Kde Launches Its Own Distribution
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KDE has launched its own immutable Linux distribution, sparking debate among HN users about the need for another distro and the implications of immutability.
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The main differences are related to packages. The package format (.deb, .rpm, etc), the package manager (dpkg/apt, pacman, dnf, etc), how frequently the packages are updated, if they focus on stability or new features, etc.
New Linux users that are used to Windows or Mac sometimes dislike a distro and like other, but actually what they really disliked what the desktop environment. For example, Kubuntu uses KDE Plasma as its desktop environment and its user experience are almost the same as Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, OpenSuSE and so on, while it's very different to the default Ubuntu (that uses GNOME). But, under the hood, Ubuntu and Kubuntu are the same (you can even uninstall KDE and install GNOME).
Actually, other Unix-based systems can install the same desktop environments that we have on Linux, so, if you have a FreeBSD with KDE you won't even notice the difference to Kubuntu at first, even though it's a completely different operating system.
tl;dr: there's a real difference, but from a user perspective it's mostly under the hood, not exactly in usability.
But hey, more power to them.
And of course the distros end up sharing the gross of the application packages - originally a differentiator between the classic distros - via e.g. Flatpak/Flathub.
One reason we're doing KDE Linux is that if you look at the growth opportunities KDE has had in recent years, a lot of that has come from our hardware partners, e.g. Slimbook, Tuxedo, Framework and others. They've generally shipped KDE Neon, which is Ubuntu-based but has a few real engineering and stability challenges that have been difficult to overcome. KDE Linux is partly a lessons-learned project about how to do an OEM offering correctly (with some of the lessons coming out of the SteamOS effort, which also ships Plasma), and is also pushing along the development of various out-of-the-box experience components, e.g. the post-first-boot setup experience and things like that.
And Kalpa is that just with Plasma as DE.
To add something useful, OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation.
It's a complete strip down and an opportunity to change or do things that previously had a lot of friction due to the amount of change that would occur.
To me, it seems like the opposite is true. Operating systems feel like a solved problem. What are some of the big innovations of recent times?
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/
I've long wanted a scrollable/zoomable desktop, with a minimap that shows the overall layout. Think the UI of an RTS game, where instead of units you move around and resize windows. This seems like something in that direction, at least.
How does Karousel work with full screen applications, e.g., games?
I would love to see a complete overhaul of those.
In my opinion, if I type "xeyes" and it works (the app shows on my screen), then I should be able to start any other X11 application. However, gnome-terminal behaves differently. I don't know why precisely, but using dbus-launch sometimes works. It is a very annoying issue. A modern Linux desktop system feels like it's microservices connected by duct-tape, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
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.
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.
You can build a skyscraper on top of the foundations of a shed, and the kernel devs have done an amazing job at that, but at some point you gotta conclude that maybe it is better to start from scratch with a new design. And security is a good enough reason.
According to kde.org/linux it comes with Flatpak and Snap. Distrobox and Toolbox. They don't seem to just pick a lane to be consistent, it's all kind of random.
KDE and Gnome are footing Flathub together and a lot of the community effort goes into Flatpak packaging.
Does this mean they're testing that all the Wayland bugs are fixed? I haven't updated to the new Debian stable quite yet but all the previous times I've switch to Wayland under promises of "it's working now" I've been burned; hopefully dogfood helps.
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).
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.
But I'm pretty sure at least half of them actually do work under X11, it's just that some UI libraries refuse to use it on the grounds of "X11 is outdated, I won't support features even though it does".
(also, having played around with DPI stuff on Wayland, it's pretty broken there in practice)
No HDR or high DPI is an annoyance. Not supporting accessibility is real deal breaker. Especially for commercial settings where things like Americans with Disability Act compliance matters. And even more for me with my retinas slowly tearing apart and losing my eyesight: the entire waylands ecosystem is extremely inconsistent and buggy.
