This month in KDE Linux

Another month has gone by since the last time I wrote about KDE Linux, KDE’s upcoming new operating system. The project hasn’t stood still! Here’s an assortment of what’s gone on recently:

Real sizes for system updates

Aleix Pol Gonzalez and Harald Sitter built the machinery to allow update sizes to be calculated for delta updates. This means the sizes listed in Discover are no longer “Unknown”. Instead, you’ll see a real number:

Better tools for extending the OS

Lasath Fernando started building out the new Kapsule system, which is a tool for installing software in long-lived containers with great integration with Konsole and the rest of the OS. Before this, we experimented multiple options for experts to extend the system — including Homebrew, Distrobox, and Nix — but none really hit the sweet spot. They were too limited, too dangerous, too complex, too ephemeral, or too something else.

Kapsule deeply integrates with Konsole, which makes sense because a terminal window is a major interface for touching or extending the system in this way. Integrations with Kate and Discover are planned, too. In other words, we want to go all in on this promising new technology for the “extending the system” story for experts and software developers.

You can read more about Kapsule in these blog posts.

Moving to better infrastructure

Harald did a lot of work to upload KDE Linux images to a better location, in preparation for far higher server loads in the future as the OS gains users and rolls out a user-focused edition.

Pre-installed backup system

I pre-installed KDE’s Kup backup system, which is really quite nice! Basic documentation can be found here.

APFS filesystem support

Hadi Chokr turned on support for reading from and writing to disks formatted with Apple’s APFS filesystem.

Safer Homebrew, ydotool, and AMD GPUs

renner03 put in place a safety mechanism that prevents Homebrew packages from breaking the system in case you install Homeberew and any of its packages would otherwise conflict with system files. Now, the Homebrew packages break instead.

Note that we still don’t recommend Homebrew. But now you can use it without endangering the rest of the system.

I made the ydotool automation tool safer; now it’s an off-by-by-default system service you need to authenticate to turn on.

I also put in place a workaround for total system freezes affecting AMD GPU users. This stubborn AMD driver issue has been unfixed for months, so a workaround here is appropriate.

More languages in pre-installed Flatpak apps

Guilherme Marçal Silva fixed an issue that made the pre-installed Flatpak apps only usable in English.

Longer time for installation

Jonar Harer bumped the installation timeout from 30 minutes to 1 hour to account for slower devices.

Outstanding issues

KDE Linux is still an alpha product with lots of bugs and rough edges. We had our second dev call yesterday and discussed the road to a beta release, which will include user builds. We’re going to be focusing on a number of high priority issues and will consider the other beta-milestoned issues to be done on an “if we can” basis.

Get Involved!

Progress on KDE Linux is steady but nonetheless rather slow. Help is greatly appreciated. In addition to installing it and reporting issues, there are lots of development task that need doing:

• High priority tasks for technical experts
• Other tasks to make the user builds better
• Tasks for newcomers