Oh, one really good thing about openSUSE: since they have this openQA and test everything before release, they usually don't get affected by critical bugs. Recently on Arch Linux and other Rolling Release distros we saw a problem with people that couldn't use their machines because of a problem in a upgrade of the GRUB. It didn't affected openSUSE because they spotted it with the openQA and didn't update the GRUB package until it get fixed. The same happens for Plasma, we didn't get the Plasma beta on the "official KDE beta repository" on the day that it was release because of a bug, it took some days until they release it on the repositories because of that bug. Is because of these things that openSUSE is known by its stability, even on its rolling release distro.
I had arch for a while, and just went back to an ubuntu lts distro, exactly for the problem you mentioned :) Tried opensuse tb and really liked it, sad that there is not great support for some nvidia stuff, like cuda
@@claudiocastellikurageart Since I wanted rolling release distro with the stability, I tried OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (OpenSUSE Leap (OpenSUSE) in the video) is the standard release version). Unfortunately, it wouldn't boot the live CD on my Nvidia GTX1050, with no way to get to console. I then found out about Manjaro, a tested version of Arch (manually tested instead of automated tested like Tumbleweed) with updates every 2 to 4 weeks and of course the AUR. It works fine so far, but we'll see with Plasma 6.
openSUSE also releases Argon and Krypton versions. Argon similar to KDE neon gives you the latest builds of KDE on a stable base, where as Krypton gives you the latest snapshot of tumbleweed with builds of the master branch of KDE.
I switched from Neon to Garuda about a year ago as my main distro. Absolutely love it, I get the power of Arch but without the headache. Garuda's custom tools for management works very well and makes most maintenance task a breeze. Example 1: If I use a secondary packet manager to install something odd I get an alert that I should update the whole system to keep the integrity. Example 2: I messed up my install by installing something I shouldn't (well, in the wrong way). Reboot, choose an older snapshot, boot with that and got the question if I wanted a roll-back... Yes please and thus I was back to before my stupidity. I really like the "rolling distro" concept as end user and will likely not go back to "version update". I usually base my install on the "Dragonized" variant since I love the looks but I need to change the looks to something more traditional, not fond of hovering menus (I keep start button, activity tray etc on the left side due to today's stupidly wide monitors). And from my experience their user forum is a good and pleasant one I'm about to install a Linux system for my 75 year old neighbour (runs win 7 now), I'm leaning towards Garuda for him as well (but more likely the XFCE variant)
That’s interesting. I’ll check it out with my spare crap laptop. I use opensuse and love it for some similar reasons. They have snapper rollback enabled by default, and a wonderful forum. But, I’ve used snapper a couple odd times now (really nice), but I always have to look up the commands to set the system to the rollback once I’ve logged into it. Garuda prompting with a gui is a nice touch.
Cool, love the user friendliness of Garuda KDE but hate two things:latte dock and the theming :) I did try to work on both kden drsgonized and other and I tried to change the look "back" to normal KDE. Unfortunatly things get worse than, latte is alwaysa utostarting and the desktop get corrupted. Denna like the user should leave the drsgonized version more or less untouched. So yeah.. I switched back to Manjaro KDE that is clean very fast and no issues, just works.
Absolutely LOVE Garuda, in all its flavours. Using LXQt at the moment but KDE Dr460nized and Gnome are excellent too. Had some issues though, esp. with KDE. A work in progress. Love the look of it, totally and uniquely Linux. I'm a Windows power-user switching to Linux now and Garuda is my distro of choice.
Thank you for the video! I would recommend Opensuse tumbleweed easily because like you said, it brings the latest version of plasma and kde framework but OpenSUSE has a great support of btrfs too. They made snapper, a tool that make it easy to rollback your system to an old snapshot. Tumbleweed is not really an immutable OS like kinoite is, but I think it's a good compromise and easy to use OS if you want to be able to rollback when something bad happened. Now thanks to you I want to try kinoite to make my own opinion about it.
There is Opensuse Microos, which is an inmutable OS based on Tumbleweed, so if you want something rolling and inmutable, that's the way to go. Just keep in mind that the KDE version it's still on alpha, but in my opinion its usable.
