4 ms·

What's a good live distro for a well-integrated KDE experience? I haven't used it for years but want to see how it is these days. I used to love the way the cor

What's a good live distro for a well-integrated KDE experience? I haven't used it for years but want to see how it is these days. I used to love the way the core-ish apps seemed to work together in concert.

brnt 4y ago
Frankly, any? I used KDE Neon, Fedora, Opensuse and now Debian. They all give you access to the KDE apps suite. I don't know what you mean with integration really, it's a matter of using their apps (or not, I still use Firefox for example).
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  Integrated, as in the package updater UI works together with the OS. Or there are no services that conflict with those running under KDE. Fedora's not been great, upgrades always bring some kind of changes. In 35, I ended up with broken system monitoring applets. Still better than in 34, where, in addition to broken monitoring, Plasma needed to be restarted 3 times before panel drawers unbroke. Never managed to get night mode not get immediately overridden by some other part of the OS.
  - brnt 4y ago
    All distros that I've used provided UI for package updates. Rolling releases hugging upstream very closely may have breakage, but that isn't KDE specific. It is the reason I went back to Debian stable, because it is indeed stable. The breakage I had with Opensuse and Fedora was Wayland related as far as I could establish.
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      Well, after upgrading to Fedora 35, my UI no longer works :) No, it's not KDE-specific. The failure of integration is distribution-specific.
      - brnt 4y ago
        I can't run recent Fedora KDE either, due to them mainlining Wayland prematurely. Perhaps you have the same? I'm on Debian now, which ships an older KDE, but, everything works, which is a first.
        rhn_mk1 4y ago
        I had KDE running on Wayland mostly OK, but some glitches caused me to switch the session back to X (in exchange for other glitches I already know how to deal with). I never asked to switch, it happened when upgrading to 35. It also means I don't know how to install the X session.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  I used Manjaro KDE for years and always felt like it is perfect.
  - 3np 4y ago
    Really? Just in the past year or two I had more than one occasion when an upgrade of the same mostly vanilla system broke the graphical environment completely and I had to manually edit/delete some files to get it back. (That was separate from the other couple of times when some python packages required manual intervention to not yield a broken upgrade but that may have been related to AUR. Not a biggie for me but probably caused frustration for many users)
    - qwerty456127 4y ago
      Never happened to me. I mostly used it on very old hardware Core 2 Duo with on-board Intel graphics though. Everything seems great on a modern AMD laptop as well but I run XFCE (for sake of using the Chicago95 theme) rather than KDE on it and it's been just about a year. Perhaps one of reasons why it worked this reliably for me is I turnt composition off (there is a handy hotkey for that in KDE) but it worked nice with it enabled as well. I only switched it off because I never managed to invent a reason for it to be enabled.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
I recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed since it's a sane and tested rolling release without the blood, so you get the latest KDE updates with the latest kernel and packages. I wouldn't recommend Kubuntu or KDE Neon, as the latest KDE releases are developed on the latest kernel, so, using it on Ubuntu based distros with old kernel and old packages might not be the best experience for the latest KDE releases or even cause issues. Anecdotally, KDE also runs better on Tumbleweed than on Fedora for me. Also, maybe give Gecko Linux a try, it's a sane, noob friendly, batteries included version of Tumbleweed, with Nvidia drivers and proprietary codecs out of the box, along with a default to X11 because the author doesn't consider Wayland ready for prime time. Just make sure to do a sudo zypper dup after installation to update the OS and packages since the packages on the ISOs are out of date as the ISOs are updated about twice a year, which is not ideal for a rolling distro but to be fair, the whole Gecko "operation" is run for free by one guy so this is understandable.
jraph 4y ago
Probably KDE Neon [1]: this is Ubuntu with updated KDE maintained by the KDE Team. I use openSUSE Tumbleweed where KDE is up to date and well integrated (I really recommend Tumbleweed for a good KDE experience), I see that they have a live image they call JeOS ("We also have JeOS, Live images. Check out Alternative Downloads!") [2], I haven't tried the live image but it's probably very good. [1] https://neon.kde.org/ https://neon.kde.org/ [2] https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/#download https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/#download
- brnt 4y ago
  I've got two issues with NEON: 1. It's Ubuntu based, so comes with snap. Not a fan. 2. It's LTS based, and tends to update not on schedule but with about a half year delay. That means packages get old... 3. (I lied!) It's both bad and good: updates are, even on the user branch, too damn frequent :)
  - jraph 4y ago
    I do agree about the Ubuntu part. For the updates, if the intent is just to test KDE in a live environment, this part should be up to date and frequent updates should not be an issue. I would recommend against using KDE Neon daily though. Or Ubuntu by the way. It used to be a really good distro, but it's not so much today I think.
npteljes 4y ago
I installed Kubuntu 20.04 on my workstation almost 2 years ago, and it has been working out well since. It really does feel well integrated.
zafiro17 4y ago
I'm using Mageia with great success. KDE, frequent security and package updates, big repository, non-Ubuntu. Former Mandriva and Mandrake for those who remember Linux in the early 2000s.

