You might remember that the KDE folks have been busy working on KDE Linux, their own Linux distribution that is still very much in active development. I tried its Alpha build last year and found the experience surprisingly smooth for something so early.
Fast forward to today, and Nate Graham, a well-known KDE name, has put out a progress report covering a pretty busy May for the project, with security fixes, build system changes, and a notable app swap all making the cut.
A lot of work
The most significant infrastructure work this month came from contributor Hadi Chokr, who reworked how KDE software gets built. The old process churned out Arch packages and handed them off to mkosi for installation.
That is now gone, replaced by KDE's own kde-builder tool compiling everything directly.
As a result, there are three major improvements. The build process now works the same way KDE developers build software on their own machines, the project is now more distro-agnostic, and builds are faster because the new setup uses caching more effectively.
Reacting to the many Linux vulnerabilities of last month (e.g., Dirty Frag and Copy Fail), the devs went through KDE Linux's package list looking for anything insecure or unnecessary.
The end result was a slew of cuts that included dropping the Zen kernel, axing several insecure kernel modules, removing a bunch of unused packages, and finally killing off the project's AUR dependency.
It's not all removals though. Nate also added a service that installs newly added pre-installed Flatpak apps on existing KDE Linux systems automatically, while leaving untouched anything the user has already removed on purpose.
There's a swap too; KWalletManager is being retired in favor of KeepSecret, a new, more modern KDE app for managing passwords and credentials.
Another thing to note is that Ark, the graphical file compression/decompression utility, now has .7z file support in its KDE Linux Flatpak packaging, bringing it in line with what the Flathub version already offers.
And, lastly, testing is being improved.
Right now, KDE Linux only checks that each build boots to the desktop, which is not saying much. Work is underway to change that though, with an OpenQA-based testing system in the works that should catch a lot more before a broken build goes out.
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