I am distro hopping again. I really enjoyed my time with openSUSE, but eventually I could reinstall Ubuntu again without just staring at the blinking cursor on a black screen. I moved back to Ubuntu purely because I feel more proficient with its use, and this just giving me a little more peace of mind. As it is a personal system, that’s probably the most heavily weighted deciding factor. However, I do find Ubuntu running with Gnome to be sluggish on my ageing system. So I did the usual and looked at both Lubuntu and Xubuntu wondering if one of those lightweight (system resource wise) distro’s would be just a better fit. Though while doing all this I noted that Kubuntu running with KDE demanded less than Ubuntu, so decided to give it a try.
Yes, the difference was immediately apparent, I clicked icons and things happened almost instantly. It took me a bit of time and tweaking to get an environment I was happy with but I fell I have got there. I do see the constant posting of users with the KDE desktops designed to emulate other operating systems (re: Mac). But I do not see the point of a top and bottom panel/dock combo as I lose space. I also expect more docks and panels to use more resources, especially when they are using effects.
So of course why stop there? I was enjoying Kubuntu so much I decided to take a further step and made the move to KDE Neon. KDE Neon essentially provides the very latest of KDE applications built on top of the current Ubuntu LTS, so it feels and looks a lot like Kubuntu, but keep in mind that you are living much closer to the bleeding edge. At time of writing still using the Ubuntu 18.04LTS, though the upgrade to the Ubuntu 20.04LTS base is expected when it’s ready. For what it is worth, my system feels even quicker compared to Kubuntu, so a significant improvement again over Ubuntu.
For what it is worth, here is specs of the PC I am running KDE Neon on;
Packard-Bell Imedia S1800 PC
Operating System: KDE neon 5.19
KDE Plasma Version: 5.19.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.72.0
Qt Version: 5.14.2
Kernel Version: 5.3.0-62-generic
OS Type: 64-bit
Processors: 2 × Pentium® Dual-Core CPU E5800 @ 3.20GHz
Memory: 3.8 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: GeForce GT 620/PCIe/SSE2
So nothing cutting edge there in terms of specifications. I am very happy with the performance I am now experiencing. There have been a few teething issues which I will share in other posts but they are just from my own tweaking, but for a fan of KDE this is definitely worth putting onto a live USB. Though unlike Ubuntu, do not expect to be able to just install a different environment, KDE Neon expects you to be faithful!
A few links to get more information:
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