Changes/Fedora Kinoite

Add Fedora Kinoite as a variant

Summary

Introduce Fedora Kinoite as a variant of Fedora alongside Fedora Silverblue.

Owner

• Name: Timothée Ravier
• Email: travier AT redhat DOT com
• FESCo shepherd: Neal Gompa (ngompa13 A gmail D com)
• SIG: KDE SIG

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 35
• Last updated: 2021-06-02
• FESCo issue: #2571
• Tracker bug: #1927425
• Release notes tracker: #658

Detailed Description

Fedora Kinoite is an immutable desktop operating system featuring the KDE Plasma desktop. It is based on the same technologies as Fedora Silverblue (rpm-ostree, Flatpak, podman). Fedora Kinoite is to the Fedora KDE Spin what Fedora Silverblue is to Fedora Workstation.

We chose the Kinoite name for the following reasons:

• KDE based projects traditionally start with a 'K'
• Kinoite is a blue mineral (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinoite), thus referring to both the 'silver' and 'blue' part of Silverblue and the blue color of the KDE logo.
• "Kinoite" means "There is a tree" in Japanese (https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=kinoite&op=translate), thus referring to the 'tree' in 'ostree'.

Feedback

No specific feedback received so far.

Benefit to Fedora

This will make Fedora more attractive to users that are interested in immutable OSes and underlying technologies but would prefer to use the KDE desktop environment. This should also strengthen Silverblue as more effort may be put into fixing the issues in the shared technologies.

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • The KDE SIG will submit the Pungi changes needed to add this new variant to the compose.
  • The KDE SIG will submit the changes to add a new sub-package to fedora-release.
  • The KDE SIG will maintain the Kinoite specific rpm-ostree config in the workstation-ostree-config repo.

• Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

• Release engineering: Submitted as #9952.

• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

• Trademark approval: The "Fedora Kinoite" trademark has been approved

• Alignment with Objectives: N/A

Upgrade/compatibility impact

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

How To Test

Instructions to test the officials Fedora builds are in https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/how-to-test-fedora-kinoite/30405.

You can still test or use the unofficial preview with the instructions from this Fedora Magazine article that only need to be updated for F34 (instead of F33).

User Experience

Current limitations (last updated 2021-01-18):

• No rpm-ostree support in Discover (graphical package and update manager). A Season of KDE is in progress to work on that.
• Partial Flatpak support in Discover.
• KDE applications are not yet available as Flatpak from the Fedora registry.

Dependencies

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Contingency Plan

Report to the next release.

• Contingency mechanism: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks product? N/A

Documentation

A lot of the known issues impacting Fedora Kinoite are shared with Silverblue and their resolution is the same: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/troubleshooting/. It is not clear for now if Kinoite specific documentation is needed but a landing page with pointer to known issues might be good.

Release Notes

Fedora Kinoite has been introduced as a new variant of Fedora Linux featuring the KDE desktop environment and the same technologies as Silverblue (rpm-ostree, Flatpak, podman).