KDE Linux Emerges! Will It Supplement or Replace Neon?

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Hello community,

While browsing Mastodon today, I came across news about KDE Linux on a source that shares Linux news. I had previously heard about the existence of a Linux distribution developed by KDE outside of Neon. As someone who closely follows KDE news and developments, I haven’t yet come across an official announcement from KDE about this new distribution.

Therefore, I’d like to pose a few questions to the KDE development team, both my own curiosity and to reflect the thoughts of users with similar questions:

1. Is KDE Linux a replacement for KDE Neon?What will be the difference between the two?

2. Does KDE Linux represent a more innovative and different vision than KDE Neon?

3. Also, is this new system ready and stable enough for mainstream use?

4. Does KDE Linux aim to offer KDE technologies in a more holistic way, or does it aim to take the current KDE experience offered by KDE Neon to a different level?

5. What platform does KDE Linux use, or will it be its own platform?

I’m eagerly awaiting the KDE community’s thoughts and goals regarding this new project, and how it will relate to KDE Neon. It seems like a significant development for the future of KDE, and I believe it’s important for many users seeking more information to find answers to these questions.

In my opinion, merging two existing projects under a name like KDE Linux or KDE OS would be a great step. Developing a distribution with KDE’s own native platform, rather than relying on the Ubuntu LTS platform, would allow the project to become more independent, robust, and sustainable.

Such a change could represent a major turning point in KDE’s vision. Switching to a constantly updated platform and keeping the system always up-to-date could make KDE a leading player in the desktop environment space. This step would make KDE a much more accessible and attractive option, not only from a technical perspective but also from a user experience perspective.

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Would’t take much to replace Neon or Kubuntu.

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I’m not sure what they plan to do with it, but it should be called xenon.

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Supposedly it’s a Immutable Arch distro. I’m voting for “Plasma Mut”.:rofl:

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It’s merely an immutable, atomic, image based snapshot of Arch where you can install software with only flatpak and systemd-sysext. It doesn’t have even half the customizability of KDE Neon. The team within KDE that maintains KDE Linux is different from the team behind KDE Neon.

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KDE Linux - KDE Community answers most of your questions

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Hello again. The explanations here cover some information, but due to translation errors, they’re not entirely clear. I’m hoping for a concise and understandable explanation from someone truly knowledgeable on the subject.

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That sounds bad, very very bad.

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What translation errors? And did you see the link from that page to KDE Linux - KDE Community Wiki ? That has some more information.

I don’t know much more than what those pages say, but if you could say what isn’t clear to you after reading that, someone more knowledgable than I will probably see and answer.

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“Apps primarily come from Flatpak and Snap”,

Good thing SSD’s are huge nowadays and we have access to a lot of RAM, because this distro I think is going to need it. I can understand the reasoning for for using Flatpak & Snap, but my god they’re not very optimised.

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As far as I understand, the issue isn’t that important, at least not as I understand or imagine it. Therefore, I think it’s best to end this discussion here.

I’d like to take this opportunity to emphasize that KDE Neon is a great system, but it could be much better. As a user, I’ll do my best and contribute to this development with feedback.

However, I must say that an innovative Plasma system, developed as a single, independent project with its own core, called KDE OS or KDE Linux, would have truly impressed me much more.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated in this thread and shared their valuable ideas.

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I like the idea, that KDE Neon is intentionally ‘lean’ in that it doesn’t come loaded up with a stack of software that you may or may not particularly like - or wish to use. Leaving the Neon system relatively ‘bare-boned’ is better than trying to remove pre-installed software - whose removal or partial removal may cause the system to crash. However, the one thing I question is the use of Canonical Ubuntu as the base. With Kubuntu part of the Canonical stable - it seems to make Neon redundant. I appreciate that my suggestion may be scoffed at - but perhaps the Neon team should consider moving to Debian. I don’t think there are too many KDE systems out there that offer the ‘barebones’ approach to Debian. Perhaps, it could find a niche that is more useful in that regard. As for a name - how about KDEB ?

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Sorry for the rather late entry but as this is a high-ranking oogle result for “kde neon vs kde linux” (and moreso after I hit Send on this comment ig lol) … I’ll just add:

Re redundancy, I think you answer yourself. Kubuntu aims to be a full-featured general-purpose desktop that happens to leverage KDE as its centrepiece. KDE Neon is rather aiming to be “Just enough OS to run all of latest KDE”. I think that’s a meaningful distinction.

