KDE's 'Other' Distro - KDE Linux - Now Available To Download In Pre-Alpha

'KDE Linux is an all-new desktop Linux distro being developed as a showcase for the KDE desktop project,' reports The Register.

'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...

Several aspects of [KDE Linux's] 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... 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... 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 intended to one day be a bulletproof daily driver, not a demo system, which is the intended purpose of KDE Neon...' the article concludes.

And while their test of current work-in-progress/test version kept crashing, 'the promise is considerable, and this could turn out to be one of the most radical end-user distros out there.'
Thanks to Slashdot reader king*jojo for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.