KDE neon 5.21.0
Jonni Bidwell has had it with Gnome, at least for this page, where he dabbles with KDE’S latest desktop delights.
Jonni Bidwell has had it with Gnome – at least for this page, where he dabbles with KDE’S latest desktop delights.
Despite the plethora of KDE distros around – from Kubuntu to KAOS to PCLINUXOS – some people still haven’t heard of KDE neon. Any distro working on a fix release cycle is going to have problems keeping current with KDE. The
KDE Applications suite is updated every three months, as is the Plasma desktop (roughly, and rarely in cadence with the applications) and the underlying KDE Frameworks libraries see a new release every month. So distros – conservative ones that don’t like to break things at least – will tend to stick with older KDE technologies.
KDE neon wants to showcase the latest Special K, but to do so on a reliable base. So it’s built on Ubuntu 20.04, but has its own repos for the applications, frameworks and Plasma trifecta. It goes to pains to point out that this makes it not quite a distro, because it doesn’t offer any software outside of the KDE aegis (but that won’t stop us labelling it as one because “software repository” sounds odd – Ed). This might put you off, or it might intrigue you, but we think you should at least check this out. If your last memories of KDE was the clunky, handles on everything widgetry of KDE 4, then you’re in for a refreshing surprise.
Effects-packed desktop
The Plasma desktop, we’ve often said, is a thing of beauty. It’s also lighter and more traditional than Gnome, and in its latest 5.21 iteration includes a fancy double-pane application launcher, improvements to the svelte Breeze theme and a new system resource monitor for those KDE users who like to keep a close eye on proceedings.
A great deal of effort has been invested in getting the Plasma Wayland session on par with X11. KDE has some nice desktop effects and the team has been making sure Kwin (the window manager) renders these as smoothly with Wayland as it does in X11. KDE remains as configurable as ever, so if you don’t like these you can turn them off. But we found them not at all distracting, and actually rather pleasing. Qtquick is used for rendering, so these effects shouldn’t tax anything but the oldest of hardware.
The initial install occupies less than 5GB, but besides a lovely desktop you don’t get much. Fire up the Discover package manager though and you’ll soon find everything you need. In theory you can install anything from the Ubuntu repos, but it’s possible that this won’t work (at least for some Qt software) because of newer libraries and such. Even if you don’t like KDE you should probably like KDE connect, which enables you to receive mobile notifications on your desktop, as well as reply to messages, control music and all sorts of other things.
There’s a lot to like here, from the effortless Calamares install to the peculiar pleasure that comes with a having a desktop that no modern distro could (easily) imitate. Even if you don’t end up using it forever it might sway you to try other Kde-based affairs or Qt applications. If you really want to see bleeding-edge, check out the Testing or Unstable editions, which use Qt 6.0. But don’t expect them not to break.
If you fancy being a KDE developer, then there’s an edition for that too. This has all the pre-release Qt 6.0 stuff as well as all the libraries you’ll need to start making your own beautiful applications.