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KDE Neon review
- partycoder 8y agoIt mostly covers installation, which has been for the most part the same for a long time.
- hydrot3k 8y agoThank you for your comment! This was my first experience with KDE Neon, so I can't compare the installation to an installation of an earlier version. Was there any information missing that you would have liked to read? I would appreciate any feedback you can provide!
- quickben 8y agoOk, feedback of one: I don't care about the installation. I can install anything just fine. Should I though? Is this version better than the last one? Is it better than windows? Mac os? True os? How is it better? Should i care about kde neon? What if i am mainstream Ubuntu with that gnome ui that wants to be MacOs (or wherever it is lately), will Neon appeal to me, why? Stuff like that, otherwise you provided yet another installation process screenshots and we have enough of them lately.
- hydrot3k 8y agoIt is my purpose to provide enough information so that anyone reading my articles can answer these questions for themselves, but I agree that there is definitely still a lot of room for improvement. Thank you for your feedback!
- keithpeter 8y agoThe rolling GUI/LTS underpinning is the unusual thing about KDE Neon. So I'd find a second review after about 6 months and at least one major KDE version update of interest - any glitches? config files need delete/or OK? That kind of thing. Might also be fun to show various end user activities using KDE Plasma 5 oriented software (photos with digiKAM, music management, audio applications &c) and if they have got the desktop indexing and search sorted out yet.
- partycoder 8y agoRather than how to install this article should be about WHY you should install KDE. Features, software, etc.
- Improvotter 8y agoNot really a very comprehensive review I'd say.
- hydrot3k 8y agoThank you for your comment! I would really like to hear what information or topics you missed in the review.
- diffeomorphism 8y agoCould you say something about the distro? The installer is used only once and not very interesting. Default preinstalled apps are nice to know, but again not important. Interesting things would be: - How does this differ in practice from other similar distros like ubuntu with kde, debian (stable or unstable?) or fedora? - Is package management different? E.g. other repos, are snaps supported? flatpak? - What additional software is added or missing in the repos compared its ubuntu lts base? Is this actually a standalone distro or "just" an added repo? - What are the drawbacks or advantages of this distro compared to ubuntu+kde (kubuntu is just a flavor of ubuntu, not really a separate distro)? - How many people are working on this distro? - What about security? Do they have their own team? - Can you contribute packages to Neon or only to ubuntu?
- natex 8y agoI don't understand the point of it, either. Who is it for?
- Legogris 8y agoI always wanted to like KDE but never really good hooked on it way back when I was surveying desktop environments over a decade ago. Have been on xmonad on my main desktops for quite some time now and just going with GNOME, Xfce or LXDE in whatever other scenario I need X11 in. I am now running KDE on my media PC and am very happy with it - it is very streamlined yet configurable. There are keyboard shortcut possibilities for pretty much anything I'd want. I might just be replacing Lubuntu with this as my default "just need Ubuntu with a graphical environment" dist.
- qwerty456127 8y agoKDE feels amazing on Manjaro. I always liked KDE but it has always felt rather immature (severe bugs, clumsy design, questionable architecture) and now it feels complete finally. I would probably prefer tiling window managers if I had a huge display and used terminals a lot but as long as neither applies to me KDE seems the best of all the options available today (XFCE is not bad too but it lacks native support for Win7-like task panel).
- TomMarius 8y agoYou can combine KDE with a tiling WM very easily
- qwerty456127 8y agoAnd what would I get and why would I probably need it? In fact the only things I want from a DE are a Win7-like task panel + pretty and convenient window decorations. Another thing I love about KDE is Krusader - the best Linux file manager I know (I've tried using it in a GTK environment on Ubuntu but it looked ugly to the point of unusable).
- jraph 8y agoKDE is convenient for a lot of things. At least, handling of the desktop / wallpaper, the amazing command runner, the menu with its search bar that also supports running commands, the network, bluetooth, clipboard management, the task manager, the configuration center, the overall integration that pretty much stays here event without KDE's window manager (which is amazing too). I'm not speaking about KDE applications because they are usable outside of plasma, but I tend to like them too. So yes, if one day I found that an advanced tiling window manager is what I want, maybe I would keep the rest of the KDE environment.