All of those are productivity things
I guarantee you spend more time "configuring" linux than actually being "productive" with it.
I suspect HDR support could be added if someone were to retrofit it like how VR support was added, but no one really wants to work on that.
Perhaps people ought to listen to the Xorg devs when they say X11 is broken and obsolete, and you should be using Wayland instead. Every single one of them says this.
what are you talking about?
R10G10B10 matches most HDR displays out there, AFAIK even Windows uses that outside of DirectX (where FP16 is used).
But beyond that...
> Fixing this would require rewriting the entire protocol.
...most of the protocol does not have to do with color values. X11 is extensible and an extension can be used that allows alternative functions that use more advanced color values where that'd make sense. For example, assuming you want to use "full" range color values for the drawing functions like XFillPolygon, etc, you'd want to add have the extended range state in graphics contexts, introduce extended commands for changing it (with the existing commands simulating an SDR color for backwards compatibility). That is assuming R10G10B10 is not enough of course (though because for decades many applications assumed 8bit RGB, it is a good idea to do sRGB/SDR simulation for existing APIs and clients regardless of the real underlying mode of the monitor unless a client either opts-in to using extended color or uses the new APIs).
Another thing to keep in mind is that these are really needed if you want to use the draw primitives using extended color / HDR. However most HDR output, at least currently, is either done using some other API (e.g. Vulkan) or via raw pixel data. In which case you need to configure the window output (a window region, to allow for apps with mixed color spaces in a single window - e.g. think Firefox showing a SDR page with an HDR image) to use a specific color space/format and then rely on other APIs for the actual pixel data.
This is something i wanted to look into for a while now, unfortunately other stuff always end up having more priority - and well, my "HDR" monitor is only HDR in name, it barely looks any different when i try to enable HDR mode in KDE Plasma under Wayland for example :-P. I do plan on getting an HDR OLED monitor at some point though and since i do not plan on changing my X11-based environment, i might take a look at it in the future.
Once again, every... last... one of the Xorg devs is of the opinion that you should be using Wayland instead. Even if you had changes to propose to Xorg, they will not make it into a release. If you insist on soldiering on with X, your best bet is probably to contribute to Wayback, likely to be the only supported X11 display server in the near future, and see if you can add a protocol to the compositor to allow "overlay" of an HDR image displayed using Wayland "on top of" an X window that wants to do HDR.
But really, consider switching to Wayland.
I use X11 features such as highlight to copy and then using middle mouse button and/or Shift-Insert to paste its contents (just to mention one), and I use xclip extensively to copy contents of files (and stdin) to it. I use scrot, I use many other applications specifically made for Xorg, and so forth. I have a custom Xorg config as well which may or may not work with Wayland.
Thus, I do not think I could realistically switch to Wayland.
I won't say anything against your other points (and in fact I am typing this comment on Xorg because I have my own list of reasons), but https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard is almost drop-in for xclip/xsel.
My comment isn't about how much work something would need, but about how it can be done.
> Once again, every... last... one of the Xorg devs is of the opinion that you should be using Wayland instead.
Good for them, but i have my own opinions.
> Even if you had changes to propose to Xorg, they will not make it into a release.
Maybe or maybe not. AFAICT the official stance has been that nobody wanted to work on these things, not that they are against it, they just do not want to do it themselves.
But if they do not make it into a release, there is also the XLibre fork or there might be other forks in the future, it isn't like Xorg is some sort of proprietary product. I'd rather stick with Xorg as it seems more professional but ultimately whatever works.
> see if you can add a protocol to the compositor to allow "overlay" of an HDR image displayed using Wayland "on top of" an X window that wants to do HDR.
TBH this sounds like an incredibly ugly and fragile hack. There are two main uses for HDR support: embedded HDR (e.g. in a firefox window) and fullscreen HDR (e.g. for videos/games). For the latter there is no point in an overlay, just give the server the full screen. For the former such an overlay will require awful workarounds when you want more than just a self-contained rectangle, e.g. you want it clipped (partially visible image) or need it to be mixed with the underlying contents (think of a non-square HDR shape that blends into SDR text beneath or wrapped around it).
