This Month in KDE Linux on KDE Blogs

This Month in KDE Linux: September 2026

Nate Graham — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to this edition of This Month in KDE Linux, dedicated to KDE’s next-generation operating system.

September was a bit of a slow month for KDE Linux, the result of multiple contributors preparing for, attending, and recovering from Akademy 2026, and then later All Systems Go! 2026.

But it was hopefully not all for naught; Harald and Nate gave a presentation about the project at Akademy:

…And then Harald gave another one at All Systems Go!

Anyway, most work consisted of infrastructure and code maintenance, documentation improvements, and small bug fixes. Sky Poincet and Philip Grant did a lot of the heavy lifting while Harald and Nate were absent, which is much appreciated.

Despite us still calling KDE Linux an alpha release, the project is maturing to focus on stability and polish, a classic application of the Pareto principle (colloquially known as the “80/20” rule).

One interesting project did land in September, though: Hadi Chokr replaced sudo and pkexec with wrappers that call the more modern and secure run0 tool. This reduces the number of SUID binaries that can be used for privilege escalation attacks.

BuildStream

This is probably a good time to talk about BuildStream. What’s BuildStream?

If you know what Yocto is, BuildStream is basically Yocto but stewarded by the Apache Foundation.

If you don’t, then the easiest wasy to explain BuildStream is that it’s a tool for compiling and packaging software from arbitrary sources. In the same way that mkosi currently builds KDE Linux an OS image from distro packages, BuildStream builds an OS image from individual projects’ source code — bypassing distro packages entirely.

KDE Linux has had a skunkworks project going on in the background that replaces the base OS’s Arch Linux packages with basically the same software stack, but built by us, using BuildStream. The project is quite close to a “shall we integrate it or not?” decision point.

If we do, the result should behave identically and users won’t even notice the change — an advantage of KDE Linux being image-based rather than package-based.

So here’s an obvious question: why are we considering doing a huge amount of work ourselves to rebuild what we’re already getting for free with Arch? KDE Linux has been able to inherit everything that makes Arch awesome, really accelerating its development.

But ultimately Arch is a rolling release OS, and KDE Linux does not plan to be a rolling release OS. The user and stable editions will have discrete, time-based releases. If we stick with Arch, at the moment we branch for a new release, we have to either accept whatever’s in Arch (which could include regressions that we miss) or polish a fork of Arch for some amount of time (which entails doing a bunch of packaging work ourselves anyway).

So while BuildStream offers other advantages too, the big win would be allowing us to have total control over the software versions we build, and making it easier for us to add new things that aren’t currently packaged by Arch (here are some examples).

We wouldn’t be doing it all ourselves, either. The BuildStream-based KDE Linux variant is based on the FreeDesktop Flatpak SDK, same as GNOME OS. So maintenance will be shared across all three projects’ contributors.

This project has consumed quite a bit of time over the past few months, and we’ll be plugging away in October, hopefully to the point where we can make a decision about it one way or another.

How you can help

KDE Linux is making steady progress towards its Beta milestone, and remains 85% of the way there.

There’s lots to do! If you’re a fan of the project, please help out; there are many ways:

User support: help support people on discuss.kde.org using KDE Linux.
Issue reporting: install KDE Linux and report issues.
Documentation: improve the docs by submitting merge requests.
Flatpak: fix packaging or code issues in Flatpak-packaged apps.
OS development: help build KDE Linux! There’s plenty to do.

This Month in KDE Linux: August 2026

Nate Graham and John Veness — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:15:01 +0000

Welcome to this edition of This Month in KDE Linux, dedicated to KDE’s next-generation operating system.

Here’s how KDE Linux evolved in August:

Data safety

A major data safety project reached a state of usability!

First, Hadi Chokr transformed users’ home folders into Btrfs sub-volumes and turned on automatic Btrfs snapshots for all user files.

Then, Bharadwaj Raju integrated the new kio-snapshot system he’s been working on and added support in Dolphin.

Now you can easily view and roll back to older versions of your files, even without an off-device backup:

This doesn’t replace a backup, of course! But it does amount to a sort of homedir-level undo feature that can keep your data safe from accidental deletions, or other destructive changes that are less catastrophic than a disk failure or having the device lost or stolen. And these snapshots will be useful to use as backup sources, so you’re not trying to back up a moving target.

Another few layers in the data safety onion, shall we say!

CJKV input support by default

Nate Graham finished the project to make Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese text input work out of the box. Now everything needed to type in these languages is pre-installed, and all you have to do is turn it on.

QA & testing

Thomas Duckworth and Bhushan Shah continued to develop, refine, and maintain KDE Linux’s automatic QA system, which continued to pay dividends this month. The system caught multiple complex integration issues introduced accidentally in commits made to KDE software — all of which are now fixed, so users of other operating systems will never have to experience them.

Security

Yago Raña Gayoso removed an unnecessary override that gave everyone in the wheel group default access to the Docker daemon’s socket.

Nate Graham fixed an oversight that let blacklisted kernel modules into the unified kernel images.

Bugs fixed

Harald Sitter fixed an issue that could make updates fail right after the update was published, or when run on machines with weak CPUs or slow network connections.

Hadi Chokr fixed an issue with user-visible version numbers of KDE Linux builds not including the intended level of precision.

Documentation

Nate Graham added quick links to KDE Linux’s official documentation right there in the launcher menu’s “Help” section.

