
KDE Neon review - hydrot3k
https://verummeum.com/blog/2018/10/07/kde-neon-review-2018/
======
bsaul
Looking 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)

~~~
guessmyname
ElementaryOS [1] is the only Linux distribution that seems to care more about
design than functionality.

[1] [https://elementary.io](https://elementary.io)

~~~
nextos
I loved the looks of classical Gnome. Say Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10).

My favorite design these days is an extremely minimal UI. A tiling window
manager (StumpWM), Emacs, a terminal (xterm) and a web browser (Firefox). It's
very efficient, and solves the design issue by having almost no design at all.

It can actually look really nice. See e.g. a some images from a random user
with a similar setup:
[https://lepisma.github.io/wiki/misc/desktop.html](https://lepisma.github.io/wiki/misc/desktop.html)

~~~
ashtonbaker
I tried i3wm for a while - are you able to compare that to StumpWM? I really
like the idea of a tiling wm, but haven't gotten around to customizing it
exactly the way I would want it.

~~~
nextos
Both are manual tiling window managers. I tried i3wm and I didn't like it that
much, though.

StumpWM is essentially Ratpoison reimplemented in Common Lisp. It's really
good and stable, plus it resembles Emacs a lot. There's even a winner-mode.

There's not much to say except that you can tweak it till infinity and extend
it in CL. But for me most defaults are pretty good already.

------
Legogris
I 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.

------
unethical_ban
Posted 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.

~~~
diffeomorphism
> 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.

------
qwerty456127
KDE 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
You can combine KDE with a tiling WM very easily

~~~
qwerty456127
And 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
KDE 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
Yes, 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.

~~~
jraph
For what it's worth, krunner works well outside of plasma. I've found that the
one of lxqt is quite nice too. I'm lost with runners from other desktop
environments. No auto completion, no history or no calculator.

I've found that clipboard is wiped on application exit in X11 when no
clipboard manager is running. Annoying when this happens. KDE's one is
Klipper, and I tend to set it such that it keeps and history or 50 items.

Off topic: by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when
using Wayland compositors is sadly the main thing that keeps me from using
Wayland. Which is too bad, since my WQHD screen support in X is so so. I hope
this gets fixed in a not to distant future, I rely on this feature.

~~~
qwerty456127
> I've found that clipboard is wiped on application exit in X11 when no
> clipboard manager is running.

I've never encountered this behavior in any DE before moving to KDE5 and even
with KDE5.

> KDE's one is Klipper, and I tend to set it such that it keeps and history or
> 50 items.

Although I admit clipboard history can be useful and even I used to have a
task made easier with it, now I really don't want a clipboard manager to keep
history.

> by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using
> Wayland

It doesn't work as it is meant to, reliably with all the apps even with X11
with KDE5.

~~~
jraph
I think I encounter this behavior outside of big desktop managers, when using
an openbox session for instance.

For clipboard history, I understand that you don't want everything saved. I
think most clipboard managers allow you to delete entries. (But you have to
think about it)

>> by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using
Wayland

> It doesn't work as it is meant to, reliably with all the apps even with X11
> with KDE5.

I'm curious, in which situation it does not work correctly?

~~~
qwerty456127
> I'm curious, in which situation it does not work correctly?

I can't remember particular cases already but sometimes middle mouse click
won't paste anything or will paste old clipboard content and only Ctrl+V works
the meant way. It seems this happens either because Ctrl+C/V and MMB actually
use 2 independent clipboards that are not always synchronized correctly or
because some UI toolkits have some quirks with this part.

~~~
jraph
Yes, I actually rely on mouse paste and Ctrl+V being independent clipboards
(though usually clipboard managers offer to synchronize them, which I've never
tried, so I can't say if it works flawlessly, and I can imagine glitches
here).

Edit: [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/139191/whats-the-
di...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/139191/whats-the-difference-
between-primary-selection-and-clipboard-buffer)

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dschuetz
KDE 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
Interesting : )

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.

------
rocky1138
I 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
Kubuntu has drivers out of the box and clean integration with Firefox for KDE.

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oelmekki
I'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).

------
123919239
KDE 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.

------
partycoder
It mostly covers installation, which has been for the most part the same for a
long time.

~~~
hydrot3k
Thank 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
Ok, 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
It 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!

------
blinkingled
As 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.

------
qwerty456127
BTW 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).

------
cpburns2009
I'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.

------
gradschool
Kde 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.

------
JamesCoyne
Presumably KDE neon ships with an LTS kernel. Does this impact support for
newer graphics drivers or hinder gaming usage?

~~~
giancarlostoro
They do not include any proprietary drivers. You need to enable them or do
some Kubuntu Neon hybrid.

------
flerchin
I'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.

------
wink
Damn, 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
Was 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.

------
Roodstyle
All 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

------
Improvotter
Not really a very comprehensive review I'd say.

~~~
hydrot3k
Thank you for your comment!

I would really like to hear what information or topics you missed in the
review.

~~~
diffeomorphism
Could 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?

------
greencore
As long it doesn't support fraction scaling there's no good use of it.

~~~
natex
Not sure where you are getting your information but KDE has supported
fractional scaling for a while now.

