Initial Thoughts

[kayvee]

I installed Neon on Sunday. I will put in a few first impressions and thoughts throughout the week in case it is of any use to others...
First, my system specs are:

$ inxi
CPU: 12-Core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (-MT MCP-) speed/min/max: 2235/2200/3700 MHz Kernel: 5.13.0-39-generic x86_64 Up: 53m  
Mem: 4436.8/32025.5 MiB (13.9%) Storage: 2.73 TiB (36.2% used) Procs: 501 Shell: bash 5.0.17 inxi: 3.0.38

• Installation was a breeze. This was a clean install and I had to choose which filesystem to use. The default was ext4 but reading from the comments above and elsewhere I decided to go with btrfs.
• Neon is minimal. I needed to install additional software like Libreoffice and Gimp manually. And that's alright by me. I would prefer having a minimal install and choose to install what I really want over something that I may never use. Neon (or rather Plasma) came preinstalled with KDE Connect which I don't use; so that was the only thing I chose to remove.
• Updates -- not a big fan of the "System Upgrade"... that makes me restart the machine every time I want to upgrade. Reminds me of Windows XP days.
• My machine has an old NVIDIA graphics card that uses proprietary drivers. Kubuntu additional drivers would pick it up and give me a helpful message about the availability of NVIDIA drivers, should I want to use them. The additional-drivers software wasn't installed on Neon by default (which is fine) but I could never get it to work. I go to it from the System Settings and it just gets stuck at looking for additional drivers.
• I could not get lm-sensors to tell me my CPU temps... probably because Neon is using a (relatively) older kernel?

[claydoh]

[*]Installation was a breeze. This was a clean install and I had to choose which filesystem to use. The default was ext4 but reading from the comments above and elsewhere I decided to go with btrfs.

[*]Neon is minimal. I needed to install additional software like Libreoffice and Gimp manually. And that's alright by me. I would prefer having a minimal install and choose to install what I really want over something that I may never use. Neon (or rather Plasma) came preinstalled with KDE Connect which I don't use; so that was the only thing I chose to remove.

neon only cares about Plasma, so it has nothing but the base Plasma, plus Firefox, on purpose

[*]Updates -- not a big fan of the "System Upgrade"... that makes me restart the machine every time I want to upgrade. Reminds me of Windows XP days.

Easily turned off in System Settings. I like the idea, but the current implementation (from Freedesktop) is a bit clunky and doesn't consider desktop vs system updates - no way to tell which is which, without a brand new standard and specs, I am sure.

[*]My machine has an old NVIDIA graphics card that uses proprietary drivers. Kubuntu additional drivers would pick it up and give me a helpful message about the availability of NVIDIA drivers, should I want to use them. The additional-drivers software wasn't installed on Neon by default (which is fine) but I could never get it to work. I go to it from the System Settings and it just gets stuck at looking for additional drivers.

Kubuntu's Driver Manager moved to the Software Sources tool some time back, The link to it in System Settings is going to be broken in neon - probably because it was made for a different version of Qt/System Settings.

It is not in neon by default because, well, it is a Kubuntu/Ubuntu application, not a KDE/Plasma one.

If you installed the Driver Manager, you can find it in Discover's settings -- the Software Sources button

[*]I could not get lm-sensors to tell me my CPU temps... probably because Neon is using a (relatively) older kernel?

You have the current stock Ubuntu 20.04 kernel (5.13), which is actually the kernel from 21.10, so it is not really all that ancient. You may need something extra for sensors in any distro with a similar kernel. Not sure if this is still relevant. You might try Ubuntu's 5.14-oem kernel as well.

[kayvee]

Thank you claydoh .

Easily turned off in System Settings.

Thank you, I did not know of this. I have now disabled the "Use offline updates" option; I like the ability to update without restarting for every update.

If you installed the Driver Manager, you can find it in Discover's settings -- the Software Sources button

I do not seem to have this. Here's what I see:

You may need something extra for sensors in any distro with a similar kernel.

Thank you for the pointer. I will give this a try and post my results here.

[claydoh]

Sorry!! I should have said "if you have installed software-properties-qt, which is what provides Kubuntu/Lubuntu's driver tool, you will see the button in the settings.

Or use the commandline tool (already installed) : sudo ubuntu-drivers-autoinstall