- qwerty456127 8y agoYes, you're right. I've forgotten the command runner isn't a standard feature of other DEs/WMs... As for BlueTooth - I have never managed to make it work - it worked on Ubuntu (although it used to take me ~10 minutes of random switching to make my BT headphones work with it but at least it would always detect them, the problem was setting them up correctly) but doesn't work on Manjaro+KDE at all, fortunately I don't really need it. As for clipboard management - it can be helpful in many cases but in my everyday work it only annoys me as I can't find how to disable clipboard erasure on Kate exit.
- unethical_ban 8y agoPosted from KDE Neon. I like the concept of "Stable OS, Updated GUI". I've been running it for a while on my laptop. Good: * Things just seem to work. The notifications and system settings are pretty easy and slick. The start menu is good. * Annoying: I miss Ubuntu's Unity keyboard shortcuts. Not just that, but holding down "meta" key showed the shortcuts. I also had trouble doing... I think it was adding a hidden network? There was something in the network manager I couldn't do. AND: To this day I don't know how to make a multi-line taskbar like you can do in Windows. I never liked KDE (Been using Linux since 2005) but this 5.1.x is making me swing my vote over.
- simcop2387 8y ago> To this day I don't know how to make a multi-line taskbar like you can do in Windows. Right click on the task bar at the bottom, goto "Configure Task Manager". There's a setting for how many rows to allow. The only other thing needed is to have the panel tall enough (You'll have to play, I don't know what this height is) and it will then start doing multi-row/line task bar when you have enough windows. Also you can check the "Always make rows box" in that same settings dialog to force it to always be multi-line.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- diffeomorphism 8y ago> To this day I don't know how to make a multi-line taskbar like you can do in Windows It is there by default. Simply make the panel a bit taller. You can also right-click to adjust the number of rows and to always arrange in columns.
- rocky1138 8y agoI used to use KDE Neon installed on my work 2015 MBP. Very happy with it and missed the keyboard shortcuts so much that I switched back to KDE on my new laptop from PopOS. I'm not sure what the point of kubuntu is any more since that's what most people will get and they'll get an old and outdated experience as a result. IMO KDE Neon should become the new Kubuntu.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoKubuntu has drivers out of the box and clean integration with Firefox for KDE.
- JamesCoyne 8y agoPresumably KDE neon ships with an LTS kernel. Does this impact support for newer graphics drivers or hinder gaming usage?
- giancarlostoro 8y agoThey do not include any proprietary drivers. You need to enable them or do some Kubuntu Neon hybrid.
- qwerty456127 8y agoBTW what I miss using KDE and willing to extend it is a concise widget toolkit. I've taken a look at source code of some plasmoids and it seemed quite extraterrestrial to me, certainly not something you can start with quickly and easily so I've ended up using a widget (a "plasmoid") that just displays HTML and serving HTML content to it (and even that widget was not really easy to install).
- Roodstyle 8y agoAll seems to work...i just have problems when i use 2 monitors, the srceens turn black some times when a dialog window appears on screen
- greencore 8y agoAs long it doesn't support fraction scaling there's no good use of it.
- natex 8y agoNot sure where you are getting your information but KDE has supported fractional scaling for a while now.
- bsaul 8y agoLooking at the screenshots makes me seriously wonder if any professional graphic artist / ui designer is working on that project... screens are mostly empty gray panels, with weirdly spaced inputs from the 80s , tiny fonts and bland colors... i don’t want to sound too harsh on the nice guys that worked on it, but if they want to have anything popular they should give UI a bit more love ( and i think now is the time when a popular lîux desktop is the most needed)
- meddlepal 8y agoIt looks functional unlike most garbage designers produce.
- matthewmacleod 8y agoThis comment is entirely without value. It's possible to make a user interface that's both functional and well-designed. Indeed, good UI design improves functionality by making it more accessible and understandable. Things like consistency of elements and appropriate use of whitespace help to avoid mistakes and confusion. I have to agree with the parent – it's also surprising to me how often otherwise excellent open-source projects are let down by poor user interface design. A large part of this is probably down to the more technical nature of the teams building them, who are probably the group for which design matters least. But I see this a lot in things like internal admin tools too – developers can quite often develop UIs that are so bad they actually become dangerous, and I wonder if some kind of "useful design skills for software developers" might be a worthwhile thing to work on.
