New distributions with the most current KDE versions

Neon Three Times

There are three images available for the KDE project neon. The developer version comes in Git Stable and Git Unstable . The additional User Edition contains the newest of the KDE packages that have been released. All three versions are based on the current Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. We put the User Edition to the test.

The developers update the images on an almost daily basis with neon. During testing we used an image dated May 4 that is about 900MB. Since then, an image with Wayland instead of X11 has become available [8]. As with the image from openSUSE, it does not work in VirtualBox.

The installer needs no extra explanations for neon. This is familiar software from Ubuntu. After restarting in the installation, an Ubuntu "Xenial" runs with kernel 4.4.0, KDE Plasma 5.6.3, and KDE Frameworks 5.16. Unlike openSUSE and the neon developer edition, there are no Git versions. Instead you will find the most recent KDE releases. As a result, neon is understandably somewhat behind in the User Edition when compared with Argon and Krypton. Even so, it offers a more updated KDE experience than most of the other distributions.

It becomes apparent when looking at the K menu that there is a gaping hole when it comes to usable applications (Figure 4). The only thing available is an xterm for installing additional software. Therefore, you should update the package database and install the most important KDE tools (Listing 1). All of the other packages that Kubuntu offers are available for installation. In the future, the KDE applications are supposed to come with more recent editions of the still fresh User Edition .

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install nano konsole dolphin

Figure 4: The KDE system tools are included with neon, but application programs are missing.

One half of this article was written while using Krypton, and the other half using the neon User Edition . Granted, testing conducted with researching and writing texts is not conclusive. Still, neon handled this task with aplomb. When testing other applications in the areas of multimedia, office and graphics, we found neon less awkward than the openSUSE versions. This is probably due to the somewhat more mature software.

However, neon does not have a capability for creating snapshots. This feature can be retrofitted by selecting Btrfs as the file manager during installation. It was clear from the beginning with both openSUSE and neon that there is no localization option for the software either before or after installation. The only language available is English. KDE could also not be localized for either of these into another language.

Conclusion

Considering the fact that both providers label their images as "unstable," the programs actually run surprisingly smoothly. However, we did not subject these programs to intensive use during testing, so the picture outside of a test environment might look different. Therefore it is up to you to decide whether you want to permanently work productively with these distributions, or whether it is better to only play around with them. At this point, we prefer the User Edition from neon. You can provide the neon developers with your test results by filling out a questionnaire about your neon experience [9].