Now we have the immutable Exodia, VanillaOS for Debian, KDE Linux for Arch, Bazzite/Fedora Atomic for Fedora, NixOS for NixOS. What’s great about this is KDE is zeroed in on developing for immutable distros now and will make their apps work better with them, this will help the whole ecosystem.
News article: https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/06/announcing-the-alpha-release-of-kde-linux/
Just what the world needs, another Linux distro…
A sentiment I have in the past expressed myself.
However, there’s a method to our madness. KDE is a huge producer of software. It’s awkward for us to not have our own method of distributing it. Yes, KDE produces source code that others distribute, but we self-distribute our apps on app stores like Flathub and the Snap and Microsoft stores, so I think it’s natural thing for us to have our own platform for doing that distribution too, and that’s an operating system. I think all the major producers of free software desktop environments should have their own OS, and many already do: Linux Mint and ElementaryOS spring to mind, and GNOME is working on one too.
Besides, this matter was settled 10 years ago with the creation of KDE neon, our first bite at the “in-house OS” apple. The sky did not fall; everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
Speaking of KDE neon, what’s going on with it? Is it canceled? If not, doesn’t this amount to unnecessary duplication?
KDE neon is not canceled. However it has shed most of its developers over the years, which is problematic, and it’s currently being held together by a heroic volunteer. KDE e.V. has been reaching out to stakeholders to see if we can help put in place a continuity or transition plan. No decision has yet been made about its future.
While neon continues to exist, KDE Linux therefore does represent duplication. As for unnecessary? That I’m less sure about that. Harald, myself, and others feel that KDE neon has somewhat reached its limit in terms of what we can do with it. It was a great first product for KDE to distribute our own software and prepare the world for the idea of KDE in that role, and it served admirably for a decade. But technological and conceptual issues limit how far we can continue to develop it.
KDE Linux is an “immutable base” operating system that does not include a traditional package manager. Apps can be installed from Flatpak, Snap, or AppImages.
Oh, wow. Okay. I can see why some people might want something like that, but I’m empathically not one of them.
Its “OK”, and with Distrobox available it can make it far more usable. My experience with it has been on Bazzite, and it was great for a while but ended up having issues with os-tree a number of times, when the whole promise of being able to rollback to a last known good install didn’t work, I went back to a traditional OS.
Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. History has shown that a system package manager is a very poor solution for distributing software. Anyone who disagrees has never been involved in shipping and/or supporting software on Linux. Nix tries to solve this one way, immutable distros solve it another (IMO much simpler) way.
You can still install software using a traditional package manager via podman or docker. Toolbox and Distrobox streamline this for the common shell use-case by automatically doing things like mounting your home directory, using host networking, etc so it looks/acts like a regular shell. Anything you install in the container works exactly as it would on the host, except you can completely wreck it without breaking your host (just don’t rm -rf your home directory, or anything shared)
Immutability is the future of the Linux desktop.
Yeah, that did nothing to sell me on the concept, but if there’s one great thing about open source it is that there’s no single right way of doing things. If this is what you want for your system(s), you get to do you.
And those of us who run on cobbled together systems composed of other people’s e-waste get to not waste massive amounts of system resources we don’t have on abstractions ten layers deep. I can live with the potential for occasional transient system instability if it means I can run my base desktop system without involvement of flatpak, snap or - Jesus Christ - docker.
I’m not trying to pick a fight or anything, just doing my part to prevent the spread of disinformation and ignorance on the internet. The second paragraph in your comment shows you don’t understand these technologies at all, and I feel compelled to point it out for the benefit of people reading it, so they don’t come away misinformed.
There are no abstractions here. Containers use kernel features called “namespaces” and “cgroups” to isolate system resources and implement sand boxing. There’s no abstraction layer in the software engineering sense. You might be confused because containers look like virtual machines (which is by design), but they’re not that at all, they’re regular native system processes that just aren’t allowed to see each other. There’s nothing about this that is precluded by “cobbled together e-waste”, except maybe if you can’t install a modern-ish Linux kernel for some reason.
For some perspective, the exact same containerization technology is deployed in production on millions of Linux servers around the world every day. Every wasted second in those environment costs money, and they wouldn’t be used if they were “wasteful” or inefficient.
There’s a lot of misinfo online about Flatpaks and their disk usage. Yes, they include all their dependencies, but so do a lot of other devs who ship software on Linux (and some don’t even bother to statically link them) outside of a system package manager. The name for that is “vendored” libraries. Flatpaks however implement deduplication.
For anyone on the fence who is reading this, some important perspective to have is that, like many old communities, Linux has people who are stubborn/resistant to change. Sometimes that’s a good polocy, sometimes it’s not. In this case, it certainly is not. Look at the growing success of immutable distros (like Steam OS) for proof of that. Android and iOS have successfully deployed a similar model since day one. Linux can’t offer a stable API like win32 for various reasons, but it can do Flatpaks, which comes with the added benefit of secure sandboxing (which win32 lacks). It makes life easier for users, and makes it easier for devs to port their software to Linux.
It is the future.
