Jump to content

Akademy/2025/Immutable Distros BoF

From KDE Community Wiki

Summary

We discussed possible opportunities for sharing technology across immutable distros and found a good opportunity in the build/dependency metadata. We came up with the outlines of how to migrate data between machines. Also a bunch of KDE Linux related topics were discussed. Tomorrow at 10:00 in Room 2 we will continue with Automatic QA and Recoverability topics.

Agenda

  • How to share more of the base image building between the different distros?
  • Mobile Device Management (MDM)
  • Migrating install to a new device
  • Backup support, Dolphin integration to rollback files
  • System encryption
  • Switching editions
  • Automatic QA
  • Recoverability / Never dead
  • Security

Notes

Sharing Buildsystem tech

  • establish a canonical source of truth for dependencies. don't consider edge cases, we establish what we want this thing to depend on. if distros want to deviate they have to have special handling on their own
  • input-distroformat-outputformat system. kde-ci.yaml as input format maybe. metadata doesn't help (e.g. collecting cmake output)

MDM

  • For later. bof on MDM for 2026 in Graz

Migration

  • do it with baby steps. cross distro is for later. start with migration within the same distro but on different devices.
  • different scopes can be handled one after the other.
  • kdeconnect + sshfs to transfer stuff. later something more bespoke (if necessary)

migration scopes

  • apps
  • user data
  • profile data

backup

  • maybe polish up kup. someone needs to pick up the project and come up with a plan
  • dolphin integration: undo/recovery are kinda different from a user pov but technically the same. probably needs some metadata store to abstract away storage locations.
  • maybe look into the osx backup system thing and borrow ideas

security

tricky. someone smart should think about it. maybe just do it like windows and encrypt everything. done

switching editions

  • configs are an app issue we don't care about
  • but what about the flatpak apps?
  • flatpak upstream needs support for using individual apps from a different delivery channel (e.g. beta)
Retrieved from "https://community.kde.org/index.php?title=Akademy/2025/Immutable_Distros_BoF&oldid=104555"