Degree of customisation
What makes them stand out?
None of the distros in this Roundup ship with a stock KDE desktop. However, their degrees of customisation vary. Some have even tweaked the layout of key KDE apps such as the Dolphin file manager to make it more appealing to their intended user base. All distributions offer various types of menu. There’s a simple application menu, cascading popup menus used by default by several distributions, as well as a full-screen Unity/Gnome3 style Application Dashboard. Maui, Netrunner and KaOS offer no custom tools to aid administration which is relegated to the KDE System Settings window. Maui and Netrunner have both tweaked Firefox to include add-ons such as AdBlock Plus and Ant video downloader. KaOS on the other hand is the only distribution to place the panel on the right-side of the screen instead of its usual place at the bottom. It also offers the option to start a Plasma Wayland session at the login screen and uses the Kaptan first run wizard to adjust various aspects of a newly installed system such as the behaviour of the mouse, etc.
Manjaro includes the Manjaro SettingsManager (MSM) that helps users change between the various available kernels. The tool also automatically installs all necessary kernel modules for a selected kernel. MSM also includes the hardware detection module that lets you switch between free and proprietary drivers for connected hardware including graphics cards. Chakra’s kernel is configured with several MAC hardening options including Tomoyo and AppArmor. The distro also has a graphical minibackup script to backup personal data such as address book, email SSH keys as well as application settings. There’s also the Chakra repository editor module to help you control repositories with ease.