Project Banana ripens into a pre-alpha for KDE Linux, and you can test it

KDE Linux is an all-new desktop Linux distro being developed as a showcase for the KDE desktop project. The project is still in a pre-alpha testing stage, but recently went public on the KDE website. Versions are available to download and try out.

KDE Linux is an entirely new and experimental OS. There's lots of room for confusion here, because KDE already has a demonstration distro, KDE Neon. KDE Linux is a totally separate and far more ambitious project. In terms of its underlying design, it's intended to be a super-stable end-user distro. This is in contrast with Neon, which is an experimental showcase for the latest and greatest code. Neon isn't meant to be anyone's daily driver. There's a little more to it, but an executive summary of Neon could be "the latest KDE Plasma pre-installed on top of Ubuntu LTS."

KDE Linux is a very different beast. It's not based on it, but several aspects of its design are clearly influenced by Valve's SteamOS 3. Like SteamOS 3, KDE Linux is an immutable distro, with dual read-only Btrfs-format root partitions that update each other alternately. Regular Reg readers may recall this because we discussed it nearly a year ago in the context of both of the two biggest names in Linux desktops – KDE Plasma and GNOME – working on their own showcase distros.

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