From a pragmatic perspective the best approach would be to see how toolkits, etc, use HDR support in Wayland and implement something similar under X11/Xorg to make supporting both of them easy.
> But really, consider switching to Wayland.
I've been using Window Maker for decades and have no interest in something else. Honestly i think that adding Wayland support to Window Maker or making a Window Maker-like Wayland compositor are both more of an effort and harder than adding HDR support to Xorg. Also i am sometimes trying KDE Plasma Wayland for various things and i have several programs having small but annoying issues under Wayland.
That said, from a practical perspective, one can use both. The only use for HDR i can think of right now is games and videos and i can keep using my Xorg-based setup for everything while switching to another virtual terminal running KDE Plasma Wayland for games/videos that i want to see in HDR. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Fn to switch virtual terminal isn't any different than pressing Win+n to switch virtual desktop.
https://www.x.org/wiki/AlanCoopersmith/
You will not find one.
This is incorrect. Alan Coopersmith does not share this view and he is a Xorg developer. Anyone repeating this propaganda is arguing from ignorance.
That said, I have used both X11 and Wayland. X11 does its job well in many applications and honestly, we would have been better off had Wayland just been a X11 extension. As for things being broken, I have encountered far more brokenness when using Wayland than when using X11 exclusively. Wayland has gotten better of late, especially in desktop applications, but I do not consider it a replacement in general.
Just recently, I built a display based on a CM4 at work that uses X11 and I can remotely view and interact with the screen using x11vnc, which is fantastic for remote development and debugging. That is a convenience I simply do not have with Wayland. I have tried to do steam remote play by streaming from a desktop to my Steam Deck. If the desktop is running a Wayland session, a pop up appears on the physical display asking if I want to permit remote access and I currently have no way of clicking it without being physically present. This ruins the remote play experience, which I want to use when I am physically not present. A X11 session does not have this problem. If a tool like x11vnc existed for Wayland, it would be useless if it does what Steam Remote Play does with Wayland. :/
That would have never happened. From a functionality standpoint, Wayland is "the parts of X11 modern toolkits actually use". Give clients a buffer, have them locally render into that buffer, then composite the buffers together into a final display. Xorg can do all this. It's just a question of, do we want the maintenance burden of all the other stuff that Xorg has, like obsolete graphics primitives, obsolete visuals, etc.? And do we want the architectural decisions of X11, which seemed sensible in the 80s, but make far less sense in light of modern GPUs and modern applications with modern display needs?
The point of Wayland always was to start from scratch.
X maintainers said it is a feature they do not want to implement. Because "we work on Wayland now, Wayland better".
https://www.x.org/wiki/AlanCoopersmith/
That said, he has not volunteered to implement HDR.
If you're about to tell me that XLibre is a viable alternative, no you're not because it isn't.
Reading this thread makes me want to try KDE/Wayland again, so probably on my next install I'll give it another shot. If it's still crap I think it's time to switch off of KDE.
That said, I am probably preaching to the choir, as I think we are both moderates as far as the X11 vs Wayland debate is concerned.
https://www.x.org/wiki/AlanCoopersmith/
Xorg will continue to exist even if Redhat pulls out, but Redhat needs it for XWayland indefinitely.
Wayland, KDE, and several other pieces of software evolve rapidly. What may be broken in one release will very likely be fixed a few releases after the last debian stable release.
I'll run Debian on a server if I need predictability and stability with known issues. I won't run Debian on a desktop or workstation for the same reason.
I’m sitting with SW acceleration in the browser today because some update broke it. I have had it working in the past but I’ve had like 2-3 updates in the past 2 years break it.