As for Debian, the problem there is you can forget about the “latest” part of Neon’s MO. Debian stable only just got past KDE5 with release of Trixie late last year. Neon may already build its own KDE packages in order to present the latest version, but a Debian stable base would mean it also had to do the same with a host of low-level dependencies. Basing on Ubuntu takes that workload (mostly) away.

If you mean Debian Sid (unstable), that would leave the Neon team on the hook for its bugs. Were I them, I wouldn’t want that risk of unforeseen showstoppers besmirching what’ll often be people’s first experience of KDE.

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As of 2026-01-15, there are no formal plans for KDE Linux to replace KDE neon.

Speaking personally, I do expect KDE Linux to eventually replace KDE neon, for the following reasons:

  1. Vastly more automated, with less busywork required from developers to keep it running
  2. More buzz and excitement around it (one of the key currencies of any FOSS project)
  3. More contributors as a result of 1 and 2
  4. Safer core architecture
  5. Technological base that aligns better with that KDE developers like and use

As for when those advantages will result in KDE Linux replacing KDE neon? I have no idea. Could be a year, could be two years, could be never.

At the minimum, we’ll have to have user builds of KDE Linux, which means completing our Beta milestone.

Yes that’s right, we consider the release of a general purpose Linux distribution to be a beta! Our Public Release milestone targets shipping a UX that we consider to be on par with the big commercial offerings.

So KDE Linux is not just a “showcase of KDE” distro. We intend for it to be the real deal.

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I’m always uncertain about whether statements like this are just parroted favorite-derivative marketing without any real thought cherry on top, or a genuine complete misunderstanding about how software development works. You can have well tested and well known – or fresh out the box yesterday. Pick either one, they are by definition opposite goals to aim for.

But I have to wonder, which version of KF6 do you think Ubuntu Noble ships with by default?

Spoiler alert, none of them. It’s even more Forget About Latest than Debian Stable is. And my Debian Stable VM doesn’t force me into only using ancient cmake constructs like Neon-on-Noble does. And my Debian Testing VM isn’t very far behind the Neon one for KDE/Qt, straight out of the box, and has the benefit of all the packages in it actually being installable.

So this:

Basing on Ubuntu takes that workload (mostly) away.

is just simply false at best, and a massive red flag about the foundation and basis for other decisions at worst.

I’ve just tried to update the Neon one, and currently there are more than a dozen packages, from the Neon repo, which have all been held back and failed to update because they were built with a version of liblcms2-2 that Neon doesn’t actually appear to ship, and which is again, absolutely ancient compared to what is in any current Debian release.

It always struck me as a little weird that Neon seems to mostly just be taking the current packaging work of the Debian KDE team and using that to build packages for a much older, much less flexible Ubuntu release. And I do understand that for some people that may have been a career bet as much as a technical decision - which is fine, every volunteer is entitled to choose how they spend their time. But it’s hard not to think that this effort would not be much better spent simply collaborating with the Debian KDE team, to be getting the latest KDE updates into Debian Testing as quickly and as well tested as possible.

I can’t speak for the overall merits of the two KDE team approaches here, or whether one will thrive and the other wither - but I can share what I was looking for when I first decided to trial Neon.

I’m developing software that needed testing against bleeding edge Qt and KF6/Kirigami - I needed an environment where I could install my preferred development tools and similarly bleeding edge versions of other third party packages from my own local repo.

And while Trixie was frozen for release, Neon seemed, on paper, like a promising option for that.

Except the “testing edition” install media completely failed to boot. And the “user edition”, which did install, forced me to hack kludges into things to workaround the ancient cmake support, and suffer older versions of other basic system tools that I had long ago updated in all my other dev environments.

I’m not really sure I see the niche for a new distro with an “immutable base” where you need to update the entire OS base every day and can’t easily install other things yourself. It might make things “easier for developers”, but it’s not clear to me which users really benefit from or want that.

I found this thread because I was wondering if I should report the liblcms issue, and whether it was worth asking for cmake to be added to the list of packages that Neon supplies current versions of (given how much of an intrinsic part to the whole Qt/KDE gestalt it is).

