What's the deal with KDE Neon vs. Kubuntu?

[jlittle]

... In my post I mentioned a specific user-case: Gaming. We could add to that such things as video editing, development, and multimedia. There are valid cases for wanting newer kernels and newer apps. ...

Just to agree with dequire on this, and maybe amplify his point...

IMO one of the strengths of Ubuntu is that you can get releases that are well supported and fairly up to date. In my limited experience with other distros (er, pretty much debian stable and Red Hat) it's a huge show-stopping pain to strike a bug or misfeature that has been fixed but to get the fix means upgrading lots of dependencies to later versions, or other gymnastics. Many, or rather most, *buntu users don't appreciate the trouble they've avoided.

For me over the years, there's been a variety of packages that I've needed up to date versions, for disparate and unpredictable purposes, usually related to development or hardware. The LTS proponents will say "you can use backports" (backports are repos that port newer versions back to older releases) but I had trouble finding what I needed once, I can't remember what it was, maybe it was too obscure.

The six month release cadence falls short sometimes, but a ppa or two can tide one over, usually somebody somewhere has found an answer. I think that release cadence was too slow for some KDE people and this led to Neon.

So Neon is good for the latest and greatest KDE, and Kubuntu better for other stuff.

[jglen490]

I predict that you will move to Neon User Edition LTS because you want the latest STABLE release of KDE.

Probably not, just because it is a mashup/hybrid of two different approaches. Just basing that on the stated concept of Neon.

I'm not saying that Neon is bad, but it is different in approach from the KDE base. An LTS is stable, because it is predictable, committed, and supportable for a longer time period. And, again, I'm not saying that the non-LTS releases are bad, either. But, since I have a aversion to the non-LTS "ops tempo", the stable LTS is more in keeping with my needs. Heck, I even wait until the first bug fix cycle (i.e., 16.04.1) before installing ...

But then again, I'm saying "probably".

[mowestusa]

Well, I did it. I switched over to Neon User Edition from Kubuntu on two crusty old laptops that I can wipe the drives of Windows and use Linux. Primarily, I'm interested in seeing if there is a difference in stability of KDE. I have added the LibreOffice Fresh PPA and one other PPA for OpenLP so that I could use the latest versions of those apps to fit my current work flow when I'm switching between Windows 10 and Linux.

So far, I do believe my KDE experience is more stable. I had frequent crashes of Discover in Kubuntu 17.04, and in Neon Discover seems to be more stable. In Neon I had an issue with LibreOffice 5.4 having no icons the first time I opened it. The icon set was "Automatic (Helpimg)" which showed no icons only text. I fixed this by just switching to "Galaxy" icon set. Overall I have been impressed with how well KDE Neon is running on a old Windows Vista Toshiba with only 2Gigs or RAM, and the first generation AMD Dual Core Mobile chip. It struggles when opening GDrive in Firefox or if I have Firefox, LibreOffice, and other programs open because of the RAM limitation.

KDE Plasma has crashed twice while I was using KDE, I'm not sure why, but both times it recovered itself, and I could continue working. I have had the computer lockup a few times when the display has blanked, and the screen freezes on the Lockscreen. I have to investigate that further to figure out what is crashing. Overall, with those couple of PPA I seem to have a very stable system with some the most recent versions of software that I need the most. I'm glad to be giving KDE Neon a spin.

[phonic-otg]

I'm using both Neon (PC) and Kubuntu (Lap-top) both using the 16.04LTS kernel.
VPN installed easily on Neon but not so easy on Kubuntu.
Both will throw "hissy fits" occasionally (1 in 10 sessions) and freeze with only a moving cursor forcing a hard reset.
I'm about to install the amdgpu driver for both machines. I'll post my K & N experience. Oh happy days

[GreyGeek]

If you are having freezing cursor issues two common possible causes are 1) permanent freeze - misconfigured adds/gpu or 2) temporary freeze - baloo indexing isn't complete.


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[phonic-otg]

If you are having freezing cursor issues two common possible causes are 1) permanent freeze - misconfigured adds/gpu or 2) temporary freeze - baloo indexing isn't complete.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks GG the freeze lasts for hours before I get impatient, so I'm gonna say permanent. Hopefully the amdgpu driver may correct that. EDIT: After checking the amdgpu is allredy there running.

[GreyGeek]

adds? Brain fart. I meant sddm. Must have had the fingers on the wrong home keys