Why Kubuntu is "better" than Ubuntu

[Schwarzer Kater]

As you can see I put the "better" in quotes, because many things come down to personal preference. I also have to point out that this is written with Kubuntu 22.04 in mind (e.g. Appimages and libfuse2).

But I truly think that there are valid arguments why Kubuntu is indeed better than Ubuntu, some of them I tell people when and why I recommend Kubuntu if they ask me for installing them "Ubuntu Linux" additional to or instead of Windows on their system:

• KDE Plasma instead of Gnome (obviously :-) )
• (therefore) uses less resources / memory
• Appimages do work out of the box (libfuse2 is installed by default)
• much easier to remove snaps / snapd from your system (is this possible in Ubuntu at all?)
• applications or system components don't close randomly in low memory conditions, because no systemd-oomd is installed (yes, I know: the kernel can do this too, but it is much less aggressive)
• Thunderbird is installed by default
• semi-official(?) way to get additional updates for KDE stuff via Kubuntu Backports PPA
• … ?

Unfortunately the Kubuntu trademark is owned by Canonical afaik, so Kubuntu will always be more or less dependent on Ubuntu/Canonical - but this is an advantage as well as hopefully the Kubuntu team can rely on Canonical's support.

Do you also think that Kubuntu is better than Ubuntu and why?

[claydoh]

Plasma is becoming a bit less light, at least it seems to be

On my Arm based Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook, Gnome deems to run better, faster, and smoother than Plasma, based on all of 5 minutes Gnome usage vs much longer on KDE. Both running off an NVME in a USB enclosure - possibly faster than the on-board EMMC storage. 8 cores and 8Gb ram don't seem to help much, though.

This of course could be related to the specific 'custom' kernel build as well likely more time and effort by Ubuntu and Gnome on Arm vs KDE, Kubuntu and Neon, though even Arch's Plasma seems just as pokey.

[claydoh]

And de-snapifying Ubuntu looks identical to what is needed in Kubuntu

As to appimage, that seems to also effect/have effected Fedora, maybe
https://github.com/AppImage/libappimage/issues/168

I *think* earlier on that having both libfuse2 and libfuse3 installed on systems was problematic, but that seems to have been worked out. libfuse2 is outdated, and no longer supported upstream, so Appimage is partly to blame here.

[GreyGeek]

As you can see I put the "better" in quotes, because many things come down to personal preference. I also have to point out that this is written with Kubuntu 22.04 in mind (e.g. Appimages and libfuse2).
....
Do you also think that Kubuntu is better than Ubuntu and why?

I agree with what you wrote.
My first choice for installing new apps is to look for the most recent AppImage of it, and if it equals or exceeds what is in the repository I'll install it instead.

Last fall I moved from Kubuntu to Neon, primarily to experience Plasma on the leading edge (not bleeding edge, you'd have to install the dev version for that).
Neon is, for all practical purposes, Kubuntu with Plasma on steroids. I've been happy with the move.

Regardless, I won't use a distro that doesn't use systemd and/or BTRFS. Especially BTRFS. I can get along without systemd, but I won't ever again run a distro that doesn't allow BTRFS as the root filesystem.

[Schwarzer Kater]

And de-snapifying Ubuntu looks identical to what is needed in Kubuntu

Oh, OK - maybe I was wrong there. I thought there were things like the Gnome Software Center (or whatever it is called) in Ubuntu that were installed as a snap too.


Because I was curious I fired up some virtual machines (VirtualBox on an Intel processor, as I am lazy and like to drag and drop my virtual machines around… :-) ) and installed Kubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 22.04 and Xubuntu 22.04. I chose "standard" installation with additional proprietary stuff on the whole virtual drive (all with standard ext4, added for GreyGeek :-) ).
The only thing I did afterwards was to

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

and reboot.
After 3-4 minutes of doing nothing I ran

df -h /

and

free -h

(htop or neofetch would give higher numbers, and the three different terminal emulators probably use different amounts of memory themselves but this is just for a rough comparison in general).
I repeated this five times for each operating system (mainly because of the memory usage estimate):

	Kubuntu 22.04	Ubuntu 22.04	Xubuntu 22.04
df -h / "used"	9.0 G	8.2 G	8.3 G
free -h "used" (average)	~550 Mi	~670 Mi	~520 Mi
systemd-oomd installed	no	yes	no
libfuse2 installed	yes	no	yes
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE	x11	wayland	x11

If I remember correctly the gap of memory usage on cold boot was about the same between Xubuntu -> Kubuntu (+ ~25-50 Mi) -> Ubuntu (+ ~100-125 Mi) with 18.04 and 20.04…
Of course the numbers above are a) in a virtual machine and b) can go way up in "real-world" usage when you launch applications as the different graphical user interfaces start different (additional) things then or some additional background processes are run (e.g. update-, location- or maintenance-services).

I was surprised at the disk usage though, but I did not compare the out-of-the-box installed applications.

[…] libfuse2 is outdated, and no longer supported upstream, so Appimage is partly to blame here.

You are certainly right, but I purely take an enduser's perspective on this one. ;-)