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Why "finally"?

To me, KDE's job should be to organize and render windows, application launcher icons, and the like

If I want a virtual machine, I'll use a virtual machine for that

All this "KDE suite" stuff and what not is unnecesarry - some of these are good pieces of software that I like to use, but there's no reason they need any integration with a desktop environment (arguably a few basics like a file manager, VTE and plain text editor are expected and fine but in theory also can be wholly separate)

Also, any integration attempts like making the icons a common asset rather than each application have their own, _fail_ and make things worse, with these integrations applications less often have working icons at all, and more often have mistakes like black icons against a black background making them invisible

I love how 95% of the comments are about anything but the effing article.

Looking forward to a new VM manager. virt-manager is what I use and it's not very maintained: it still has issues on a HiDPI screen where scaling is all messed up. GNOME Boxes is both buggy and featureless in the usual GNOME sense, haven't found much use for it. I think all the focus has been on the virsh CLI and we haven't had a decent VM GUI in a while.

I use Arch and love KDE Plasma. It even has a blue light filter. Am never going back to Windows. KDE runs faster, looks nicer, does not have forced adware and telemetry. Great daily driver.

Karton, Dutch for 'cardboard'. Chosen because it is a tool to handle (virtual) boxes, maybe?

Karton, sounds like "cartón" but with the traditional K added to the start of the names in KDE programs.

I really like KDE in general, and how full featured it is, but their design just feels dated compared to all modern OSes and other DMs on Linux...

The only reason why I'm a gnome user, it's because of that.

And yes, I know I can just customize, but everytime I try, it just make KDE more sluggish for some reason, and doesn't really feels natural.

Nice!

I've been using virt-manager for a long time, but more KDE native solution is welcome.

Still waiting for virt-manager to add support for Vulkan rendering through libvirt.

Side note, not sure if it's specific to Kirigami, but a bunch of interfaces which use it have this excessive margin spacing feel to them.

Something like that happens with print-manager's configuration which is using Kirigami supposedly too.

Karton is a welcome development—there’s definitely a gap in the Linux desktop space for a VM manager that feels native, lightweight, and user-friendly without sacrificing features. virt-manager is still functional but hasn’t kept pace with modern UX expectations, and GNOME Boxes has taken the opposite route: sleek but lacking power-user features.

KDE’s approach could strike a balance, especially if they leverage Qt's flexibility and KDE’s existing system integration. I’m cautiously optimistic—if Karton stays focused and avoids becoming bloated, it could fill a long-standing need for developers and desktop users alike. The key will be how well it handles real-world edge cases (HiDPI, GPU passthrough, multi-VM workflows, etc.).

I hope they can come up with a solution integrated into KDE where you can have apps running on a VM but appearing as a native Kwin window... Would probably need a helper daemon running on guest OS.

I know a similar thing has been done before but would be great to have upstream support from a major DE

Rappelkiste bzw. "Es rappelt in der Kiste!" :-)

Do we really need another GUI for kvm/qemu? I thought https://cockpit-project.org cover the idea to develop something like Karton, but who am I to think so =)

What KDE needs isn't new features but less bugs.

What ever happened to aqemu? That was my favorite frontend but it seems to have been languishing for a decade.

Nice, having a new alternative to virt-manager is great, especially a Qt one. Unfortunate it's using Kirigami and Qt Quick, I always felt the appearance and functionality is much worse compared to Qt Widgets.