KDE Neon

[fox]

You might have seen my recent thread on KDE neon, but it turns out that this was really about the latest version of KDE Plasma and not the Neon distro itself. However, after messing up a Fedora 25 installation by adding KDE to it and then removing it, I blew away Fedora on my distrohopper laptop and installed KDE Neon LTS. Neon is is a Ubuntu 16.04-based distro with the latest KDE packages included. It is minimal in terms of software, and includes only the KDE desktop (i.e., no Unity or Gnome). There are stable and developer versions; I chose stable. If you want to make a live USB from, the instructions suggest that you use the Rosa USB creator, which I did. I tested the live version on both a Mac and a PC, and it starts up pretty quickly, and runs well from the USB. Apparently it includes both a UEFI and non-UEFI booter, and it chooses the correct one automatically.

Next I installed it on my Acer laptop. The installer is Ubiquity, same as Ubuntu. The installation was pretty quick and routine, but you do have to set up the partitions manually (on qparted GUI) if you don't want it to take over the whole drive. It nicely assumes it will use an existing swap partition if there is one, or you can make another when you set it up. Once installed, I had none of the issues I experienced when installing a Plasma desktop into Ubuntu - no error messages, no repeated demands for kde wallet, no loss of close-minimize-maximize window widgets. Also, not a lot of software, but I had no problems adding anything I normally use in Ubuntu. The one problem I did have was with the version of grub it installed. Also "update-grub" showed that it recognized other distros on the computer, the grub menu you get had entries only for Neon and Windows. I had to use boot-repair to fix this. The only other negative I experienced so far is a long boot time relative to vanilla Ubuntu, but I also noticed this in Ubuntu itself when booting up the KDE desktop.

If anyone is interested, I can bring the live USB to a PLUG MUG, and/or do a mini-presentation on Neon at one of our upcoming PLUG meetings.

[Jason]

A presentation of Neon would be interesting, I think. Thank you for offering.

[buster]

"I blew away Fedora on my distrohopper laptop"

Always a good idea in my opinion. 

[fox]

Blowing away Fedora in particular, or any distro to try anotherr one?

[buster]

"Blowing away Fedora in particular"

Yes, Fedora. Any distro described as cutting edge is not for me anymore. I like words like stable and easy.

[fox]

One other negative I found about Neon is the software boutique package it uses, called Discover. Discover is OK if it has the particular software you're looking for, but it doesn't have everything Ubuntu does, and more important, it doesn't seem to be very update-aware. This is not normally a problem if your distro has a software updater, but Neon doesn't come with one and I couldn't find one in Discover. So what I did was apt-get the venerable synaptic, which works as good as ever on Neon. It noted and installed a bunch of updates that Discover wasn't aware of. I don't know if this is a general KDE problem, or if it is limited to the Neon distro.

[Jason]

I saw this but not sure if it's the problem to which you're referring:

Is it a rolling distro?

Not quite, it's a package archive with the latest KDE software on top of a stable base. Unlike rolling distros only the KDE software will be updated continuously.

Source: https://neon.kde.org/faq

[fox]

That could explain it. But if the Neo devs don't intend on having users update the Ubuntu part of the distro, that would be leaving it vulnerable to security flaws. That doesn't seem right to me.

[Jason]

I took another look at the FAQ. I suggest you do so, too. It says it's built on the last Ubuntu LTS version. So it may be just that there are no recent updates for it for the Ubuntu core, security updates, that is. I don't believe Ubuntu Core updates anything other than security fixes and bug updates. But they're really clear in any case of saying this is not really a distribution. It's for demonstrating the latest version of KDE.

[fox]

I just read the FAQ, and it is ambiguous. First of all, it doesn't specify "Ubuntu core", but rather states that it is built on top of Ubuntu LTS. Maybe those two things mean the same thing; I'm not sure. Second, even if they are the same thing, I know I have been getting security updates in Ubuntu 16.04; also security updates to installed apps like Firefox. I'll have to look harder at packages updated by synaptic that weren't updated in Discover. I did some further reading and found out that there is no way to add repositories through the graphical app, Discover. Of course synaptic can do this; another reason to install synaptic. (You can also install software updater from Discover.) According to that post, which is 7 months old, one can't even install .deb files on Neon until the package qapt-deb-installer is added. None of these things are a big deal; they're all easily fixable if you're not a rank beginner.

The FAQ actually states that KDE Neon is not a distro and I suspect that some of the deficiencies I noted in this thread are partly the reason. They also note that it isn't Kubuntu 16.04, which is a true distro that tracks updates in all of its installed packages. The advantage of installing Neon is that you get the latest KDE software (like Arch gives you for all its software); in Kubuntu you have to wait until the latest KDE software hits the repositories before you get it. One can get the best of (K)ubuntu and Neon by installing a KDE Neon ppa on top of K(ubuntu), but there is more of a risk of breakage, as there is with any ppa. It was the ppa approach that I originally tried with Ubuntu 16.04. This was what gave me the small problems I previously reported in another thread, but I don't know whether they were due to the ppa or general interference between the Unity and KDE desktops.