I recommend you to try openSUSE MicroOS with KDE Plasma. Even if it says that is Alpha, is very stable and I use it on my production machine since a while with no problem. But be careful because is hard to go back to non-immutable distro after get used to it. 😅
OpenSUSE is a distro for someone who needs to get the work done, period. Not only is it rock solid but it is also well designed and has very sane defaults out of the box. It just works! And if it doesn't, there are snapper with btrfs to roll back to previous "working" snapshot if/when SHTF. I've been using it as my main distro (work and personal life) for almost 3 years now and I'm not planing on moving to anything else. P.S. OpenSUSE has it's own beer, I mean what other distro has/brews it's own beer?!
All this pretty much. Its hard for me to settle with an OS and feel "home", but Opensuse did that for me. Suse Linux Enterprise was also the first Linux I played around with as a kid so I have fond memories. Whats weird is that Opensuses effort regarding KDE are all community based, the image of it being THE KDE distro comes from the old day of .. Novell I think? Back then it was company backed, now the only thing that is backed officially by Suse is that other DE that looks like a tablet os. Dont know why.
Nah... I love OpenSUSE, but I hate use it with KDE, too much bugs. Discover don't work, Baloo the last time I tried don't work too. If want to use OpenSUSE I suggest XFCE or GNOME.
For me it caused some problem in multi-language environment: when there are multiple system languages installed, Kde mixes them up in a very strange way, in a single app window...
Honestly, Kubuntu LTS. I've used it for years, and had absolutely zero reasons to hop from it. By default it's as good as it can get, and adding a few (legit) ppa's can turn it into a BEAST
I'm using Manjaro with Plasma and my OS install was 8,5 years ago! So that means, it still works and there were no reinstalls in that time. Sure, there were some issues once in a while, but nothing that I couldn't fix. So Manjaro can be incredibly stable if you are familiar with the Manjaro and Arch, and know what you are doing. Manjaro is easy and nice, but still for more advanced users. Plus, if you are a developer, Manjaro has also KDE beta packages.
Totally agree. I rate a distro on what it is like to use and live with. I have been on Manjaro for 2.5 years now and it is fantastic. I use a heavily modified plasma desktop and I am usually on the Unstable branch (which has never caused me a problem). I used to use the AUR (which is hit and miss even on Arch) but now I use Faltpaks for a few apps that are not in the repositories. It really is the most flexible distro that I have found but marred by these petty gripes and management squabbles which keep coming back to haunt it in videos like this.
@@phrtao If you know any of the devs personally, could you please get them to reconsider and put the grub menu back in instead of hiding it :) I've always preferred using Manjaro with an older LTS kernel (for stability) and going back from 6.1 (current ISOs) to 5.15, for example, is now a pain in the butt :) I don't use the AUR either, and do TTY2 updates as well. I must admit that my trust level in their decision-making processes has diminished significantly... unfortunately.
Yes, I have it since spring 2017 in virtual box. Once virtual box changed default graphics driver and Manjaro just crashed starting plasma. Once I lost some fonts or they looked weird, can't recall. Once I lost kernel and had to boot live distro, chroot, run mhwd or how is it called to choose one, download it and reinstall grub. Maybe I used very old kernel which was no longer available. Then I had some problems with dependencies and I'm quite sure Octopi is replaced by pamac, but whatever - actually this is problem of rolling distro, you are getting new stuff with fresh install, but not with updates.
Agreed. My oldest Manjaro was installed way back in late 2014, and is still current, having survived multiple hardware swaps in the timeframe. It hasn't been always smooth sailing, I had one particular issue (damn Nvidia) where I was tempted to throw the towel and reinstall, but I finally dug into the issue and managed to recover with hand surgery into the initrd. I hear a lot about Manjaro and its team, but that's mostly made up drama, which could happen within any team. I have my griefs, but for all the faults, it's been rock solid and better than every other distro I ever used (and that includes a lot of names since 1998).
Been using KDE since version 2.0 days and in my opinion the best KDE distro is OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Oh and Nico can I have different wallpapers for each virtual desktop back, please.... :)
18:40 You might be getting confused with bigLinux. Feren OS merely forks Kickoff to change its look a bit and uses said fork as its menu (although has a sister variant which does fill the screen instead). However, bigLinux, if I recall correctly, does use a fork of Application Dashboard.
I have been a MX Linux KDE Edition user for about four years and I never broken it in a way that forced a reinstall. Their custom toolset is rock solid and has not failed in bringing me back from the black screen of death. Great distro should have gotten a mention in my opinion.
