Linux Virtual Machines
Written on Aug 5, 2026
I installed a few Linux distributions as virtual machines over the past several days. They aren't intended to be permanent, but I don't want to remove them until I'm positive I won't need to examine them again. Installations are time consuming.
I was checking to see how up-to-date the KDE Plasma desktop environments were on each of them. Version 6.7.3 is the latest. I was also testing a specific application to see if it would work on different systems. I'll write about it in the next article.
Linux Installations
Linux Installers are supposed to be simple enough for novices to understand and navigate. Most installers for modern distributions fall into that category. I'm not a novice, and I found two distributions extra annoying when I installed them. They were Fedora KDE Plasma and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Both of those distributions defaulted to btrfs for their file systems. I didn't have difficulty changing it to "ext4" on OpenSUSE, but I gave up on Fedora. Both installed swap partitions instead of swap files. They both provided the latest version of KDE Plasma.
The one thing I have against btrfs is that causes a solid-state drive to wear out faster than other file systems. I'm sure it would work great for a hard disk drive. Some distributions provide multiple choices in an alphabetical ordered drop-down list, with btrfs showing first.
I prefer swap files over swap partitions because they can be resized in the terminal. It's easy:
sudo swapoff -a sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=8192 sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile sudo mkswap /swapfile sudo swapon -a
The "count" above should be in multiples of 1024. The above amount is for eight gigabytes.
The Distributions I Examined
I wrote about Kubuntu in my previous article. The version of plasma was at 6.6.5, same as the Debian testing branch, and enabling backports only increased it by one point. Enabling backports can affect stability, so one point really isn't worth the effort.
I installed the KDE Plasma version of Manjaro and I selected KDE Plasma when I installed CachyOS. Since both are bleeding-edge distributions based on Arch Linux, I expected the latest version of KDE Plasma on both and I wasn't disappointed. CachyOS only provided zram for swap.
PikaOS is based on the Debian unstable branch ("Sid"). Sid is supposed to be a bleeding-edge branch, right? It may be, but PikaOS isn't. The KDE Plasma version is only at 6.5.4, lower than the Debian testing branch, which I didn't expect.
I like the installer. Not only did PikaOS give me multiple file system choices, it also gave me multiple swap choices, including zram. Regardless, I would never use it as a daily driver. I'm considering Kubuntu for my laptop, but I won't be choosing anything until next year when I have to travel again.
Image by Boby Pogy from Pixabay