But now, honestly, it’s feeling more like The Future for my needs looks a lot more like plain vanilla Debian Testing is the sweet spot for most of my Bleeding Edge dev needs in this space. And it would be really nice to have a repo of bleeding edge (or near to it with a couple of days delay for major oopses to shake out) KDE/Qt packages that can layer on that. Maybe I just need to build my own local infra for building those if that’s not anybody else’s itch.

That’s my 2c on where we are, and the kind of direction that would be valuable for what I need to do. But not everyone is like me - and there’s definitely room for releases targeted at different audiences (Just like Debian Stable and Testing are). But it is pretty hard to see where “start from bleeding edge Debian work, then build and ship that for an ancient barely maintained Ubuntu release” is adding value in the kind of way which that amount of work really ought to be.

Do with that what you will, but that’s a Real User Story. : D

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My comment was based on how Neon had been described to me in the past. Next time I’ll be sure to add a couple of “AIUI” and maybe you can restrain yourself from the personal attacks, yeah? Totally uncalled-for.

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There was nothing personal or attacky about it, so genuinely sorry if that’s how you feel about having some light shone on a common meme that’s really just pretty blatant misinformation. I do get that can be a bit embarrassing, but it’s always better to learn the truth than to keep putting yourself in an embarrassing position.

I know you didn’t invent this story, so it would be terribly unfair to hold you responsible for being more than, as you’ve just confirmed, the last person to repeat it without actually fact checking it in any way. But in my most conciliatory, least poised for attack, voice - please don’t just keep repeating things you now know are untrue prefixed with “AIUI” - because if that’s somehow Still how you “understand it”, then you’ve somehow managed to just get offended without actually understanding any of what I explained. And that doesn’t really help anyone.

So if you don’t actually get it, let’s clear that up. The point wasn’t to take a swing at you, it was to help people properly understand The Problem and options for solving it.

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I don’t know how you interpreted from the above that I intended to continue repeating the same information. Next time – as in, next time I feel moved to wade into any subject based on the first couple of prominent bits of coverage I’ve read on it – I’ll be sure to avoid implicitly presenting it as fact. Clearer? Happy?

If what I said is wrong (and yes that is indeed embarrassing to learn) you can just state that without the crap about “parroting” and “massive red flags” - if you convey your point with language like that then yes, people are going to take it as a personal attack.

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I am slightly confused by your comments. For example, are your complaints about Cmake about the fact that Neon uses CMake, or that it is an outdated version? When you say ancient Ubuntu, what do you mean?

Neon is based on the LTS version of Ubuntu. Yes, it gets outdated quickly from a development point of view with stale libs and build envs. Bleeding edge dev is not what LTS is for. I agree that Neon seems to be inappropriate for your use case. For mine, it is ideal. I have more issues with bleeding edge always breaking everything.

I have, in the nearly 4 years since installing Neon, only run into one roadblock and that was right before the rebase where I was having trouble with constantly changing dependencies and stale libs when trying to daily build KDE in Neon User 22.04. That of course was to be expected. 24.04 is similarly beginning to show its age and I suspect I will be looking forward to the next rebase soon.

I do agree with your thoughts on an immutable distro. I got a chuckle when you pointed out that Nate said out loud what we have all being saying: “building the distro the devs want, not what we want”. That has been my major gripe with Linux for 30 years and the main reason its been soooo slow to be adopted. It is not user facing enough.

Neon was the first Distro in 30 years of using Linux that made me feel that I was not compromising everything I wanted out of an OS. It made me feel like it was giving me what I want. Every other distro makes me feel like I am giving something up. Especially the new KDE Linux. It works OK (I am testing it) but its very limited and very restrictive. Seems counter to the whole philosophy of FLOSS.

I do not foresee myself moving away from KDE Neon toward KDE Linux, even if Neon were to die off. If I were a superdev or a rich man, I would ensure Neon never does die off.

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For what it’s worth, KDE Linux is absolutely intended to be a user-focused operating system, not just a developers’ playground.

But I’m glad you’ve had a good experience with KDE neon! That’s awesome. Would you be able to share some of the things about KDE neon that make you so happy? I’d like to see if we can get that in KDE Linux, too! :smiley: