Love Ubuntu but want the latest KDE Plasma? KDE neon now sits atop Ubuntu 20.04

I'm on Kubuntu currently.. doing some research and getting opinions a few years back made me to pick it over KDE Neon.

I'd like to get some Plasma updates now and then though.. so how is situation today? Any problems with Neon, that I dont run into on Kubuntu?

I'm on Kubuntu currently.. doing some research and getting opinions a few years back made me to pick it over KDE Neon.

I'd like to get some Plasma updates now and then though.. so how is situation today? Any problems with Neon, that I dont run into on Kubuntu?

Not really, as someone who's used it since the beginning. If anything, the experience is better since KDE and Qt bugs get fixed much sooner. Some may take issue with it only using LTS bases, however for the most part it's quite fine. Maybe with newer hardware it could have issues owing to the LTS base, however HWE can significantly mitigate this.

Kubuntu with the Xanmod kernel and the PPA "Graphics Drivers" team is fine for me.

!link

I'm on Kubuntu currently.. doing some research and getting opinions a few years back made me to pick it over KDE Neon.

I'd like to get some Plasma updates now and then though.. so how is situation today? Any problems with Neon, that I dont run into on Kubuntu?

On Kubuntu I use the backports PPA as a compromise. It isn't as recent as Plasma, but it gets some updates that the LTS doesn't get.

I used Kubuntu for many years and was reasonably happy. However, I decided to switch to Neon a few years ago for reasons I can't remember now. I have only used the stable LTS version of Neon, not the developer version. I tend to wait a bit before doing the upgrade (I am still on 18.04) but was surprised at how easy it was between 16.04 and 18.04.

My observations may not be fair to the current version of Kubuntu, but here they are:

- Neon is lean. I don't have forced dependency monsters. The base install is light and I can choose what I want to add.

- Neon is fast. I am not sure how this compares any more, but it was noticeable when I first switched.

- Neon has been quite stable. This has been a surprise. There have been a couple issues that required some wrangling over the years, but not more than I was getting under Kubuntu.

- I have had zero issue with Steam games. As far as I can tell, there is nothing significantly different than mainline *buntu as far as the games are concerned.

- I still get to use the huge *buntu PPA system.

Cons:

- There are a few dependencies that Neon requires for fresh Plasma. However, they very occasionally conflict with something else I want to install. I remember some of the GIS (mapping) software wouldn't work a couple years ago, but I haven't tried lately.

- Proton works fine but I can't install 32bit Wine. Not sure if this is Neon's fault. I would really like 32bit Wine for my work, not play.

- Very minor, but I like to use Synaptic for my package manager and there are no useful descriptions in the Neon packaging system. Again, I am not sure if this is Neon's fault.

I have occasionally thought about going back to Kubuntu, but I really like how lean Neon is.

Hi from an happy KDE-Neon user.
I like this "distro" because allows to have a stable system thanks to the Ubuntu LTS base but with the last features of KDE environment. The new plasma/KDE releases are usually published in a matter of days. In the rare cases where a release contains some bugged code, the problem is not system-breaking and will be fixed in few days (or hours? ).

The negative aspect of using KDE-neon is the need to wait a few month before upgrading to the next LTS release. I think this is widely compensated by having the last features of the desktop environment, the part of the system more in contact with the user. I have a Nvidia GPU so I do not need a bleeding edge Mesa or kernel, I do not know how simple will be to install and maintain a system for gaming with an AMD GPU.

About stability: with this upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 I had a problem with the audio output not detected anymore (my motherboard is a Gigabyte Aorus Pro X570). After some research and tests I discovered that the "headphones" and "line out" are now swapped. Connecting the headphone jack to the "line out" socket fixed the problem . I doubt this is related to KDE-Neon, it is more probably related to changes in the kernel drivers or PulseAudio. To fix the problem I tried even to install the HWE Kernel but I thinks that for now for Ubuntu 20.04 the HWE kernel is the same as the standard kernel?. After reading lordgault I installed Xanmod kernel, the audio outputs are still swapped but at least now I have a kernel with support for fsync .

If I wasn't so rooted in Manjaro KDE, I think KDE neon would be what I would go for if I needed to do a fresh install.

rolling release > all
also AUR

and they have FSYNC in kernel 5.7, which you can easily install with the kernel manager.... you dont need a lot of ppas for mesa, kernel, ukuu, etc and mayor updates that may break something

Now i have to ask difficult question:
I'm looking for distro that:
1. Is fully compatible with Ubuntu in terms of gaming (mainly Robocraft, i do not want to use flatpak)
2. Has fresh packages (KDE, kernel, Mesa, Wine, Lutris being major ones)
3. Does integrate well with KDE
4. I would like something as close as possible to rolling relase

Now i have to ask difficult question:
I'm looking for distro that:
1. Is fully compatible with Ubuntu in terms of gaming (mainly Robocraft, i do not want to use flatpak)
2. Has fresh packages (KDE, kernel, Mesa, Wine, Lutris being major ones)
3. Does integrate well with KDE
4. I would like something as close as possible to rolling relase

That is a difficult question. Don't think there's any such thing, especially when you add in that last bit.

Now i have to ask difficult question:
I'm looking for distro that:
1. Is fully compatible with Ubuntu in terms of gaming (mainly Robocraft, i do not want to use flatpak)
2. Has fresh packages (KDE, kernel, Mesa, Wine, Lutris being major ones)
3. Does integrate well with KDE
4. I would like something as close as possible to rolling relase

I doubt there is any distro that can satisfy such requirements, if the distro uses the Ubuntu repository then it cannot be rolling release.
If the compatibility with Ubuntu is required only for running Robocraft, I think the best solution is to ask someone using a rolling release (probably Arch or derivatives) if the game works on their system.

Now i have to ask difficult question:
I'm looking for distro that:
1. Is fully compatible with Ubuntu in terms of gaming (mainly Robocraft, i do not want to use flatpak)
2. Has fresh packages (KDE, kernel, Mesa, Wine, Lutris being major ones)
3. Does integrate well with KDE
4. I would like something as close as possible to rolling relase

I doubt there is any distro that can satisfy such requirements, if the distro uses the Ubuntu repository then it cannot be rolling release.
If the compatibility with Ubuntu is required only for running Robocraft, I think the best solution is to ask someone using a rolling release (probably Arch or derivatives) if the game works on their system.

Robocraft is just the biggest offender- they set their EAC to run *buntu family only. There are other games that are broken or somewhat broken on rr's i've tested (mainly Manjaro and openSUSE). The closest I've come to meeting this requirements was KDE Neon, but some software was so old i could not reasonably use it. I'm thinking about something similar to Pop OS, but running nicely with KDE.

From KDE NEON 20.04 how i feel;

Rocksolid,
More Responsive
Always up to date Desktop
Fastest amongst gnome or older kde versions.
still has some minor bugs with gui. (very few times discovery stucks. and apt databases locks need reboot to use install remove etc.)
Kde connect has more options (i love it.)
Boot up time very reduced. from 35 to 15 for my pc.
Still didnt noticed any crashs. also Steam installer has auto fix for "lib32 packages" which is needed by games.
also just dont forget to install sudo apt install libnvidia-gl-XXX.xx:i386 package to get steam running after nvidia driver install.


Last edited by Kuduzkehpan on 20 August 2020 at 5:48 am UTC

Now i have to ask difficult question:
I'm looking for distro that:
1. Is fully compatible with Ubuntu in terms of gaming (mainly Robocraft, i do not want to use flatpak)
2. Has fresh packages (KDE, kernel, Mesa, Wine, Lutris being major ones)
3. Does integrate well with KDE
4. I would like something as close as possible to rolling relase

The development version of Ubuntu, specifically the Kubuntu flavour is the closest you can get to that.
Currently its Groovy Gorilla which will come out as 20.10 in October.

Its almost like a rolling release, during most of the half year development phase you get newer versions of the packages. Once it gets close to release more and more parts gets frozen with then only bugfixes, and then it gets released.

A week or so later the next one will start development, and you need to do a small release upgrade, and then its rolls on:-)

Lutris is not yet in the Ubuntu repositories, but the PPA from them does support groovy already. And there has been some progress in getting Lutris into Debian, after which it will get into the Ubuntu development automatically, and then next release. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754129

Now i have to ask difficult question:
I'm looking for distro that:
1. Is fully compatible with Ubuntu in terms of gaming (mainly Robocraft, i do not want to use flatpak)
2. Has fresh packages (KDE, kernel, Mesa, Wine, Lutris being major ones)
3. Does integrate well with KDE
4. I would like something as close as possible to rolling relase

The development version of Ubuntu, specifically the Kubuntu flavour is the closest you can get to that.
Currently its Groovy Gorilla which will come out as 20.10 in October.

Its almost like a rolling release, during most of the half year development phase you get newer versions of the packages. Once it gets close to release more and more parts gets frozen with then only bugfixes, and then it gets released.

A week or so later the next one will start development, and you need to do a small release upgrade, and then its rolls on:-)

Lutris is not yet in the Ubuntu repositories, but the PPA from them does support groovy already. And there has been some progress in getting Lutris into Debian, after which it will get into the Ubuntu development automatically, and then next release. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754129

Thanks! I'll check that next time I will be hopping distros.