KDE’s October update, published on November 1, said KDE Linux remained 85% of the way to its Beta milestone. The project site still labels the operating system alpha and lists only its Testing edition, so the milestone figure describes development progress, not a beta release. KDE’s update and the KDE Linux project page give the current status.
What KDE’s 85% milestone means
The 85% is KDE’s estimate of progress toward a project milestone. KDE’s project page warns that testing is limited and regressions are possible, and advises users to keep robust backups.
KDE Linux is KDE’s reference operating system, distinct from KDE Plasma, the desktop environment. The system uses Arch Linux packages, but KDE says it should not be considered an Arch-based distribution and it does not ship with pacman. It supports Wayland only and uses Flatpak primarily for applications.
What default NTSYNC means for gaming
In the October update, KDE said Tabitha Moon enabled the NTSYNC kernel module by default. KDE says the change improves performance in games played through Wine and Proton, compatibility tools used to run Windows games on Linux. The update describes the benefit without quantifying it.
Other changes KDE reported for October
The installer gained a basic slideshow. KDE also fixed keyboard-layout indicator text on the full-disk-encryption unlock screen, updated Info Center to show the active edition, and added linting and validation checks for contributions. The wayland-protocols package was added to the base image to remove a barrier to compiling some KDE projects out of the box.
KDE also moved operating-system image storage and updates to its S3-based file-storage server, and moved OpenQA to a dedicated server on KDE infrastructure. For users who encounter a “Protocol error” while updating, KDE points to recovery instructions in its October update.
