SonicDE is a fork of KDE that aims to preserve and improve the X11 and init system agnostic aspects of KDE since they announced they are going Wayland-only in KDE Plasma 6.8 and have been actively moving towards a systemd only future. SonicDE currently consists of over 120 repositories including the customized sonic-win (KWin/X11) window manager and compositor, Plasma Workspace components, the Silver theme, the Sonic Login Manager, and other components and support 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, there is already work ongoing to package SonicDE for different operating systems and distributions. Please see the linked pages in the table below for how to install SonicDE.
Available Packages
| Distribution | Notes |
|---|---|
| Arch Linux-based | SonicDE for Arch Linux - Homepage |
| Arch Linux-based | sonicde-meta - AUR |
| RHEL-based | SonicDE for Enterprise Linux |
| Vendefoul Wolf | Vendefoul Wolf - Sourceforge |
| Slackware | r1w1s1/sonicde-SlackBuild - Slackware Community Forge |
| Void Linux | SonicDE on Void Linux · GitHub |
| Manjaro Linux | SonicDE for Manjaro Linux - Homepage |
| Artix Linux | SonicDE for Artix Linux - Homepage |
Packaging in Progress
| Distribution | Notes |
|---|---|
| Debian | sonicde-debian/debian - GitHub |
| Devuan | sonicde-debian/debian - GitHub |
| FreeBSD | SonicDE on FreeBSD - GitHub |
| Gentoo | SonicDE on Gentoo - GitHub |
| NixOS | SonicDE on NixOS - GitHub |
| OpenMandriva | OMA/sonic-win - GitHub OMA/sonic-workspace - GitHub |
Getting in Contact
We’d love to hear from you on one of our channels. To get end-user support, please also check your distribution’s chat or forum.
Bluesky 
Discord 
Mastodon 
Matrix 
OFTC IRC 
Telegram 
X (Twitter)