[KDE] neon - Holy cow Batman

[verndog]

I used neon in the past with some issues. I recently installed one of the Testing ISO's, and was I surprised!
It work without a hitch. I know there are bugs lurching around, but so far its rock solid. I like the fact its stripped down to the bone.

I can now add what I use, and be free of the rest.

One thing I just discovered, and I'm sure its not neon specific, but new to me. I wanted a desktop clock on my Xubuntu. A simple one without Conky. Nothing I could find.
Right-click Application Launcher > Add Widgets, then just pull the analog clock to the desktop.. Its there ticking away. I couldn't believe my eyes how easy that was.

The only reason I started using neon vs Kubuntu, is that System Settings on Kubuntu would crash and never recover. Also right-click on hidden icons didn't show all the choices anymore.

For the foreseeable future I'm sticking with neon.

[Don B. Cilly]

Try this clock

[mr_raider]

Switched to Neon exclusively from kubuntu about a year ago. Before that ran kubuntu on my main rig for "stability". I've found neon to be less buggy in many ways.

[oshunluvr]

KDE Neon Unstable in a VM;

This mornings updates have broken my X server it appears. Early this morning I ran update and the login screen was in table mode and didn't work. Then 2 hours later, a couple more updates and now only text log in.

Waiting for the next update...

[Snowhog]

Posted on KDE neon FB page an hour ago:

KDE neon unstable edition is currently broken, best not upgrade, sorry folks

[verndog]

Posted on KDE neon FB page an hour ago:

I had been running unstable, when mine blew out plasma.desktop after an update. That's why I'll on neon stable.

[oshunluvr]

I had been running unstable, when mine blew out plasma.desktop after an update. That's why I'll on neon stable.

Yeah, UNSTABLE = NOT READY FOR USE.

I want to watch the progress of the newest releases so I run UNSTABLE in a VM. When it breaks, no harm no foul. My daily OS is KDEneon User Edition. It's kind of interesting to see the Info Centers side-by-side.

[oshunluvr]

The last couple of rounds failed to fix my issue with graphics in the Neon Unstable VM (no X), so I gave up.

This morning I built a new machine using the May 10 ISO (the latest available), installed and booted right to exit. I haven't tried to update it yet.

I noticed something exciting during the installation: They used Calamares installer! Finally! It's simple, works great, has an obvious option to install grub on a device, partition, or not at all. Love it. Also is programmed well enough that when I selected Manual Partitioning and MBR rather than GPT because it's a VM so why go through reserving space for GRUB - the program advised me that using GPT is recommended AND that I would need to eave room for GRUB! Wow, genius. Informative and accurate.

Un-updated:

[oshunluvr]

A note on Calamares: I decided to re-install the VM using GPT this time to see how it worked. I created the 8MB unformatted partition with the "grub-bios" flag as advised. When it tried to install GRUB, the installer crashed. So I re-launched it, reviewed my partition table and re-checked all the boxes, etc. and this time it installed perfectly. I have no idea if I did something wrong or if Calamares just crashed. Anyway, now it works.

BTW: One of the cool things about VMs for testing is SNAPSHOTS. I snapshotted my VM, ran full-upgrade, and it indeed is still broken. So we wait...

[oshunluvr]

Also. BTW: If you've read my posts on GPT with GRUB, you know the best place to provide space for GRUB is to partition the drive before running the installer and creating the grub-bios partition in the otherwise unused space between sectors 34 and 2047. I wanted to see how the install went for a new-ish user so I didn't make and "advanced" moves ...

...this time

[verndog]

I wasn't aware neon didn't use Calamares from the beginning. Maybe that was my original problem when I issues a year ago installing neon.
Above I stated Unstable. Actually I was using Testing instead. I never use VM, but install on partition. Want to know how a distro performs with hardware.

I do things a tab bit different. For one, I use my own grub.cfg. I keep it safe so when update-grub comes along I can easily copy it back to the grub folder.
Mine is much smaller and easy to change UUID's. I even have a script for that.

There's an odd install for some of Ubuntu distros. Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu doesn't complain about the EFI partition, it just does the work itself. Lubuntu and neon wants me to change efi partition attributes.

[Don B. Cilly]

Out of curiosity, I just tried updating Unstable - hadn't for a while - and sure enough, it rebooted quite broken.
It was all there, but the screen was "strobing" like crazy.

I immediately ;·) noticed (hey, I have a hell of a system monitor, it tells me everything :·) the GPU bar was empty, and there was no irq/97-nvidia process (which is usually in the top 5 at idle).
Aha. Inxi -G, it was using nouveau.
Pah. Driver manager (which on Neon is called "Software and Updates", and it's software-properties-gtk), switched to nvidia driver (takes ages) , rebooted, all good.

Calamares, neon has used that as long as I remember. But then I've been using neon - only about a year.
I positively dislike it, actually, it's caused me countless headaches.
The latest one is, I'm extensively testing adding ISOs to grub.
The best way to install an ISO when booted from grub is to use the "toram" option.
Now - just to annoy me, I'm sure ;·) they started shipping a version with every ISO that contains this bug which crashes with the "toram" option. Confirmed, Undecided, Unassigned. :·///

[claydoh]

it is not in the User Edition yet, just the Unstable variant iirc.

[oshunluvr]

Calamares, neon has used that as long as I remember. But then I've been using neon - only about a year.

Your dislike aside, you're wrong about this, at least for the User Edition. Booting the latest User Edition ISO and opening the properties of the "Install neon user" icon:


If you look next to my mouse cursor, you can clearly see it says "ubquity". Ubiquity has always been horrible and Calamares is 10 times better. If, for no other reason than it gives you control over when or whether or not to install GRUB which Ubiquity does not. I can think of several more reasons, but no matter. As long as Ubiquity is gone, I'm happy.

[oshunluvr]

However, interesting you got your Unstable install to come back. I got no X activity at all. When I booted (after the full-upgrade) I got a text log-in prompt. Afterward, manually executing X and/or startx, all I got was a black screen and no active x process -meaning it died immediately after execution. I suspect the difference is I'm using a QEMU/KVM virtual machine and it seems you're on bare metal. I played around with the varying Video settings in QEMU for awhile, and although I got some changes in behavior (scrambled colored blocks when I use Cirrus) X still died right away.

The really entertaining part was the problem start three-four days ago when the initial "breakage" was reported on facebook. I got a grub screen with an on-screen virtual keyboard. but it never responded. The next update killed the GUI totally.