KDE Linux is official. The first alpha version of the new distribution has been released for testing.

For those unaware, KDE Plasma is a popular desktop environment and ships as a part of flavored distros like Kubuntu, Fedora KDE, etc. My experience with KDE is mostly limited to their apps, especially KDE Connect, Okular, Ark, and Kate. I briefly used Fedora KDE recently on a secondary “distro hopping” drive,  Plasma was pretty good. There is also KDE Neon, which is maintained by the KDE Community. But this time KDE Linux is, made by KDE.

(Image courtesy: KDE)

Why another distro? KDE Linux wants to be “the KDE operating system” that offers a user-friendly experience, with a high-quality UX. It is an immutable OS, meaning there will be some restrictions, such as limited access to the system components.

KDE’s in-house distro comes with, you guessed it, Plasma and KDE apps. KDE Linux is built using Arch Linux packages, but apparently shouldn’t be considered Arch-based. It doesn’t have a package manager (no pacman for you), so you will need to install apps using Flatpak, Snap, or AppImages. It does include Distrobox and Toolbox pre-installed. OMG Ubuntu reports that KDE Linux includes the following apps by default: Mozilla Firefox, Haruna, Elisa, Kate, KWrite, Gwenview, etc. That’s quite a good starter set up.

The system requirements for KDE Linux are fairly low.

UEFI firmware (this includes most sold in the last 15 years)
An AMD or Intel CPU
1 GB of memory (more will make the system faster)
6 GB of storage space (more than 12 will allow for system rollbacks)

I mean it is Linux, the specs needed are budget-friendly, but look at that. That’s lower than Linux Mint‘s requirements (2GB RAM/ 20GB storage).

Want to try KDE Linux? Head over to https://kde.org/linux/ and download it.

There are some caveats, in its current state KDE Linux does not support NVIDIA GPUs older than the GTX 1630 out of the box, you will need to tinker with it a bit. Secure Boot is not supported at the moment, but it will be in the future. System updates are being delivered as an entire OS image, yes these are atomic upgrades. Check the official wiki for more details.

I have not tested KDE Linux yet, it’s way too early to do that. So this is just an FYI article. I wouldn’t recommend using an alpha version as your primary OS, but there’s no harm trying a Live US, or maybe you can try it in a virtual machine or a secondary system/drive.

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