Why "finally"?<p>To me, KDE's job should be to organize and render windows, application launcher icons, and the like<p>If I want a virtual machine, I'll use a virtual machine for that<p>All this "KDE suite" stuff and what not is unnecesarry - some of these are good pieces of software that I like to use, but there's no reason they need any integration with a desktop environment (arguably a few basics like a file manager, VTE and plain text editor are expected and fine but in theory also can be wholly separate)<p>Also, any integration attempts like making the icons a common asset rather than each application have their own, _fail_ and make things worse, with these integrations applications less often have working icons at all, and more often have mistakes like black icons against a black background making them invisible
I love how 95% of the comments are about anything but the effing article.<p>Looking forward to a new VM manager. virt-manager is what I use and it's not very maintained: it still has issues on a HiDPI screen where scaling is all messed up. GNOME Boxes is both buggy and featureless in the usual GNOME sense, haven't found much use for it. I think all the focus has been on the virsh CLI and we haven't had a decent VM GUI in a while.
I use Arch and love KDE Plasma. It even has a blue light filter. Am never going back to Windows. KDE runs faster, looks nicer, does not have forced adware and telemetry. Great daily driver.
Nice!<p>I've been using virt-manager for a long time, but more KDE native solution is welcome.<p>Still waiting for virt-manager to add support for Vulkan rendering through libvirt.<p>Side note, not sure if it's specific to Kirigami, but a bunch of interfaces which use it have this excessive margin spacing feel to them.<p>Something like that happens with print-manager's configuration which is using Kirigami supposedly too.
I hope they can come up with a solution integrated into KDE where you can have apps running on a VM but appearing as a native Kwin window... Would probably need a helper daemon running on guest OS.<p>I know a similar thing has been done before but would be great to have upstream support from a major DE
Nice, having a new alternative to virt-manager is great, especially a Qt one. Unfortunate it's using Kirigami and Qt Quick, I always felt the appearance and functionality is much worse compared to Qt Widgets.
I really like KDE in general, and how full featured it is, but their design just feels dated compared to all modern OSes and other DMs on Linux...<p>The only reason why I'm a gnome user, it's because of that.<p>And yes, I know I can just customize, but everytime I try, it just make KDE more sluggish for some reason, and doesn't really feels natural.
Karton is a welcome development—there’s definitely a gap in the Linux desktop space for a VM manager that feels native, lightweight, and user-friendly without sacrificing features. virt-manager is still functional but hasn’t kept pace with modern UX expectations, and GNOME Boxes has taken the opposite route: sleek but lacking power-user features.<p>KDE’s approach could strike a balance, especially if they leverage Qt's flexibility and KDE’s existing system integration. I’m cautiously optimistic—if Karton stays focused and avoids becoming bloated, it could fill a long-standing need for developers and desktop users alike. The key will be how well it handles real-world edge cases (HiDPI, GPU passthrough, multi-VM workflows, etc.).
Do we really need another GUI for kvm/qemu? I thought <a href="https://cockpit-project.org" rel="nofollow">https://cockpit-project.org</a> cover the idea to develop something like Karton, but who am I to think so =)