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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.

updates

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

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?