My first foray into KDE Neon User in years.

[GreyGeek]

18 months after the Alpha release Kubuntu 20.04 got long in the tooth. Stable, reliable, but stuck with the old kernels, plasma, etc.

I began looking enviously at those running the latest Plasma.

So, I took the leap and installed the latest KDE Neon User Edition. Before I had even installed Nvidia, Thunderbird and other apps, or configured Dolphin, I saw Tyler's review of Manjaro Pahov. That review showed TimeShift creating snapshots before updating that were added to the grub menu. Wow indeed, I replaced KDE Neon with Manjaro Pavho.

Beautiful startup, beautiful desktop. Then I noticed that my HP Laserjet 1606dn didn't automatically install in the system tray.

I opened their beautifully made System Settings application, which included a Systemd GUI page, just like the old one that used to be in Kubuntu, and when I clicked on the Printer icon I was presented with a message dialog that told me to run either hp-setup or cups as root and use one of them to install my printer. Who said travel into the past is impossible? I ran hp-setup and saw a dialog I hadn't seen since I installed Kubuntu 14.04, or was it 12.04? The only ppd file option given to me for my printer was one that didn't not include the plugin baked in. It took me to HP's site and then to run it asked me for root's password. I entered my password and the install failed. I tried cups. Same problem. I went back to hp-setup and this time the duplex plugin was accepted. I checked the HP maintence page to turn on the duplex mode but the sliding button was grayed out. And, the printer wouldn't accept pages from the print buffer. My printer wouldn't print, not even a test page. I figured I'd sort that out later and went on with the setup. I installed Thunderbird (sudo pacman -Sy thunderbird) and it worked beautifully. I imported my bookmarks and added the mailto extension. Nice.
Oh, I made Starship my wallpaper. I used Discover to install Nvidia, but the only option it gave for my GT 650M was Bumblebee Prime. I'd used that before on 14.04 and wasn't pleased with it. I went ahead and installed it and rebooted. I was still in Intel's HD 4000 running i915 and mesa. So, I purged nvidia, opened muon, and installed nvidia-390, which I was running on Kubuntu 20.04, which went on smoothly and ran like a dream. TimeShift comes pre-installed. I used it to create a post nvidia snapshot, even though TimeShift created one. Then I rebooted using F12 to bring up the grub menu and selected the snapshot TS made. It gave me a black screen when I was supposed to get a login screen. I used Alt-F2 to get a login screen and logged into my account. "sudo startx" failed, I rebooted and tried the snapshot I made. Same result. Underneath all this pig's makeup is nothing extraordinary. TimeShift stores its snapshots under the ROOT_FS in a directory structure similar to the one I used on Kubuntu, except it stores both @ and @home.

I reinstalled KDE Neon. Everything installed as I expected it would, except for the nvidia-390 driver. Here's the message I got when I ran "ubuntu-drivers devices":

:~$ ubuntu-drivers devices
WARNING:root:_pkg_get_support nvidia-driver-390: package has invalid Support Legacyheader, cannot determine support level
== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00000FD1sv00001025sd00000686bc03sc00 i00
vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
model : GK107M [GeForce GT 650M]
driver : nvidia-driver-390 - distro non-free recommended
driver : nvidia-340 - distro non-free
driver : nvidia-driver-418-server - distro non-free
driver : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

I used the following in an attempt to repair and reinstall the nvidia 390 driver:

sudo apt-get remove --purge "nvidia*"
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

It started out with:

:~$ sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
WARNING:root:_pkg_get_support nvidia-driver-390: package has invalid Support Legacyheader, cannot determine support level
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Starting pkgProblemResolver with broken count: 0
Starting 2 pkgProblemResolver with broken count: 0
Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
libnvidia-cfg1-390 libnvidia-common-390 libnvidia-compute-390 libnvidia-decode-390 libnvidia-encode-390 libnvidia-fbc1-390
libnvidia-gl-390 libnvidia-ifr1-390 libxnvctrl0 linux-modules-nvidia-390-5.11.0-34-generic
linux-objects-nvidia-390-5.11.0-34-generic linux-signatures-nvidia-5.11.0-34-generic nvidia-compute-utils-390
nvidia-kernel-common-390 nvidia-kernel-source-390 nvidia-prime nvidia-settings nvidia-utils-390 pkg-config
screen-resolution-extra xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-390

and ended with:

: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/tgl_huc_7.5.0.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/tgl_guc_49.0.1.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/dg1_dmc_ver2_02.bin for module i915
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub:
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/99_breeze-grub.cfg'
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/init-select.cfg'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found theme: /boot/grub/themes/breeze/theme.txt
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.11.0-34-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.11.0-34-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /@/boot/memtest86+.elf
Found memtest86+ image: /@/boot/memtest86+.bin
done

When I did a similar thing with Manjaro and rebooted I didn't get a login screen. WIth KDE Neon it worked and I was presented with an Nvidia desktop.

However, my machine is, like me, getting long in the tooth. It was made in May of 2012, so it is over 9 years old. Probably ready to pass out of that floating window of compatibility which cuts off machines that are too old or too new. The race is on to see who can cross the finish line first.

[Beerislife]

I've considered dabbling with other distros, especially based on Arch but then I read about problems people are having with Manjaro and how Endeavour is a better implementation and feel somehow lucky the KDE Neon just plods along with no real hiccups!

Maybe when the boss's Chromebook comes back from Asus! I'll try one or two alternatives on my Kubuntu 20.04 ThinkPad. That's now about 11 years old and still runs very well!