Project Banana ripens into a pre-alpha for KDE Linux, and you can test it

The former "Project Banana" now has a more sober name, albeit one a bit trickier to search for.

KDE Linux is an all-new desktop Linux distro being developed as a showcase for the KDE desktop project. The project is still in a pre-alpha testing stage, but recently went public on the KDE website. Versions are available to download and try out.

KDE Linux is an entirely new and experimental OS. There's lots of room for confusion here, because KDE already has a demonstration distro, KDE Neon. KDE Linux is a totally separate and far more ambitious project. In terms of its underlying design, it's intended to be a super-stable end-user distro. This is in contrast with Neon, which is an experimental showcase for the latest and greatest code. Neon isn't meant to be anyone's daily driver. There's a little more to it, but an executive summary of Neon could be "the latest KDE Plasma pre-installed on top of Ubuntu LTS."

KDE Linux is a very different beast. It's not based on it, but several aspects of its design are clearly influenced by Valve's SteamOS 3. Like SteamOS 3, KDE Linux is an immutable distro, with dual read-only Btrfs-format root partitions that update each other alternately. Regular Reg readers may recall this because we discussed it nearly a year ago in the context of both of the two biggest names in Linux desktops – KDE Plasma and GNOME – working on their own showcase distros.

KDE Linux isn't based on Ubuntu or Debian. It's built using Arch Linux, but it's different enough that it doesn't really count as an Arch variant. As an immutable distro, there's no package manager, for instance, so the user can't install Arch packages. This also applies to other native OS packages, including, for instance, Nvidia proprietary drivers. That means KDE Linux only supports recent Nvidia GPUs for which Nvidia supplies FOSS drivers. In Big Green's own words, "Nvidia Grace Hopper or Nvidia Blackwell" and "newer GPUs from the Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, or Hopper architectures."

As it's an immutable distro, it shares some attributes with other OSes that have read-only root file systems. You can only install sandboxed apps that go in their own corner of the OS, and here the plan is that users will install Flatpak (and possibly Snap, "if it's not too hard and the UX is OK") packages using the KDE Discover app store. Aside from them, you won't be able to update individual packages. OS updates come as a whole new system image, with all components updated at once. This is unlike most current desktop OSes. Instead it's more akin to how smartphone OS updates work.

Right now, there are various serious limitations. This is not ready for production yet. Aside from the Nvidia drivers issue, it doesn't yet support Secure Boot, and right now, updates are big, because updating is managed directly by systemd, and that can't yet handle incremental upgrades – you get a whole fresh OS image every time. Since the current download is over 5 GB in size, this is substantial. Oh, and it's Wayland-only.

However, to our jaundiced eye, the plan seems sound and well considered. Using Btrfs and its snapshots to make it possible to roll back to the previous system state makes for a much simpler updating system than Red Hat's OStree, which looks superficially simple but gets seriously complicated under the hood. In a previous role, The Reg FOSS desk daily drove a Btrfs-based distro for just over four years, and we experienced more fatal file system corruption incidents than in the previous two decades of Linux use. However, a read-only Btrfs system should be much more robust, and the A/B update system with dual redundant root file systems also eliminates whole other categories of potential failure.

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This is intended to one day be a bulletproof daily driver, not a demo system, which is the intended purpose of KDE Neon. It's not meant for those who want to get under the hood and tinker – plain old Arch Linux is better for that. If you want to install your own packages and customize your OS, then existing tools such as the container-based Distrobox may help.

The idea is good: lean heavily on existing upstream tooling, and draw upon an existing design that's already out there in the hands of millions of users. It's a radical design, and very unlike most existing distros. In terms of how it's designed to be robust and have "no user-serviceable parts inside" (as the warning sticker on many consumer electronics devices says), it has some of the things we wrote we wanted to see in a FOSS ChromeOS last month. For those interested, some of the developers are answering questions in the Reddit discussion about the new OS.

We tried the current work-in-progress test version inside QEMU. You need to follow the steps in the KDE Community Wiki very closely. After a few tries, we managed to install it, and it booted as far as the login screen, but the desktop instantly crashed on login, every time. This is not ready for prime-time yet, and we don't think it will be before the looming Windows 10 support cut-off in a couple of months. But the promise is considerable, and this could turn out to be one of the most radical end-user distros out there. ®