And for what it’s worth there was a really bad tearing bug because of the argument over implicit and explicit synchronization that neither side wanted to fix. I think it’s since been addressed but that was only like in the past 6 months or something. So it’s definitely not been “years” since it’s been working seamlessly. Things break at a greater rate than X because X basically is frozen and isn’t getting updates.
With Arch, you have to read up ahead of time before updating software because it's a rolling release.
I remember one breaking change when I was switching from the previous Nvidia drivers to the new 'open' ones, but some breakge was expected with that change.
So it might make sense to avoid Wayland in that case.
Make sure you have switched over instead of using the old proprietary one.
The only issue I have with software conservatism, like Debian, is that some new thing requires something newer. If you live in a world where you can do without the new thing, then it's really quite nice. Security patches are another matter, but are usually dealt with.
I like to be on the bleeding edge, but Debian was created for a reason. Only time can determine which configurations don't suck.
For some obscure reason, bugs are easier to produce than fixes. But the next release will be better. I promise.
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 open to moving to Debian testing/unstable if Wayland can actually deliver. What do you run?
I've also been giving Bazzite to some non-tech people who have not once asked for help. That one is immutable and Wayland only, so it's a further testament to how far Wayland has come if you're on an up-to-date-enough system.
Sadly, I'm stuck on older Ubuntu for my work laptop because the mandated security software won't run on anything better.
I'm on an unholy amalgamation of Arch/Cachy/Endeavour now, but I have been using screen sharing nearly everyday on calls via Firefox on Arch for about a year and it's worked without a problem.
I considered Debian testing, and it does work well on servers, but a true rolling release is more convenient. The software release and update loop is shorter, it's really nice to be able to pull fixes to packages in a reasonable amount of time after they're released.
Ubuntu 24.04 is older than Debian stable currently.
You need to get portals working correctly for screensharing to work
> Even as of Ubuntu 24.04
I get that this is the current LTS release, but clearly this isn't want the parent poster had in mind. Notably 24.04 never shipped Plasma 6, which carried a lot of critical Wayland fixes.
This joke is being told since 20 years. If it is fixed in KDE5, why do they need KDE6 ?
I've been running debian stable (with backports) as my desktop for a couple of years now, I find that KDE is updated enough, and wayland is stable enough (on my hardware, of course, a 13 year old macbook and a 8 year old NUC).. honestly, as a simple user, i haven't appreciated any difference between X and wayland sessions, so i just login into wayland.
... um, okay, that's true, although in the last 10+ years it did not "rapidly" reach stability
Cross that hurdle and I can go back to trusting the Linux Desktop for business things.
If it wasn't a default, it'd go back to barely being used.
Also the taskbar is just broken in general. It'll pull tons of apps behind the '...' button even though there's plenty of room on the taskbar and it'll also put fake apps that aren't actually open on the taskbar.
Also no vertical task bar. Come on Microsoft.
Idk what's even different between them, it was just obvious that I was in the non-default / minority of users territory, so I got out.
X11 has a workaround for that because I can use gamma correction to simulate brightness control and make it work with night light. There was no way to do it in Wayland: they stomp on each other and undo whatever the other software did. So I'm back to X11 and frankly I don't notice any difference.
If you have more luck with your graphic card you'll be probably OK with Wayland. Anyway the X11 session is there, logout from Wayland and login using X11.
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?
With Debian 11, kernel 5.10.0-35-amd64
I was sure that I was using the NVIDIA driver 390 but I run dpkg -l before replying to you and I found out that actually I'm running the 470.256.02 driver. I definitely run the NVIDIA card because NVIDIA X Server Settings is telling me that X Screen 0 is on "Quadro K1100M (GPU 0)". I see it also in /var/log/messages and
cpuinfo reports that my CPU is an i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40GHz which according to the Intel web site has an internal Intel® HD Graphics 4600. I think that I never used it. NVIDIA X Server Settings does not report it but it's a NVIDIA program so I would not be surprised if it does not see it. Anyway, the kernel module for Intel should be i915 and it's not there. Maybe I have to load it but I'm phasing out this version of the OS. I'm pretty sure I never installed anything to switch between the two GPUs. There used to be something called bumblebee. Is that what you are using now?Apparently I can install the 470 driver in Debian 13 https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=163756 but it's from the unstable distribution and if Nouveau works I'm fine with that. I'm afraid that the NVIDIA driver and Wayland won't mix well even on 13 so I'll be on X11 anyway.
