State of Fedora Kinoite, December 2021 edition

This is the first post about the state of Fedora Kinoite since the release as part of Fedora 35. The goal is to have at least one post before or shortly after each release to help track the progress of Fedora Kinoite, the new features and the missing ones.

For a live updating version of this, you can follow the list of known Kinoite bugs issue in the Fedora KDE SIG tracker or on the Kinoite Board.

For a video version of this, see the Fedora Kinoite talk I made for the Fedora 35 release party (slides).

Fedora Kinoite is now an official Fedora variant!

You can get it at: https://kinoite.fedoraproject.org/

As this is the first offical release of Fedora Kinoite, some features are still missing but if you are confortable using the terminal for some workarounds, you should be fine.

So what do we have right now? With Fedora Kinoite you get an up-to-date KDE Plasma desktop environment with the latest features enabled: great Wayland and XWayland support, system user session management in Plasma, full Pipewire support.

You can install applications using Flatpak, develop using podman and toolbx, and if you miss anything, all the RPM packages from Fedora are available and ready to be installed either in a toolbx or directly on the system with rpm-ostree.

KDE Plasma Desktop updated to 5.23 release

Due to an unfortunate timing issue between the Fedora and KDE Plasma release schedules, we could not include the 5.23 Plasma release in Fedora Kinoite for the Fedora 35 release. But we have included it as an update and it is now available by default in Kinoite.

Note that we (the Fedora KDE SIG) closely follows upstream KDE releases and those updates usually come first to Fedora Rawhide for testing. If you want to help us test those packages, you can temporarily rebase you Fedora Kinoite installation to the Rawhide branch and then rollback to the stable version. Don’t forget to pin your stable deployment before you move to Rawhide:

$ sudo ostree admin pin 0
$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/rawhide/x86_64/kinoite
$ sudo systemctl reboot
# Testing
$ sudo rpm-ostree rollback

KDE Apps as Flatpaks from Fedora

We are not yet building KDE Apps in the Fedora infrastructure. You should look for KDE Apps on Flathub for now. See the setup instructions.

See: https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/13

KDE Apps as Flatpaks from Flathub

Some KDE Apps are already available on Flathub but a lot are still missing or require some adaptation to work well in Flatpaks.

See: https://community.kde.org/SoK/Ideas/2022#KDE_Apps_packaging_as_Flatpak_for_Flathub

KDE Apps are not installed by default

This is easy to solve but this depends on the availability of KDE Apps Flatpaks from Fedora.

Flathub not available by default

The filtered view of Flathub with only a selection of Free and Open Source Software is currently not installed by default on Fedora Kinoite.

See: https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/94

Missing support in Discover for system updates

Discover is able to install and update Flatpaks but support for rpm-ostree is still in progress upstream.

Use the command line to update the system for now:

$ sudo rpm-ostree update

See: https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/133

Missing support in Discover for third party repo selection

You can manually add Flatpak repositories in Discover but you can not yet manage Fedora third party repositories yet.

Missing support in Discover for permission selection for Flatpaks

You currently need to use the Flatseal application to list and change the permissions granted to a Flatpak application.

See: https://community.kde.org/SoK/Ideas/2022#Permission_management_for_Flatpak_Apps_in_Discover

Broken system when selecting the UTC/GMT timezone

Due to an unfortunate bug somewhere in the KDE framework stack, installations using an UTC/GMT timezone are currently broken.

See: https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/130

Conclusion

And that’s it for this time. Hopefully we will be able to sort out most of those issues before Fedora 36 but if you interested in one of those, reach out to us on Matrix. Some of those issues are good “first issues” to get involved in the Fedora and KDE community and projects!