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“KDE Linux” (codenamed “Project Banana”) is a work-in-progress name of a KDE-owned general-purpose Linux distribution proposed at Akademy 2024. Not to be confused with KDE Neon.

Warning

This page serves as a design document, thus information presented here should be considered a snapshot of the ongoing discussion, not final decisions.

Goals

Create a bulletproof OS showcasing the best of KDE that we can proudly recommend to users and OEMs, with a coherent "here's how you get it" story.

• "The KDE operating system"
• Quality experience
• Doesn't break, or at least easy to recover
• Keeping security in mind
• No packaging knowledge needed
• Focus on modern technologies
• Useful to our users
• Useful to our hardware partners
• Useful to our developers

Non-goals

Does not have to support the proprietary NVIDIA kernel driver. We can require that NVIDIA GPUs must either be new enough to use the open-source kernel modules that can be distributed in-tree, or else use Nouveau.

Target audience and use cases

It should have multiple editions suitable for different kinds of users. Ideas:

• Developer edition: built from git master and released daily, including debugging tools and KDE dev environment. Like Neon Developer.
• Enthusiast edition: ships released software, and releases to users on upstream KDE's schedule, like Neon User. Additionally, when there are any beta releases, ships the beta.
• Stable edition: ships only released software on a delayed schedule, based on TBD quality metrics.

Architecture

Original architecture ideas for the project included the following:

• Reproducible builds, must-pass CI, automated UI testing
• Base OS is Arch-based. OS updates are some degree of rolling; snapshot based releases with relatively recent libraries
• Systemd-boot as the bootloader
• Btrfs as the filesystem
• Encryption of all mutable data (e.g. user homedir, and cache locations on /)
• Included recovery partition
• Read-only base system, like SteamOS, Kinoite, and MicroOS
• Atomic image-based A/B updates with rollback functionality
• Manual package installation happens transparently using a per-user or systemwide overlay
• Apps are from Flatpak (and maybe also Snap if it's not too hard and the UX is okay)
• Has nice GRUB (systemd-boot?) theming: https://blog.inadvisor.lt/bling-up-your-fedora-grub.
• Wayland by default
• Automatic user data backup system using Btrfs snapshots, with a nice GUI around it like Apple's Time Machine
• DConf-like configuration management UI suitable for enterprise and managed environments leveraging KConfigXT for everything
• Simple input method configuration for CJK and more
• "Troubleshooting hub" app

TODO: hardware support, software separation, security model, deployment, OEM mode; proposed solution, alternatives, trade-offs for each section

systemd-sysext

systemd-sysext allows us to overlay developer content on top of /usr without impacting the base system.

Setup

# create directories
mkdir -p ~/kde/usr/lib/extension-release.d/
# create an extension-release file
cp /usr/lib/os-release ~/kde/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.kde
# make the ID ignored so updates don't break the extension
sed -i s%^ID=.*%ID=_any%g ~/kde/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.kde
# owned by root so it can't be removed
sudo chown root:root ~/kde/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.kde
# enable the extension
sudo mkdir /var/lib/extensions/
sudo ln -s $HOME/kde /var/lib/extensions/kde
sudo systemd-sysext merge
sudo systemd-sysext

Use

Use DESTDIR=~/kde to install stuff and then restart systemd-sysext. Beware that when changing polkit/dbus stuff you also want to restart those services as they don't necessarily pick up changes.

DESTDIR=~/kde ninja install && sudo systemctl restart systemd-sysext.service

Communication

• Matrix room
• Gitlab issues

Ideas

See 🍌/Obstsalat

• Automatic QA (openqa? Selenium? quicktest?)
• Human QA tracking (test case management of some sort)
• Health reporting into Sentry to identify bad releases
• Support sending non-KDE crashes to Sentry
• Better kde-builder dependency definitions
• kde-builder to build release tags
• Explore systemd-homed
• Secure Boot
• ARM/RISC-V images?