May have to give it another look. Until 23 couldn't even install MX since it shipped with the 5.10 kernel, which does not recognize newer wifi hardware. Wasn't like I could install it and then upgrade the kernel since I couldn't get an internet connection during install. Kind of soured me on MX/
I use EndeavourOS, an Arch bases distro, and they give you a choice of over 6 DE's. KDE Plasma is one of them and Endeavour installs it as is, other than EndeavourOS wallpapers, no changes from it's vanilla install as KDE packages it for Arch. You can customize it to your hearts content, as no matter what choices any distro may make for you, there just is no such thing as "One size fits all", and so many may not like what they get from any distro. I love EndeavorOS, Arch and KDE PLasma! It makes my penguins happy! 🐧🐧🐧
I think the flagship kde distro should be opensuse. Though i am using fedora kde .. switched from manjaro kde a week ago. Oddly faced some ui freezes and crashes in fedora kde while installing window button plasmoid and a cursor theme uninstalling them resolved the issue
Suse has no KDE Desktop anymore on their enterprise distro. They ditched KDE from it entirely, dont package for it at all and dont participate much in the KDE development itself anymore. Kubuntu essentially pushed them out They had a couple of pretty ugly disputes with each other. Sadly.
I use Xerolinux, arch based. I started with Manjaro KDE and enjoyed KDE since but with Xerolinux I found amazing customization for myself and really love it.
I tried openSUSE and I love almost everything about it. The only thing I was pulling my hair with was network printing. Any other distro does it seamlessly, on openSUSE I couldn't do it
Been using KDE since v 1.01, mostly on FreeBSD & Red Hat back then. I find Opensuse Leap a very stable platform for KDE, if you care more more about stability than new features.
MX Linux w/ KDE for me. Tried Mint, POP OS, Manjaro, Endeavour OS, Fedora workstation and Kinoite, Opensuse, Spiral, AntiX. Until recently, I was pretty happy on Endeavour OS. But then i got a new Brother Printer and was having issues with WiFi operation. MX just worked perfectly, printing, and scanning
KDE Neon. I had not a single time installing arch/archbased distro without something borked (kde included). I like bleeding edge because you get hands on newest and sweetest but Arch is just to much maintenance since i don't have enough spare time anymore. On Neon KDE packages are bleeding edge and it is fantastic. Most non-KDE software has flatpaks that work well-enough (not perfect) and are bleeding edge also. So all-around Neon is better than Kubuntu for me. Opensuse (tumbleweed) is always behind Neon for Plasma releases so no pass here. Fedora's installer appeared more confusing that installing Arch manually so no pass in that also.
I tried KDE Neon on VirtualBox and it broke immediately after installation and update. Got to the "select os" screen and froze there. Sure there may be some issues with VirtualBox itself but it's still a bit concerning. Plus the way they phrase in FAQ that "KDE neon focuses on KDE software, most other software is not supported and you should not be surprised if you can not install it or it stops working at any point in time due to an update". I got the impression that some non-KDE package could break and they wouldn't care.
Same story here here, I came from Gentile to Arch for the same reason and the Neon. I have used Neon since shortly after it was released on all my devices. It is just Ubuntu with KDE's most recent releases. It is nice.
@@edoardomartino95 it is a VirtualBox issue not Neon issue. Neon is Ubuntu, so check that your VB is the latest version and that you added enough RAM for the VM, which is the usual culprit. On a side note then VB isn't that good IMHO, so perhaps try another hypervisor.
I've used Debian 11 with Plasma, EndeavourOS with Plasma, and Kubuntu. EndeavourOS offered the best Plasma experience for me because I feel that KDE benefits from rolling release. Debian's Plasma was too old, with Kubuntu being in the middle; LTS will be older than rolling release, but point releases and Kubuntu Backports PPAs can make up the difference. My problem is that after running EndeavourOS for just about a year, I had to leave it behind. Arch-based distributions are not for me. Kubuntu's Plasma may be older, but the distribution itself is a lot easier to setup and works better on my hardware.
I switched to Garuda Dragonized (Plasma with heavily customized theme) and dropped Manjaro (what a shame). Love the theming of Garuda and that it's set up the way it suits me, I only changed the topbar into a panel on the bottom. It's also fast to boot, slightly faster than EndeavourOS, so I wouldn't say it's bloated despite the heavy ricing. These two distros I can recommend, would have been happy to see them covered.
Arch Linux with KDE Plasma. And I honestly have no idea how this concept of arch being "hard" is still going like we're still in 2012, you read the wiki for 2 minutes, copy and paste few commands and done. I am not a power user, not even close to one asi I use Linux for only a few months now. Either way, I wanted Arch because I like the philosophy, and KDE has all the settings I need and do not need to configure it my way. It's a combo made in heaven.