- bsaul 8y agoI’d like to address this comment because i think it highlights a common misconception amongst developer : a good looking UI isn’t first and foremost about being « pretty ». It’s about being meaningful. About making sense. If all i see when i look at the screen is a huge big gray panel, then it means nothing. There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason. If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important. If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention. Colors, font and layout are of the utmost importance when designning a ui because they convey meaning. Which is what a GUI is all about ( otherwise just use a terminal).
- flerchin 8y agoI've been having an issue with scaling in KDE Plasma with multiple monitors. Have you been able to resolve that with Neon? I have my 4k laptop monitor at 2x scaling, but then my 1080p monitors are also 2x scaled, and unusable. I've resigned to using 1440p on my laptop with default scaling.
- blinkingled 8y agoAs an old time KDE fan I had to give up on it because it mostly didn't work reliably after 4.x. I recently tried out Plasma on arch and was pleasantly surprised to see lot of it mostly works well - I can force font DPI and use fractional scale which means a combination of it works better on HiDPI screen than GNOME. It still scared me few times when the lock screen didn't really lock after waking from suspend. Hopefully the Arch rolling release means I will get a fix soon.
- dschuetz 8y agoKDE always was and still is a buggy, but hot mess. Also, they've been busy dumbing down the UX for a more "user-friendly" Linux which traditionally means focusing on the wrong elements. Which also means that previously easy things became impossible. A good and powerful file manager was replaced by a lame joke. I really liked KDE 4 once. It was near perfect with 4.6. But then along came Plasma 5. Downhill from there. Instead of introducing new features and design they should've focused on bugs and stability.
- reitanqild 8y agoInteresting : ) I've found one person to admit they preferred KDE 4 series. Everyone else seems to prefer the older 3 series or the newer 5 series, me included.
- ubercow13 8y agoHow has the file manager got worse?
- gradschool 8y agoKde Neon started out ok for me but slowed a low spec laptop to the point of being unusable within a few months. Other distros have run fine on the same machine before and afterwards. On top of that, Kmail somehow destroyed a couple of years of messages. I've been using Manjaro with Xfce lately and wish I had done so originally.
- oelmekki 8y agoI've been using KDE Neon since a few months after its initial release, and I'm very satisfied with it. Before that, I was for a decade on Gentoo (switching between wmii and KDE from time to time), and then on Ubuntu for a couple years (around the time I started using docker). There are still bugs here and there (which is perfectly understandable), but it's the most polished KDE experience I ever had. I'm actually wondering if it's not the most polished linux experience I ever had - except maybe a vanilla Ubuntu using as much defaults as possible, but I just can't help moving from defaults after a short while (that's the main interest of gnu/linux, to me). EDIT: oh btw, worth mentioning: I'm using the user edition (the LTS one). I initially used the developer edition, but I found its constant updates annoying, and things were a bit less stable than the user edition (as one could expect).
- cpburns2009 8y agoI've been running Kubuntu 18.04 and so far I like it. It's customizable without plugins. It's closer to GNOME 2 than Unity was and GNOME 3 is. After installing the Nvidia drivers it pretty much just works. I wish there were more themes that were compatible across Qt 4/5 and GTK 2/3. The default theme, Breeze, isn't bad but it wastes whitespace.
- 123919239 8y agoKDE offers the integration that I expect from a desktop. Plasma was way ahead of others, when it came to management of * audio, including Bluetooth * network * display Unfortunately, little care is taken on security. KDE Wallet simply offers an API to all your passwords, without any separation. Users cannot tell which application just accessed the "wallet". Certificate warnings randomly pop up, asking for "yes" or "no" without any explaination. Plasma "integration" will ask you for full access to your Google account, but it is unclear what for. The calendar integration will require separate authentication -- to the calendar only. I think Linux desktops were ahead of others, some years ago, but right now I struggle to recommend it to anyone.
- wink 8y agoDamn, just installed plain 18.04 a month ago, using it with i3 + KDE. Maybe I should've tried this one instead, keeping KDE a bit more current.
- oweiler 8y agoWas a huge fan of KDE 3.5 back in the days but with version 4.0 it became an unusable mess. Maybe I should give KDE another try.