news
Konsole tab layouts and KDE is finally getting a native virtual machine manager called "Karton"
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Akseli Lahtinen ☛ My changes to saving Konsole tab layouts
I recently made a patch to Konsole terminal emulator, that adds to the current tab layout saving system couple more things: [...]
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Neowin ☛ KDE is finally getting a native virtual machine manager called "Karton"
For years, KDE users had to use Virtual Machine Managers outside the KDE ecosystem, like GNOME Boxes. Now that's changing with a new native VMM in development for KDE.
Update
Work on Karton:
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GSoC 2025 Project Intro: Developing Karton, the KDE Virtual Machine Manager!
Hi everyone!
I'm Derek Lin, also known as kenoi. I'm a second-year student at the University of Waterloo and really excited to be working on developing Karton, a virtual machine manager, this summer. This project will be a part of the Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 program and mentored by Harald Sitter, Tobias Fella, and Nicolas Fella. Over the past few months, I've been contributing to the project through some merge requests and I hope to get it to a somewhat polished state towards the end of the program!
About Karton Virtual Machine Manager
Currently, GTK-based virtual machine managers (virt-manager, GNOME Boxes) are the norm for a lot of KDE users, but they are generally not well integrated into the Plasma environment. Although there has been work done in the past with making a Qt-Widget-based virtual machine manager, it has not been maintained for many years and the UI is quite dated.
Karton, as originally started by Aaron Rainbolt was planned to be a QEMU frontend for virtualization through its CLI. Eventually, the project ownership was handed over to Harald Sitter and it was made available as a GSoC project. My aim is to make Karton a native Qt-Quick/Kirigami virtual machine manager, using a libvirt backend. Through libvirt, lower-level tasks can be abstracted and it allows for the app to be potentially cross-platform.
If anyone is interested, I wrote a bit more in detail in my GSoC project proposal (although a bit outdated).
It's FOSS News (Belated):
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KDE’s GNOME BOXES Counterpart is in Active Development
What started as a QEMU frontend for virtualization via CLI is now on track for an ambitious makeover with modern user interface bits underneath. I am talking about KDE Karton, which is set for these upgrades as part of a GSoC 2025 project.
Intrigued? Then keep on reading! 😃
What's Happening: Being undertaken by Derek Lin, a student at the University of Waterloo, Karton will be receiving a major overhaul aimed at integrating modern tech to ensure seamless compatibility with recent Plasma desktop versions.