KDE Neon is the way to get the best KDE experience. At least you’re supposed to. So far I’ve been using KDE only on Arch (or Garuda) and Kubuntu. KDE has been great for me on both but I didn’t like that I got quite an old version on Kubuntu, so I’ve stuck to using it on Arch.

KDE on Arch⌗

It’s great to be honest. Looks nice, customizable and it mostly works without issues.

But every now and then you’re missing a package that you need so that one option, looking at you drawing tablet, appears. And finding that one, single package can be quite hard. It’s not as simple a inputing KDE graphics tablet settings packageinto DuckDuckGo and clicking the first thing. But it’s not hard either, but it’ll take a bit longer.

But after you setup everything the way you want, it works really nicely. I’ve got my tiling script in KWin, I’ve got all my keybinds, my themes and everything. I didn’t really want something else.

The “incident”⌗

So this weekend I needed to run a live ISO on another PC. I wanted to use something Ubuntu based as I’d like to have the casper persistent storage. So I almost downloaded Ubuntu itself when I thought: I should get something with KDE. And while I’m at it, I could get KDE Neon. I’ve never tried it, but I’d get Ubuntu with the newest KDE suite which could be nice…

So I just used that instead.

First boot on the live ISO⌗

So I booted it on my laptop to see whether everything worked as expected. And it did!

Wayyy better than I expected… Like the laptop is an “older” laptop with 4GB of RAM small SSD and an AMD A9 (dual core) processor. I wanted to run KDE on it before, but it was lagging way too much, at least when I configured it on Arch…

I bought that cheap laptop while I was at primary school just to have something portable I could do some school work on. I installed Arch (later Garuda) with XFCE on it so it wouldn’t be lagging.

But this time was different⌗

Everything ran quicky. I was genuinely surprised that the integrated GPU was keeping up!

And… Wait.. IS THE TOUCHSCREEN REALLY WORKING THAT WELL I BASICALLY GAVE THAT THING UP WHEN I INSTALLED LINUX ON IT!

And autorotation works as well? WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN? I almost made my own script for that!

Like 2y ago I used Gnome for a short while and it was the only DE where touchscreen and autorotation worked as intended. I had to switch though as it was laggy on that machine.

Now both worked. And really well at that! There were so many new surprises:

  • A nice Firewall GUI? Thanks!
  • Power usage? No way.
  • I’ve heard that touch mode was created but I didn’t know it worked that well!
  • Discover works wayyy better than I remembered
  • THE BREEZE THEME LOOKS SO GOOD
    • I’ve seen it before and it looked nice. But for whatever reason it just… looked better than last time. No big changes, from what I know, have been made, but wow, it looks nice for a default theme.

Everything was just coming together so well. The gestures for both touchscreen and touchpad just felt natural to me, the X11 apps didn’t look out of place on Wayland and worked with the touchscreen without any problems…

Will I switch to it?⌗

I already did! - kind of:

I installed it on the laptop almost right away. And I’m glad I did!

But there’s still things that I need to try out that will decide if this distro will stay on the laptop or not:

  • Dev environments
    • I’m used to developing on Arch. Basically everything I need is available and if not the AUR has it. I have all the new features without compiling basically anything (thanks Chaotic AUR). I don’t need to worry about finding ways on how to install some newer version of some software because I need a new feature that would save me hours of time.
      • But maybe distrobox will take care of that? I’ll see how well it’ll work.
  • It’s a clean install
    • It’s a matter of time until the OS is full of my packages. It’s basically clean even though I’ve installed many things already. But it’s not like I’ve been using it for months. Every OS feels snappy if you do a clean install (no, I’m not talking to you Win8 to Win11, you were lagging out of the box). So it’s just a matter of time until it starts slowing down so much that I’ll have to switch back to XFCE. I hope I’m wrong though.
  • Battery usage
    • So far so good. But again, it’s a clean OS. If the battery life gets substantially worse with use, it’s XFCE.

My main PC stays on Arch (Garuda)⌗

For the time being I’ll stick to Arch on my PC. I just love the benefits of tinkering around, having the newest features, the AUR - just the overall flexibility of Arch.

I can mess around with any project without too much hassle as I have all the tools available one command (or two if I need to search for the package name) away.

Meanwhile on Debian (and Ubuntu) based distros I find myself looking up how to install softwar uncomfortably often. For the PC I ran the live ISO on (I installed it on an external SSD later) I had to look up how to isntall the Nvidia drivers as it had a 1660 in it. It took adding a ppa, installing some software management utility for GNOME, looging up which driver am I supposed to use as that thing didn’t figure it out for me and then installing it from there. Meanwhile on Arch if you have somewhat newer GPU you just do pacman -S nvidia and bam, finishing the install is just a reboot away.

Why did I install it on the laptop then?⌗

Well I don’t use it that much. And updating the thing when I open it at school every other week it not a pleasant experience. I mostly take notes on it and sometimes I do a bit of C development for school as well. But I don’t really need Arch for that. So Neon is now on it and as far as no problems, that I mentioned above, appear, it will stay. For years maybe (maybe I’ll try out Fedora? 🤔).