This past week, there has been some controversy about the new Plasma Login Manager, which launched with KDE Plasma 6.6 and requires systemd. Soon after, KaOS surprisingly announced it would stop using Plasma as its desktop environment.
Which, whichever way you look at it, is a significant shift, considering KaOS has used KDE for 12 years for its primary and only desktop environment and has always promoted itself as a Qt-focused and GTK-free Linux distribution.
As a response (though not directly addressing KaOS), KDE later shared its position on the matter, which I covered here. And then, a few days ago, KaOS posted an explanation of its decision on its official website.
According to the distro, the turning point came with upstream changes in systemd. Systemd 254 was the last release to fully support KaOS’s split /usr design, and later versions also dropped compatibility paths that affected the distribution’s setup. Trials to adopt Dinit as an alternative init system began in 2025, but that transition is complex.
KaOS developers also noticed that KDE was becoming more tied to systemd. They point to tools like DrKonqi and the Plasma Login Manager, which now need systemd, while non-systemd options are now considered “legacy.” The team decided that maintaining a non-systemd base while keeping Plasma fully supported would become increasingly difficult.
Because of this, KaOS decided to change its desktop rather than its system design. The 2026.02 release removes Plasma from the default ISO and uses Niri and the Qt-based Noctalia shell instead. Of course, Plasma is still in the distro’s repos, but this change ends KaOS’s 12-year KDE Plasma era and marks a new direction for the distro.
For more information, see KaOS’s announcement.
I just tried Niri+Noctalia in Artix (dinit). I fully support KaOS in their endeavor toward this setup.
It’s a lot better than I expected it to be. It’s fully functional and more mature or widespread than I thought.
I’m using Cosmic greeter myself, which supports many DE/compositors and all the relevant init systems (dinit, openRC, runit, etc…).
Meanwhile in Slackware-land, Eric Hamellers keeps happily compiling Plasma 6 without systemd.
KaOS keeps lying about KDE’s “growing dependency” on systemd (all of 2 programs!! from the hundreds KDE produces). They should probably acknowledge their own incompetency compiling/adapting systemd.
Good riddance.
Lying for something that is factual?
Plasma Login Manager is a part of the KDE Plasma experience, if you remove it and even if you can circumvent it easily, you are not getting the full experience, and you need to start tinkering with other login managers, whatever snowflakes say about it.
It’s not about incompetence, it’s about having to maintain stuff that they shoudn’t have to, and being burdened by what the non-full experience entails.
I wish we could get rid of Red Hat from FOSS entirely regardless of how much they contribute. They’ve become a huge problem for FOSS by attempting to dismantle and destroy the FOSS userland shared across multiple UNIX and UNIX-like systems trying to force everything to GNU/Linux. Newsflash… the BSDs, Illumos, HURD, and other *NIX systems exist Red Hat and IBM. You aren’t special or important, and neither is GNU/Linux.
Yeah, that’s what they do. And they started it way before IBM even bought them, I think it’s deeply rooted in Red Hat intentions.
Just look at how their paid trolls influenced everyone to believe Canonical is bad, while they’re doing the same non-community stuff or worse tenfold. If only they could stick to themselves, but no their software is garbage and doesn’t pick up on its own, so they spread FUD about competing projects to discredit them and reinforce the fake bandwagon they create around their own NIH projects. This is a toxic and despicable company.
A quick anti-FUD FAQ to debunk “the KDE is forcing systemd!” hoax : r/kde https://share.google/FE272dea3CiGUmWYZ
Lol, this is just damage control as KDE has been dismantled from all sides for the Plasma Login Manager debacle. Even distrowatch ridiculed KDE pseudo-anti-FUD.
I’ve been using Linux for 30 years, and there are a lot of oxymorons using the OS. They say they want “freedom” and “control,” but then only want to use desktop environments “as the developers intented” or “vanilla” or complain about easy to change defaults. SDDM and Plasma Login Manager are not a part of KDE Plasma, nor are they required to run the Plasma desktop, unlike GDM, which IS required to use the lock screen in GNOME. You can use any display manager (DM) you want with Plasma. Heck, the Dolphin file manager is not a part of Plasma either. Chew on that for a while! You are given a choice, which seems to confuse the oxymorons who want to shove defaults down everyones’ throats and call it freedom. KaOS developers can simply ship Plasma with any DM they want. However, they seem to want the KDE team to tell them which unsupported DM to use.
Right on.
Labeling proven and tested solutions as “legacy” for the sake of own business interests (IBM Red Hat, again) is not in the interest of open-source development.
Then to pull the gaslighting lying option with the we are not going systemd only BS they did is typical parasite corporation behaviour. When it is perfectly clear this is the direction they take when the put their new login tool up as the required officially supported adoption is a systemd only program. They know fully well how distributions work, they take the official programs most times as the defaults which means anyone who does not want it has to go out of their way to get it now which most will not do. Before they had choice now they do not, totally against the open source way of doing things.
Definitely gaslighting lying. Plus, it is literally called Plasma Login Manager.
If you cannot use it, you cannot use the full Plasma experience. It’s as simple as that.
KDE has been unanimously pointed the finger at for this dumb move, and their arrogant anti-FUD stance has been dismantled all around, even by the neutral Distrowatch.
Sure, you can go around PLM, but the burden of maintaining software that will grow further apart quickly start piling up. And the trend is clearly to go the systemd way more and more. PLM is an indisputable proof of it, and still the snowflakes manage to deny it instead of assuming their choice (since it got heavy backlash).
Eh, more this is ragebait in search of someone wanting to be mad. Maybe one of the four downloads this distro has ever had. Seriously, it affects nobody. What sort of luddite isn’t using systemd? It’s a number best summed up by Arrested Development’s “There are dozens of us!” meme. And if their opinion was somehow important just wait for their Pentium II systems to die so they join the rest of us in the modern era.
Your statement is totally dumb and in retrospect will be even dumber.
You’re the kind of flat earther denying facts.
Sane people with probably better and more recent hardware than you are moving massively away from it.
I am using a recent Ryzen 5700X myself and it flies on dinit, without the bloat and sluggishness of systemd.
The non-systemd distros are growing in popularity big time too, being faster in comparison, and even more so with people growing knowledgeable about Red Hat trying to imbricate its tentacles into everything and grab users by the balls so as to control everything the user can do.
Systemd is a symbol of how far Red Hat is willing to go to lock down the Linux ecosystem. It’s about not letting them remove choice in open source with their inferior solutions.