Fans of the KDE Plasma desktop environment are in for a treat, with developer Derek Lin announcing development of Karton, a KDE-native virtual machine (VM) manager.

Linux offers native VM support, but most of the GUI frontends that currently exist are designed for the GNOME desktop environment, options like GNOME Boxes and virt-manager. While there is nothing stopping Plasma fans from using those options, they often look out of place and don’t integrate as well as KDE native software.

The issues are a result of GNOME and KDE using different interface frameworks. GNOME relies on GTK, while KDE Plasma and apps use Qt. Again, nothing prevents a user from using apps made with one framework on the other desktop environment, but those apps don’t always fit in very well. In many ways, it would be like running a Windows app on macOS or a Mac app on Windows. Even if the two operating systems supported such cross-platform interoperability, the apps would not look native.

Lin is determined to change that with a Qt-based VM manager specifically for Plasma.

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.

Lin warns that “Karton is still under active development,” and users should not rely on it for working with production VMs. At the same time, he has an aggressive plan for Google Summer of Code ’25, including the following:

• Support snapshotting, so users can save the state of their virtual machines.
• Rework the UI so that it uses space more effectively, possible more similar to UTMs layout.
• System monitor to graph CPU and RAM usage of VMs, similar to virt-manager.
• Other configuration options for the installer to support device passthrough and such.
• A bunch of more stuff mentioned in the project proposal!

Lin’s announcement is good news for the KDE community. While GNOME has some very useful software, unfortunately the project’s frameworks often result in apps that only look good on GNOME and look completely out of place on every other desktop environment, including Plasma. Having a KDE-native VM manager is an important step for the community, one that will help with consistency and uniform design.