KDE developer Ivan Čukić has launched KDE Ni! OS, a playful proof-of-concept that explores how immutable Linux could fit into the KDE ecosystem. The project was inspired by talks at this year’s Akademy conference, where immutable KDE distributions were a key topic.
At Akademy, two projects drew particular attention: KDE Linux, positioned as an officially branded immutable distribution, and KDE Neon Core, an effort that rethinks KDE Neon with an immutable foundation while remaining largely independent of its predecessor. With that said, KDE Ni! OS emerged as a third entry in this space, partly as a joke and partly as a practical exploration of the same design goals.
But unlike KDE Linux or KDE Neon Core, KDE Ni! OS is not meant to be a separate distribution. Čukić says he does not plan to build a new distro from the ground up. Instead, KDE Ni! OS is a reproducible system setup based on NixOS, which is known for its strong approach to immutability.
“This is not really going to be a new distribution (for real, not like KDE Neon claimed not to be a distribution back in the day 🙂 ). I don’t have the expertise nor the time to make a distribution from scratch.”
Immutability, which has become popular in recent years, is about keeping systems from breaking during updates. It helps avoid partial upgrades, stops incompatible packages from mixing, and lets users roll back changes if something goes wrong.
NixOS offers these features by default through its Nix package manager. It allows multiple versions of the same software to be installed simultaneously. Users and apps only see the versions they need, but older versions remain on the system as well.
So, KDE Ni! OS aims to demonstrate how far the planned features of KDE Linux and KDE Neon Core can be replicated using this model. Čukić plans to publish the full system configuration of his NixOS-based laptop in a public repository, treating it as the reference implementation of KDE Ni! OS.
Lastly, beyond basic immutability, future steps will focus on developer workflows. A key goal is to make it easy to replace system components with locally modified or experimental versions, such as testing changes to Plasma Vaults or validating bug fixes, without compromising system integrity.
For more information, see Čukić’s announcement.
There is currently plasma manager on NixOS which is a declarative home manager module for configuring Plasma. I use it, it works, but it’s far from perfect, largely due to how complex KDE’s suite of configuration files is. That would be a great area to invest time.
Enabling Plasma and configuring a dev or nightly overlay for relevant packages would be fairly simple to implement. Create a binary cache for it and the whole thing would be very usable.