KDE neon

Reader supplied reviews for KDE neon Average rating 7.8 from 151 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on KDE neon? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 20260205202512252024092920231214202210202021123020201231201912262018090620171228 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 20251225 Rating: 6 Date: 2026-01-13 Votes: 1 Subject Matter: KDE NEON vs. other KDE systems I've been downloading and burning live images for over 5 months now and have a substantial collection of DVDs with systems on them. Some are great, some not so greats, some duds, and some stuff that wasted my time, my bandwidth, and a DVD. Each live image is verified (and each burn) then carefully tested for 7-8 hours (I'm retired, handicapped, and have 4 days a week I devote to this) to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each live system. Without doubt KDE and XFCE are the two most popular desktops for many good reasons I won't go into here and most I've installed have these interfaces and as you may imagine their is little difference between, say, one Debian and another but more so between a Debian and a Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, ROSA or ex-Mandrake based system with KDE desktop. Of the KDE (and XFCE) systems that boot to the desktop (some don't), something must stand out in some way; be it only original wallpaper, a few unique tools by the developers/maintainers, a responsive forum (I try to test that) - something as simple a being based on Debian (unstable) rather than stable - something must attract me besides trending numbers inflated by a new release. Those that do attract me must do 2 simple things immediately and without hiccup; 1) find and hook to wireless network and 2) immediately mirror in HDMI to a 32" Samsung screen @ 1920x1080 resolution. After that I put them to work with CAD, video editing and routines of maintenance such as Timeshift and DejaVu testing. My test machine? It's ancient but in good repair; a 15 year old ASUS G74SX with 16GB RAM, Intel i7 2.0Ghz processors, a 1920x1080 screen and a DVD. The BIOS was setup by ASUS to ms-dos for Windows 7 and will not do UEFI. Many old ASUS have BIOS factory set like that and cannot even boot from a USB. Windows 7 sits in first primary partition on the same 2TB Micron SSD that holds also 20 Linux test systems. All are accessed from a a lovely, artistically colorful and well-scaled, multi-tiered boot menu.provided by one of my favorite XFCE systems, Pardus 25 from Turkey (Distrowatch hit rating of 162). With that out of the way, I just found Neon to be a tad boring. Rating Neon with a 6 of 10 does not mean it's evil. (Tea Linux will obliterate your HD during an install without warning...that's evil!) It's just that Neon sits in a Linux marketplace glutted with KDEs and has little to recommend it over any other KDE distro (yet rates 20 here). Aside from the fact it appears to be based on Ubuntu's LTS there are no other redeeming qualities I could find. To those who'll say they think Neon will be more stable that other KDEs out there, well, I can't see it being any better than, say, Siduction 'Shine On', a German-made rolling release based on Debian's unstable branch that's currently sitting at # 207 on Distrowatch; or the French independent rolling release Mageia 9 sitting at #77; or another beautiful, independent French rolling release OpenMandriva 6.0 'ROME' sitting at #66. These are all KDE Plasma 6 desktops that caught my eye and deserve serious consideration by anyone looking for a KDE desktop. Each of these has repeatedly withstood huge initial updates (2800+ on one alone) and weekly updates, plus installs and many uninstalls. Each of these 20 Linux sit in their own 80GB partition (/), yet none have failed to boot. I call that pretty good stability with all this going on. Along with EndeavourOS, PCLinuxOS, CachyOS and several other deservedly high DW hit rated KDEs, there are so many other more attractive, more unique and just as solid KDE operating systems with vast app collections. Get further out and discover. Don't let DW hits-per-day ratings box you in. That's not what those numbers are for. J.A.C. Bradshaw Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20260108 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-01-11 Votes: 2 I prefer Arch family over Debian/Ubuntu family. However, on one of my systems I have hardware that has driver support on Ubuntu-LTS only. So I have to install in addition to my Arch distros some Ubuntu distro. Requirements (for my biased case and for non-trivial HW only): 1. Calamares installer - I don't like to destroy my booting options for other distros. I done installation on a low level by hand for Arch, Mint, Ubuntu in the past, but now I need to avoid any risk, so - proven and simple Calamares only. 2. Support of several displays with different resolutions (4k and HD). No flickering mouse points in some screen area, no wrong panel location at non-primary screen, etc. 3. No annoying bugs, related to desktop environment. Tried different Debian/Ubuntu derivative distros with Calamares - all failed, some can't boot from the live iso, some can boot but erroneous installation process on my hard drive/ssd, some can boot and install, but have annoying bugs or visual artifacts. After trying KDE Neon my mission accomplished. Clear latest plasma and Ubuntu LTS as a core distro. Enables me do experiment with some exotic HW in a stable clean environments in addition to my daily Arch driver. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20260108 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-01-09 Votes: 13 I'm blown away by this distribution. It comes in a very neat, minimal package that is so easy to install that it could be done by anyone with only the most basic understanding of Linux. I fail to see how anyone could possibly make a mess of the provided installer. Since September 2025 I've been looking for a more modern distro after 10+ years on LMDE so I thought that I'd try out some KDE offerings. I hadn't used KDE for at least 20 years so it has been an interesting journey. KDE has come a very long way over the last 2 decades and I find it much more intuitive than other DE's. In recent times I had tried replacing the Cinnamon desktop in LMDE 6 and 7 with Gnome plus the extensions required to make it more usable. It was a good move but I think I was ready for a more complete change. I like the fact that the KDE neon 'User package' comes with only the essentials to get it going. Starting with a clean sheet is the way to go so that you end up installing only the apps that you want and use, therefore not being left with with a bloated workspace. This is in complete contrast to other distributions that include everything but the kitchen sink such as with Fedora and the 'buntu variants. Although KDE neon is based on Ubuntu, thankfully it comes without Snap but with Flatpak already enabled which is perfect for my needs. After installing my choice of tools for media handling and office duties the only other selections were for the Flatpak version of Firefox and other necessary items like Btop, Synaptic, and Timeshift. Often we are tempted to overdo things so I like the KDE neon team philosophy of less being more. I figure that the closest competitor to KDE neon is Kubuntu but the bloat along with Snap degrades rather than enhances it. Kubuntu is a nice KDE implementation but it is a little slower than KDE neon. Also I favour the KDE environment over Gnome and Cinnamon because it's just so easy and quick to set up the way that you want it. Pros: 'buntu based for convenience of stability and huge software repos. fast and intuitive installer semi-rolling KDE plasma implementation no bloat Cons: None discovered as yet. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 151 reader reviews of KDE neon...