The development of KDE Linux It's progressing well. It's been several months since they launched it. alpha versionAnd they already have their sights set on the beta. That's how it is announced Nate Graham, in a post on his personal blog, shared all sorts of information. For example, that they're going to drop support for snap packages and apps like Elisa and Kate. There's an explanation for everything, and it's for the sake of the overall user experience.
More and more contributors have started using KDE Linux, and that has helped to advance its development. The next step is to release a beta version. For users interested in trying something new, but who aren't developers, the beta versions won't differ much from other distributions, except that it will be somewhat more stable.
KDE Linux enables Delta updates by default
After months of testing, the project has Delta updates enabled In KDE Linux, this type of update improves update speed by calculating differences between the current system version and the one being updated to, downloading only the differences and applying them as patches for the new version. As a result, each update should be only 1-2GB, down from the 7GB of the previous method.
Simply put, the change is that before, a complete image was downloaded, and now only the part necessary for the changes to be made is downloaded.
Plasma-login-manager has been integrated
KDE Linux now starts with plasma-setup. This supports the sale of systems, as it is configured after the first boot.
Furthermore, KDE Linux now uses Plasma Login Manager instead of SDDM. It's a more modern session manager that's a better fit for Plasma 6.x. SDDM was created for Plasma 5.x.
KDE Linux improves hardware support and performance
The latest KDE Linux RAW images include support for:
- Scanners.
- Drawing tablets.
- Share files via Bluetooth.
- Android devices.
- Razer and Logitech keyboards and mice.
- Mouse buttons of all types.
- Disks formatted in LVM.
- Disks formatted as exFAT and XFS.
- Audio CDs.
- Yubikeys.
- Smart cards.
- Virtual cameras.
- External WiFi antennas with integrated storage.
- Some professional audio devices.
- Vulkan on some GPUs.
Furthermore, performance and efficiency have been improved by enhancing the kernel configuration and layers such as PulseAudio and PipeWire.
Welcomes and farewells
Ark It now supports RAR file managementIn a standard distribution, support is added by installing something like Unrar, but in an immutable distribution, support must be added out of the box for it to work. And that's what they've done.
In the terminal, a warning has been added for when commands like "apt install" are attempted, informing the user that it is not possible. Additionally, the Zsh configuration file has been included.
Among the welcome features, KDE Linux has included by default KCalc, Qrca, Kup and other CLI-type tools such as kdialog, lshw, drm_info, cpupower, turbostat, plocsate, fzf and other maintenance tools for Btrfs.
Among the changes, they've decided to remove support for snap and homebrew packages. The reason for abandoning snap has to do with the installation method: it's in the AUR, and they don't want to use the AUR in KDE Linux. The decision has been made to stick with only Flatpak packages. Homebrew was also dropped from the list for other reasons, and KDE's recommendation, and my own, is that for software not available by default, you should use [the appropriate service/platform]. distro box.
Other farewells include:
- Kate, because KWrite is already there.
- Elisa, because they say that local reproduction is losing steam and they also include Haruna.
- Icon Explorer, since you can get an alternative to Flathub.
- iwd, the wireless daemon that was never active by default.
Is KDE Linux worth it?
The beta version hasn't arrived yet, so for now I'd say no. In the future, when we talk about the stable version, I'd say yes. It just depends on what you want to use the operating system for.
For example, I used MariaDB locally for testing in the past, and that's simpler on a traditional distribution than on an immutable one. But I haven't needed it for a while. Manjaro works very well for me, and I don't need to change, but if I did need to and I wasn't switching to Linux Mint, KDE Linux would be my choice.