that millions of people will use on the Linux desktop unless you have some other downstream monetization plan. You will have tons of users who have questions, not code contributions. To enable users to better organize into their own support structures and to make non-code contributions, I'm building PrizeForge.

> applications are not trusted as they are now.

Agreed, but...

> rewrite the kernel

Why would you do that? The kernel already has all the tools you need for isolating apps from each other. It's up to userspace to use these tools.

This sounds fairly close to SteamOS in terms of structure. (Which seems to work well for its own use case, so I can see the logic.)

And let's also imagine what compels people to recommend enthusiasts onto paths where they will be more successful.

Maintaining distros that are not some kind of overlay that can track the underlying base automatically is just asking for more maintenance than people will want to do while also Balkanizing options for users because while overlays can be composed, distro hopping very much does not compose.

Nope: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pulse

Shifting on the wheel, floor, knob, buttons, etc. I've stuck mostly to Ubuntu/Debian based distros because I'm more comfortable with them and they have tended to be more sturdy/stable for my own usage (currently Pop COSMIC alpha though).

People on Arch are eating the bugs too. I think KDE would go MUCH farther if they just made their tooling a little easier and bundled that well enough. They wouldn't need a separate distro.

Security/dependancy updates depend solely on the specific maintainers. The platform itself doesn't automatically fix the developer or maintainer lethargy in this regard.

Snap and Flatpaks only real legitimate use-case is legacy compatibility:

1. Current release applications on deprecated OS (Mostly good)

2. Deprecated applications on current OS (Mostly bad)

The Windows style packaging architecture introduces more problems than it solves. Fine for running something like Steam games with single shot application instances using 95% of system resources each power cycle, but folks could also just stick with Windows 11 if convenience and security-theater is their preference.

Some people probably won't notice the issues, but depends what they do. Arch Linux itself is a pretty awesome distro for lean systems. =3

Again, static linking would only be useful in a single unique App run and dump scenario. People do link and strip .a sometimes when porting to Windows and MacOS.

Some programs take a huge memory and performance hit on non-Linux machines. =3

Apple has also yanked backwards compatibility a few times. I bet Microsoft would love to trash a few legacy API decisions from decades ago.

That being said, I still think Microsoft should have developed a seamless virtualization layer by now. Programs prior to X year are run in a microVM/WINE-like environment. Some escape hatch to kill off some cruft.

I had to use it ~2 years for work and am glad that I am back to Linux. The amount of instabilities, bugs, lack of features or removed(!) features between updates, missing software packages, horrible user experience... was just astonishing. You need a lot of fanboyism to cope with that.