Back in early November, we informed you that the KDE project had kicked off a new initiative to bring its own distro to the public. And today, they announced the first alpha release of KDE Linux (codenamed “Project Banana”), as a new “reference implementation” operating system built to showcase Plasma and the full suite of KDE applications.
The project’s goal is simple – to provide the best possible environment for KDE software, combining a modern desktop, a consistent app experience, and advanced underlying technologies.
As you can expect, this alpha release also gives us an early look at what’s coming next from the KDE ecosystem, including the upcoming Plasma 6.5 desktop, the KDE Gear 25.12 apps collection, and Frameworks 6.18, all built on top of Qt 6.9.
The distro is built as an immutable base OS using Arch Linux packages, though it is not considered part of the Arch family. Why? Because the whole idea works differently—it’s built around immutability and atomic, image-based updates. The distribution even drops Pacman and other core Arch tools.
The last five system images remain cached, making it possible to roll back to a working state when needed. The system is designed around Systemd, supports only Wayland sessions, and uses Btrfs snapshots for added safety.
Applications are distributed primarily through Flatpak and managed with KDE’s Discover software center. Additionally, Snap (yes, that’s right—Snap support is included out of the box) and AppImage formats are also supported, while Distrobox, Toolbox, and Homebrew provide options for installing traditional packages in containerized or user-space environments.
Hardware support covers most x86_64 machines with Intel or AMD CPUs that use UEFI firmware. NVIDIA GPUs from the GTX 1630 and newer are supported out of the box with NVIDIA’s open kernel modules. Older GPUs require manual setup with the Nouveau driver, which remains experimental and is not recommended for production use.
In my testing, this early alpha installed without a hitch. If you want to give it a spin, grab the latest RAW image from here and load it into your favorite virtualization software, like VirtualBox or KVM. Keep in mind that the installer requires at least 40 GB of free disk space.
Lastly, something important – this release is intended primarily for developers, contributors, and adventurous power users, not general end users. The team stresses that KDE Linux remains under heavy development, with frequent updates, regressions, and known issues.
For more information, see the project’s website.
