KDE's New Distro: Btrfs-Based, Immutable Linux OS, with Flatpak and Snap
KDE's New Distro: Btrfs-Based, Immutable Linux OS, with Flatpak and Snap
Ready to be surprised? KDE Linux, a new Arch-based immutable OS featuring Btrfs, Flatpak, and Snap, made by KDE's devs, is now in development.
Flatpak: 😏
Snap: 😑
1Get rid of snap and I'm interested
8(and possibly Snap)
I hope they exclude Snap from the default installation. Don't want an OS with built-in support for Canonical's closed source app store service when Flatpak is decentralized and FOSS on the server side.
17Flatpak and snap? Count me the hell out.
3Obligatory please-stop-releasing-new-distros-and-just-improve-exiting-things-instead
20What do you have difficulty exiting?
7Introducing vimux, the brand new distro nobody has any idea how to exit!
8
My immediate thought was: why not NixOS as a base? Building KDE is such a nightmare that if they had to deal with it themselves on NixOS, it would help them clear up their dependencies. Right now it's such a big mess of unnamed and implicit dependencies that exposing it to the team would also show them how to cut down on them.
My hope was also that if the KDE team were invest in a NixOS offshoot, that the OS would finally get proper GUIs or integrations into existing GUIs like Discover (why not Diskover?) Or the system settings and other config management.
But, to be fair, I could understand if they considered it, took one look at the documentation and noped out.
14The "distro" would be reduced to a configuration file base (which Id be all for imo).
On that note, Nix desperately needs officially supported config sharing social system like dotfyle.
3
Cool. My first thought was how this would differ from blendOS, which is also immutable Arch. Seems like the main difference is the use of systemd-sysupdate to handle unprivileged updates.
Not sure how rollbacks are handled, but I only glanced at it.
8Wondering why this isn't built on opensuse.
4Opensuse doesn't have rpm-ostree. Their immutable offerings are just snapper/btrfs snapshots before changes to the system.
Such a setup is nowhere near as powerful. rpm-ostree can rebase itself based off of a container/oci image. It can layer images on top of eachother. Rather than just tracking when changes happened, it can also track what change happened, in a git style setup.
1Ok, so rpm-ostree was the reason. Was not aware suse Lacks this...
1
Why would it? OpenSUSE isn't a good choice for a base system it is fairly obscure and the base is rather large.
3They have been a supporter / promoter of KDE for a long time, would seem logical to me that KDE would go with suse.
1
I wonder if this means SteamOS will never see general release.
5This along with Bazzite do seem to make SteamOS redundant.
Edit: I read the front of the wiki, this isn't much like SteamOS, this sounds like it will be good for KDE enthusiasts and OEMs. I'll give it a try after it cooks more, looks like a great distro for a laptop
14
Hmmm I guess this kind of makes sense - most distros push Gnome above KDE (probably because it doesn't look like this - where's Tantacrul when you need him?). On the other hand, there's already Kubuntu...
I'm a bit skeptical about immutable distros too. What if I want to install a package that isn't already installed and isn't available as a Flatpak/Snap? Seems like it's going to run in similar issues to everything else that tries to wade upstream against the bad decisions of the existing Linux packaging zeitgeist, e.g. how Nix has to install everything in one root-owned directory because nobody cares about portable installation.
-1What if I want to install a package that isn’t already installed and isn’t available as a Flatpak/Snap?
2
