KDE Introduces Fedora Kinoite Nightly for Developers

You can now try the development version of KDE using Fedora Kinoite nightly version.

Fedora Kinoite is an official Fedora KDE Plasma Spin for containerised applications and container-based software development. It is an immutable Linux distribution where the base packages never change and are identical for all installations. Due to this, it’s easier to use it as a development box for complex projects and testing because your codebase runs on identical packages.

For each stable Fedora official release (twice a year), a new Kinoite base is published, which you can either freshly download or rebase the existing installation.

Fedora Kinoite Nightly Edition

With the success of Kinoite, the KDE team takes the concept further to provide an unofficial Fedora Kinoite Nightly version. This distribution offers Fedora stable packages with nightly versions of KDE Plasma, KDE framework and KDE applications!

Furthermore, the announcement also mentioned another variant: Kinoite Beta, which publishes Fedora stable with KDE Plasma beta packages.

As of today, to test the development version of KDE Plasma and apps, you only had the only option of using KDE Neon. KDE Neon is based upon Ubuntu LTS and provides three similar variants – unstable, testing and user edition. And compiling KDE Plasma apps with the framework is a little complex. It often fails due to various kf5- dependencies.

In a way, Fedora Kinote nightly is similar to KDE Neon unstable edition as far as KDE packages go.

In theory, Fedora Kinoite nightly is binary compatible with KDE Neon unstable editions for Plasma, framework and KDE application packages. The Fedora Kinoite BETA should be similar to the KDE Neon Testing edition.

Thanks to work by Fedora & KDE team, now you can try out KDE Plasma daily builds on an immutable distribution without fear of breaking your system because immutability offers easy rollback.

How to try

You can download the daily build container images from the below pages

Or, the easiest way is to download Fedora Kinoite ISO (stable) images from this page. And install it.

After installation, use the following command to rebase to the unstable version.

sudo rpm-ostree update --reboot
sudo ostree admin pin 0

# For Kinoite Nightly
sudo rpm-ostree rebase --reboot \
    ostree-unverified-registry:quay.io/fedora-ostree-desktops/kinoite-nightly

# For Kinoite Beta
sudo rpm-ostree rebase --reboot \
    ostree-unverified-registry:quay.io/fedora-ostree-desktops/kinoite-beta

Overall, it’s awesome news for KDE developers and testers. You can now try the latest KDE nightly apps and packages out of the box without the hassles of compiling or trying out nightly Flatpaks.

Via Timothée Ravier’s blog

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