Now we have the immutable Exodia, VanillaOS for Debian, KDE Linux for Arch, Bazzite/Fedora Atomic for Fedora, NixOS for NixOS. What’s great about this is KDE is zeroed in on developing for immutable distros now and will make their apps work better with them, this will help the whole ecosystem.
News article: https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/06/announcing-the-alpha-release-of-kde-linux/
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.
Kinux
“KDE Linux” (codenamed “Project Banana”)
The wiki article starts with a banger. I’m already sold.
What’s an “immutable” distro? Is this like the OSS version of a closed/prop kernel?
Think of the OS as a sum of hundreds of components. You have a kernel, a boot manager, a boot and service manager system, a shell, some command line utils, drivers, a display server, a graphical interface, a sound server etc.
On a classical OS, all these components are distributed individually as packages. Which means that there is a risk of failure at any update: discrepancies on dependencies or compiler versions, failed updates, power outages etc.
“Immutable”, also called “atomic” or “transactional” OSs, distribute the whole stack as a single image. If it reminds you of Docker, that’s because it’s exactly the same thing. An update can’t fail. It’s either fully applied or not at all. And that’s because it’s not an update at all, it’s a complete system image deployed alongside the one currently in use. If it doesn’t work, you can simply “downgrade” by selecting the previous image.
As simply as possible, it (mostly) locks down system files and confines users to the user directory. This makes the operating system very stable and hard to break, it also creates a reproducible testing environment which significantly helps developers with bug testing software. For the vast majority of users, this is a positive, though users that want to tinker with the system files a lot may run into a lot of blockers. Upgrades are likely to be very stable, and you will not have system file config drift issues that often break long running traditional linux distros and force the user to intervene.
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It just means system libraries pinned to versions which are version controlled
It’s like a package.json or maven.xml or build.gradle or whatever but for the entire OS (An OS is really just an app that runs other apps so it makes sense to treat the deps via a dep management strat)
And if u want to swap libraries you have to layer them on using a command which will add the new library onto a commit tree, so if something breaks u just roll back
The idea is that ur pinned system libraries can get overridden and swapped out, but never have their underlying code changed or removed, so if something breaks u can just rollback to last happy version automatically at startup
Everything stays open sourced tho, it just forces stability in the system code by making sure all changes to it are versioned and tracked
That sounds like an explanation for ostree.
I mean, yeah, Fedora Atomic is based on rpm-ostree
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Ok well this deserves a closer look. Might slap this on a spare laptop and give it a test drive.
sorry, lazy, can’t be bothered to check… is it the same deal as the other immutables, I gotta reboot to get new shit?
Tried it for a bit, seems to be Arch-based, but
pacmanwasn’t installed. And it’s very much an alpha.Also, there’s a warning if you don’t have 40GB free. That hurt.
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With how KDE treats Plasma and their whole dev philosophy of “If we don’t use/like something, than neither will you”
How does anyone confuse the KDE team for the Gnome foundation? How did you manage to pull that off?
They should move the “KDE Neon” name to this new immutable version.
You should apply for a marketing position in broadcom. The people responsible for the vmware software suite just love to do stunts like this.
