🍌
“KDE Linux” (codenamed “Project Banana”) is a work-in-progress name of a KDE-owned general-purpose Linux distribution proposed at Akademy 2024. Not to be confused with KDE Neon.
Warning
Goals
Create a bulletproof OS showcasing the best of KDE that we can proudly recommend to users and OEMs, with a coherent "here's how you get it" story.
- "The KDE operating system"
- Quality experience
- Doesn't break, or at least easy to recover
- Keeping security in mind
- No packaging knowledge needed
- Focus on modern technologies
- Useful to our users
- Useful to our hardware partners
- Useful to our developers
Non-goals
Does not have to support the proprietary NVIDIA kernel driver. We can require that NVIDIA GPUs must either be new enough to use the open-source kernel modules that can be distributed in-tree, or else use Nouveau.
Target audience and use cases
It should have multiple editions suitable for different kinds of users. Ideas:
- Developer edition: built from git master and released daily, including debugging tools and KDE dev environment. Like Neon Developer.
- Enthusiast edition: ships released software, and releases to users on upstream KDE's schedule, like Neon User. Additionally, when there are any beta releases, ships the beta.
- Stable edition: ships only released software on a delayed schedule, based on TBD quality metrics.
Architecture
Original architecture ideas for the project included the following:
- Reproducible builds, must-pass CI, automated UI testing
- Base OS is Arch-based. OS updates are some degree of rolling; snapshot based releases with relatively recent libraries
- Systemd-boot as the bootloader
- Btrfs as the filesystem
- Encryption of all mutable data (e.g. user homedir, and cache locations on /)
- Included recovery partition
- Read-only base system, like SteamOS, Kinoite, and MicroOS
- Atomic image-based A/B updates with rollback functionality
- Manual package installation happens transparently using a per-user or systemwide overlay
- Apps are from Flatpak (and maybe also Snap if it's not too hard and the UX is okay)
- Has nice GRUB (systemd-boot?) theming: https://blog.inadvisor.lt/bling-up-your-fedora-grub.
- Wayland by default
- Automatic user data backup system using Btrfs snapshots, with a nice GUI around it like Apple's Time Machine
- DConf-like configuration management UI suitable for enterprise and managed environments leveraging KConfigXT for everything
- Simple input method configuration for CJK and more
- "Troubleshooting hub" app
TODO: hardware support, software separation, security model, deployment, OEM mode; proposed solution, alternatives, trade-offs for each section
updates
systemd-sysext
systemd-sysext allows us to overlay developer content on top of /usr without impacting the base system.
Setup
# create directories mkdir -p ~/kde/usr/lib/extension-release.d/ # create an extension-release file cp /usr/lib/os-release ~/kde/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.kde # make the ID ignored so updates don't break the extension sed -i s%^ID=.*%ID=_any%g ~/kde/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.kde # owned by root so it can't be removed sudo chown root:root ~/kde/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.kde # enable the extension sudo mkdir /var/lib/extensions/ sudo ln -s $HOME/kde /var/lib/extensions/kde sudo systemd-sysext merge sudo systemd-sysext
Use
Use DESTDIR=~/kde to install stuff and then restart systemd-sysext. Beware that when changing polkit/dbus stuff you also want to restart those services as they don't necessarily pick up changes.
DESTDIR=~/kde ninja install && sudo systemctl restart systemd-sysext.service
Communication
Ideas
See 🍌/Obstsalat
- Automatic QA (openqa? Selenium? quicktest?)
- Human QA tracking (test case management of some sort)
- Health reporting into Sentry to identify bad releases
- Support sending non-KDE crashes to Sentry
- Better kde-builder dependency definitions
- kde-builder to build release tags
- Explore systemd-homed
- Secure Boot
- ARM/RISC-V images?