Nate Graham also documented how to free up disk space, added a dedicated “Help & Support” page to the website, and added a link to the project’s news feed.

Philip Grant refined and documented a way to integrate KeePassXC with the Flatpak packaging of Firefox and Chromium (and their derivative browsers).

Julius Künzel fixed the styling of the standard Hugo alert bubbles, and Nate Graham ported the docs to use them.

Grab bag

Paul Brown added a neat feature to the set-up-systemd-extension tool that lets you create new extensions at different locations and with different names.

Hadi made the installer report its progress in a more granular way, so there’s less waiting around and wondering if the installation process got stuck.

Bhushan Shah removed the “UEFI shell” entry from the bootloader menu, since it was useless for practically everyone, and now the menu is less cluttered.

How you can help

KDE Linux is making steady progress towards its Beta milestone, and is now 85% of the way there.

There’s lots to do! If you’re a fan of the project, please help out; there are many ways:

User support: help support people on discuss.kde.org using KDE Linux.
Issue reporting: install KDE Linux and report issues.
Documentation: improve the docs by submitting merge requests.
Flatpak: fix packaging or code issues in Flatpak-packaged apps.
OS development: help build KDE Linux! There’s plenty to do.

This Month in KDE Linux: July 2026

Nate Graham and John Veness — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to the inaugural edition of This Month in KDE Linux hosted on blogs.kde.org!

Previously, these posts lived on Nate Graham’s personal blog. But KDE Linux is growing up and becoming a more important part of KDE, larger than its individual contributors! So it’s time to move the public communication to KDE infrastructure, and that’s where you’ll be able to read these posts going forward.

Without further ado, here’s how KDE Linux evolved in July:

QA & testing

This month, Thomas Duckworth and Bhushan Shah integrated the next-gen QA system they’ve been building!

It’s now testing tons of conditions to make sure KDE Linux continues to work as expected, and it also acts as a full-stack integration test suite. To illustrate the utility of such a thing, it’s already identified and protected users from two significant issues:

A login-breaking KWin crash caused by a regression in gcc from Arch Linux (already fixed).
A regression in automatically unlocking your wallet at login (also already fixed).

These tricky problems could only have been caught by the kind of full-stack integration test suite that KDE Linux has now.

If you’re interested in the details, Thomas Duckworth’s blog post on how the system works is worth a read. Thanks very much to Thomas and Bhushan for building this lovely system!

Security

Hadi Chokr implemented some kernel-hardening tweaks we learned about from the SecureBlue project that were relevant to KDE Linux and wouldn’t noticeably burden users.

Efficiency & performance

Nate Graham removed the kernel modules for various hardware watchdogs that aren’t relevant for desktop use, which slightly reduces CPU usage and improves boot times.

Thomas Duckworth switched the CUPS printing system to use socket activation, which allows its services to only run when needed.

Software support package downloader + support for Java and DOS apps

Hadi Chokr implemented a major improvement to the “Package Compatibility Helper” tool that now allows it to — with the user’s consent — download software from Flathub to handle files that the user tries to open, but that nothing on the system can currently open.

Hadi then made this work for Java apps; the first time you try to launch one, the tool will ask you if you want to download a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). If you approve, it will do so and then launch the app using the JRE:

After that, Hadi implemented support for DOS apps; trying to launch one will offer up DOSBox. Now you can have that authentic 1993 Doom experience:

This system can be extended to support even more things in the future! And it’s been written in a generic enough way that it would be useful for any other image-based OS using Flatpak, as well.

Bugs fixed

Philip Grant fixed the mechanism that ensures that existing KDE Linux systems have the same Flatpaks installed as are pre-loaded on new systems, as it had various bugs that prevented it from working properly.

David Fundament fixed the script that disables USB auto-suspend for input devices so that it works with devices lacking a product name.

WenChao Zhang restored the esp4 and esp6 kernel modules that had been removed to mitigate the “DirtyFrag” vulnerability. The vulnerability has been fixed now, and missing those modules had broken IPsec VPNs, so they’re back now.

Hadi Chokr made WWAN modems work out of the box.

Documentation

Thomas Duckworth documented how to use and extend the new QA system.

Nate Graham documented how to make the Fcitx 5 input method (for CJKV input) work with apps still using the XWayland compatibility layer.

Hadi Chokr documented how to set up bootloader menus so you can choose between booting KDE Linux or another OS on the same computer. However, setting up such a system is left as a manual exercise for the reader, as currently the KDE Linux installer does not yet formally support complex disk setups. This will come later.

Grab bag

Prajna Sariputra pre-installed vulkan-virtio, improving performance in VMs whose graphics drivers support Vulkan.

Thomas Duckworth made the set-up-systemd-extension and toggle-developer-mode tools only prompt for authentication once.

Nate Graham removed the “Push Services” library and System Settings page, because it’s not mature enough for shipping yet.

How you can help

KDE Linux is making steady progress towards its Beta milestone, and is now 83% of the way there.

There’s lots to do! If you’re a fan of the project, please help out; there are many ways:

User support: help support people on discuss.kde.org using KDE Linux.
Issue reporting: install KDE Linux and report issues.
Documentation: improve the docs by submitting merge requests.
Flatpak: fix packaging or code issues in Flatpak-packaged apps.
OS development: help build KDE Linux! There’s plenty to do.