Non-goals
Does not have to support the runtime installation of kernel modules. This will prevent the out-of-the-box installation of, for example:
- Proprietary NVIDIA kernel driver (NVIDIA GPUs must either be new enough to use the open-source kernel modules that can be distributed in-tree, or else use Nouveau)
- VirtualBox (requires out-of-tree modules; QEMU/KVM probably do a better job anyway)
- Vendor-specific VPNs that require custom out-of-tree kernel modules that cannot be redistributed with the kernel due to license incompatibility
Does not have to support the use case of developing low-level system components like the kernel, drivers, systemd, etc., as this can be troublesome with an immutable base OS.
Does this part mean there will also be no support for ZFS?
For whatever it’s worth, I use (up until fairly recently) KDE Plasma on Arch, and it’s pretty much fine. There’s some hiccups especially after a big update such as KDE Plasma 6, but it’s a smooth ride so far.
If the KDE Plasma developers support an Arch-based distro of their own, and package stuff for this distro with care, I think it’d be a better experience, but I am guessing not by much compared to KDE Plasma on base Arch.
