Yes I am involved in the project. As for not worrying about large system upgrades, things break, no matter how much testing you do on them. For running KDE I prefer to run the latest, it has the least bugs and the newest features.
There will be at minimum 3 editions of this OS, one for developers and those who love to live on the bleeding edge, one for enthusiasts and one for general users. The one for general users will be well tested and aim to have zero showstopping bugs.
In other words, they don’t have enough resources dedicated to doing it well.
No they’re resourced quite fine, trying to mash old with new is never going to smooth.
That could reduce the work required in one area, but increase it in another. Arch fails the “doesn’t break” goal on its own, which means someone would have to do more work to achieve it.
And that’s why they have each release as it’s own btrfs subvolume, if it breaks, you roll back, done. There will be 3 (maybe 4) variants and users will be encouraged to run the “stable” variant which is managed as a snapshot in time deployment where KDE Linux and KDE devs together agree that the system is stable and has 0 critical/showstopper bugs.
Yes it is an Arch base. Not sure on the apparmor stuff and snap is basically banned from the Arch repos so it’s relegated to the AUR which makes it a pain.
Same steps, different base, no customisation, upgrades on day 1 of release. Probably a few more things. I also ❤️ Kinoite so nothing against them.
It’s just Arch with Plasma then…
Yeah that’s certainly annoying but still relying on SDDM to solve this. There is a movement to see if we can import SDDM into the KDE umbrella but it’s a bit stalled at the moment.
I’m a bit the same but I tried the switching between versions and it’s amazing.
Harald, the main architect behind it is already running it as his daily driver. Many others (myself included) are already testing it in VMs and on spare hardware with only very minor papercut issues to be resolved.
Subvolumes.
The existing distro Neon has issues generally because of their choice to use Ubuntu LTS as a base. This is because KDE Plasma needs newer libraries usually than Ubuntu LTS can provide so they add newer libraries in their repository which often breaks existing apps in the Ubuntu repository. Having to patch and bring newer libraries all the time takes its toll. Basing it on Arch means they’ll almost always have the latest libraries ready to go.
Debain/Ubuntu are always a little behind on library and Qt versions etc. For example with KDE Neon on an LTS they had to overlay/patch many libraries which ended up breaking most of the Qt applications that users could install from the Ubuntu repo. Arch is almost always up to date with the latest stable releases of libraries and Qt making it an ideal base for KDE Plasma which is a fast moving desktop.
It’s already in use on a dozen or more physical devices as a usable OS…
Ah yes. I used to have a GTX 1060 and was pretty pissed off when they said the new open source driver would only support from 1660 onwards (or is it 1630)…