SonicDE is the community-driven desktop environment forked from KDE Plasma 6. It aims to preserve and improve X11 support and init-system independence, making it a complete and viable alternative. We currently maintain 139 components, including the customized sonic-win window manager and compositor, Sonic Workspace components, the Silver theme, the Sonic Login Manager, and supporting libraries.

History

SonicDE originates from a patch set to KWin/X11 called kwin-x11-improved - GitHub created by guiodic on Jul 7, 2025. It has been merged with the whole KWin/X11 source by Joseph Crowell and named „KDE-Lite“ in September 2025 and been rebranded to SonicDE - GitHub in December 2025.

Current Development and Outlook

Our current main task is forking the KDE components that SonicDE depends on and removing the leftover Wayland parts everywhere to better concentrate on the X11 support. Feature-wise there is work ongoing to implement a Vulkan Backend. We‘d also like to make use of the expected new features of XLibre and remain compatible with X.Org Server for as long as possible. Besides SonicDE on Linux, we like to support the BSDs (FreeBSD, Ghost BSD, NetBSD) where KDE/X11 already runs today and stay init system agnostic.

You can find the SonicDE source code at SonicDE - GitHub.

Installing SonicDE

Thanks to our contributors, we have SonicDE packages for several operating systems and distributions. Please see Installing for how to install SonicDE.