I use older Thinkpads with Optimus switching, so using the Intel GPU is not opotional: it is always on, but the OS offloads GPU-intensive stuff to the nVidia GPU.
In my testing with Debian 12, I could not get my nVidia chips recognised at all. In some distros, this has the side-effect of disabling the Displayport output, which is a deal-breaker as I use an external monitor and the machines do not have HDMI.
Alternatively, it is theoretically possible to forward port their driver yourself since their kernel compatibility shims are open source and you can see what changes they made in newer versions to support newer kernels. This is likely a masochistic exercise however.
Fractional scaling is fixed in Plasma 6 though. So, if you need that, it has been good for 1 year now.
Even *Windows* and *macOS* struggle with this — just look at how messy *fractional scaling* is [link](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20221025-00/?p=10...).
And yet, *Linux/KDE* has been pushing GUI innovation for decades. Apple and Microsoft have copied so many KDE features it’s hard to keep track.
Wayland is, by far, the best windowing system I've ever used. No dropped frames, ever. Its actually kind of uncanny, it feels like you're using an iPhone.
We think that the Wayland session currently is the better choice for the majority of our users. It's more stable and polished, performs better on average, and has more features and enables more hardware.
That said there are still gaps in the experience, and non-latin input is one of them. In principle it's roughly on par witu X11, but it's still pretty crap, e.g. at the moment we give you a choice between having a virtual keyboard and having something like ibus active, when many users want both at the same time, and a lot of the non-latin setup stuff is still not part of the core product, which is very user-unfriendly.
The KDE Linux alpha in particular will definitely and unequivocably not serve you well as it currently doesn't ship any ibus/fcitx.
The good news is that this is something we are very actively working on in the background right now. We have an annual community-wide goal election process that made Input improvements one of our goals, and the topic has been all over our developer conference this year.
Jank and glitches. Jank and glitches.
I'm currently stuck on Windows for some old school .NET work, but otherwise have been running Wayland on either arch or fedora for 8 or so years, no real problems specific to Wayland. With that said, I've also always had X to fall back to for the odd program that absolutely only worked in an X session. At this point, though, I don't even recall what they were (probably something that didn't like running under Swaywm because wlroots), so even that might not be an issue.
And no, gnome's wayland compositor did not achieve it either. They threw away all accessibility support and then invented two new gnome-only protocols for it that no software except gnomes own compositor supports.
> KDE Linux is an immutable distribution that uses Arch Linux packages as its base, but Graham notes that it is "definitely not an 'Arch-based distro!'" Pacman is not included, and Arch is used only for the base operating system. Everything else, he said, is either compiled from source using KDE Builder or installed using Flatpak.
This is where I've been for the last 7 years. Very happy with it. I'm looking forward to an Arc Pro machine with SR-IOV GPU capability for VMs. That is pretty much my dream desktop, as much as I care to have one.
"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."
https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/06/announcing-the-alpha-r...
I'd also expect installing flatpaks offline would be a hassle.
http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html
Strange design.
> 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.
But then, since / is rw and only /usr is read-only, it should be possible to install additional kernel modules, just not ones that live in /usr - unless /lib is symlinked to /usr/lib, as happens in a lot of distros these days.
Well, as long as they're either updating frequently or you're not using nvidia drivers (which are notoriously unpleasant with Wayland) I guess it's fine for a lot of people.
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