brnt 4y ago

Frankly, any? I used KDE Neon, Fedora, Opensuse and now Debian. They all give you access to the KDE apps suite. I don't know what you mean with integration really, it's a matter of using their apps (or not, I still use Firefox for example).

rhn_mk1 4y ago
Integrated, as in the package updater UI works together with the OS. Or there are no services that conflict with those running under KDE. Fedora's not been great, upgrades always bring some kind of changes. In 35, I ended up with broken system monitoring applets. Still better than in 34, where, in addition to broken monitoring, Plasma needed to be restarted 3 times before panel drawers unbroke. Never managed to get night mode not get immediately overridden by some other part of the OS.
- brnt 4y ago
  All distros that I've used provided UI for package updates. Rolling releases hugging upstream very closely may have breakage, but that isn't KDE specific. It is the reason I went back to Debian stable, because it is indeed stable. The breakage I had with Opensuse and Fedora was Wayland related as far as I could establish.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    Well, after upgrading to Fedora 35, my UI no longer works :) No, it's not KDE-specific. The failure of integration is distribution-specific.
    - brnt 4y ago
      I can't run recent Fedora KDE either, due to them mainlining Wayland prematurely. Perhaps you have the same? I'm on Debian now, which ships an older KDE, but, everything works, which is a first.
      - rhn_mk1 4y ago
        I had KDE running on Wayland mostly OK, but some glitches caused me to switch the session back to X (in exchange for other glitches I already know how to deal with). I never asked to switch, it happened when upgrading to 35. It also means I don't know how to install the X session.
qwerty456127 4y ago
I used Manjaro KDE for years and always felt like it is perfect.
- 3np 4y ago
  Really? Just in the past year or two I had more than one occasion when an upgrade of the same mostly vanilla system broke the graphical environment completely and I had to manually edit/delete some files to get it back. (That was separate from the other couple of times when some python packages required manual intervention to not yield a broken upgrade but that may have been related to AUR. Not a biggie for me but probably caused frustration for many users)
  - qwerty456127 4y ago
    Never happened to me. I mostly used it on very old hardware Core 2 Duo with on-board Intel graphics though. Everything seems great on a modern AMD laptop as well but I run XFCE (for sake of using the Chicago95 theme) rather than KDE on it and it's been just about a year. Perhaps one of reasons why it worked this reliably for me is I turnt composition off (there is a handy hotkey for that in KDE) but it worked nice with it enabled as well. I only switched it off because I never managed to invent a reason for it to be enabled.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

I recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed since it's a sane and tested rolling release without the blood, so you get the latest KDE updates with the latest kernel and packages. I wouldn't recommend Kubuntu or KDE Neon, as the latest KDE releases are developed on the latest kernel, so, using it on Ubuntu based distros with old kernel and old packages might not be the best experience for the latest KDE releases or even cause issues. Anecdotally, KDE also runs better on Tumbleweed than on Fedora for me. Also, maybe give Gecko Linux a try, it's a sane, noob friendly, batteries included version of Tumbleweed, with Nvidia drivers and proprietary codecs out of the box, along with a default to X11 because the author doesn't consider Wayland ready for prime time. Just make sure to do a sudo zypper dup after installation to update the OS and packages since the packages on the ISOs are out of date as the ISOs are updated about twice a year, which is not ideal for a rolling distro but to be fair, the whole Gecko "operation" is run for free by one guy so this is understandable.

jraph 4y ago

Probably KDE Neon [1]: this is Ubuntu with updated KDE maintained by the KDE Team. I use openSUSE Tumbleweed where KDE is up to date and well integrated (I really recommend Tumbleweed for a good KDE experience), I see that they have a live image they call JeOS ("We also have JeOS, Live images. Check out Alternative Downloads!") [2], I haven't tried the live image but it's probably very good. [1] https://neon.kde.org/ https://neon.kde.org/ [2] https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/#download https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/#download

brnt 4y ago
I've got two issues with NEON: 1. It's Ubuntu based, so comes with snap. Not a fan. 2. It's LTS based, and tends to update not on schedule but with about a half year delay. That means packages get old... 3. (I lied!) It's both bad and good: updates are, even on the user branch, too damn frequent :)
- jraph 4y ago
  I do agree about the Ubuntu part. For the updates, if the intent is just to test KDE in a live environment, this part should be up to date and frequent updates should not be an issue. I would recommend against using KDE Neon daily though. Or Ubuntu by the way. It used to be a really good distro, but it's not so much today I think.

npteljes 4y ago

I installed Kubuntu 20.04 on my workstation almost 2 years ago, and it has been working out well since. It really does feel well integrated.

zafiro17 4y ago

I'm using Mageia with great success. KDE, frequent security and package updates, big repository, non-Ubuntu. Former Mandriva and Mandrake for those who remember Linux in the early 2000s.