Hi. KDE is my favorite desktop. The best Gnome experience was Garuda but I could not stand Gnome morexthan few weeks :) I run KDE on several PCs and laptops. KDE NEON is clear winner desipte few crashes after updates a while ago. However Manjaro KDE is super stable and fast offering latest kernal etc. It works great for my daily use with both office and video editing apps. No hickups at least the last 6 months... So I don't know but Manjaro KDE is now the best option reg to my experience. :) Oh and did try most other KDE distros, still Manjaro and Neon Winns.
Manjaro KDE....by a lot. Nothing else comes close. Before anyone responds, I've tried Kubuntu, KDE Neon, OpenSUSE, Nitrux, Feren, Garuda, arch and Fedora with KDE and multiple versions of all of these. They all suck compared to Manjaro.
@@stevecorinthian Well to start with it used to die about every 3-4 rounds of updates. Not so much anymore. I've had one update glitch with Manjaro in the last two years. Secondly almost every computer I have installed it on just worked, even Macs including finding and installing WiFi drivers all on its on. (A process that has me banging my head against the wall with Fedora sometimes) It has the AUR. So I can have all the software I want to install in one place and don't have to search all over the web for it. 10 mins in the AUR and pretty much everything I want is installed. Manjaro is the most stable KDE experience I've had. The negative things I'm hearing including in this video mostly revolve around their website and internal practices (I don't care anything about that as long as the OS works)
@@dragonballjiujitsu with a rolling distro not running into issues after updates is a bit of luck, for me Manjaro was the distro that broke, for you it wasn't. True, Manjaro's OOBE is quite good as a lot is pre-installed and ready to go, it's a preference whether you mind the manual setup of other distro's but this is a strength of Manjaro. Yeah... please don't rely on the AUR too much on Manjaro, the AUR packages assume the Arch repos are used, Manjaro's holding back of updates is a major risk which I've had issues with before. That's what the community is most vocal about, along with the infamous M1 project, but even here they messed up in ways they shouldn't, main thing being recently messing up the Mesa driver but also the KDE themes being incomplete, GNOME themes being broken despite them having the ability to use the delayed updates to resolve this and generally the distro needing more workarounds than it should in my experience. But glad to hear you're having a great experience in any Linux distro, a distro is just a means to get the software on your system. As Nicolas said, there's only a best distro for you and not in general, it's important to decide for yourself and not listen to people with different priorities. That said, unless you get extremely lucky Manjaro's poor management will cause you issues eventually, but if you can resolve those, keep using it if it works for you!
@@dragonballjiujitsu It's not true, I tested Manjaro KDE, one day after clean install OS, system crash and DE not start after system update. Another time when I have again manjaro I see buggy.. google chrome: spotify web app laggy, cursor laggy - Somethink wrong with hardware accelaration built my intel card in laptop.. Many guys have bad opinion, in www linuxdistrowatch vote's is low. It's gut system for geek's who repair some buggy immediately. (My english is bad I know) ;)
I used to be a Linux Mint user with a KDE installed. However, I discovered Ubuntu and its other flavors, then ended up with Kubuntu itself. Now I am happy with what I am using right now. Also, I watch some videos on what distros are good for a newbie or a shifter like me so I have an idea with what works and not.
Have you tried Ultramarine Linux which is a Fedora based version with a KDE configured desktop. It supposedly simplifies access to nvidia drivers and other "non-free" items that Fedora makes difficult to install from the get-go?
For Work : Kubuntu (presently using 22.10 as my XPS 9250 has broken sound /no wifi on 22.04) For Home: Something Arch based (EndeavourOS currently) I've installed and tried every version of Fedora since 1 and for some reason I just do not get on with it. Used to use OpenSuse, their KDE implementation was always good, but I hate the package manager
@@user-tc9tb3a No, not at all . My Computer is about 9 years old (with added 1060 and ssd) and its really very quick. Even most games I can play at decent fps @ 1080
I love fedora and think it's the best distro currently, but their KDE spin is a bit of a mess in terms of default packages it comes with. I don't usually complain much about bloat, I am able to remove everything I don't need in 15 minutes normally. But Fedora KDE just comes with many extremely old obscure programs that nobody else ships.
Been using Garuda for something like 2,5 years? Time flies... Dragonized on my main rig and itx-rig, plain kde on T61-laptop. Surprisingly headache free usage! Love it!
I'm a BSD user and I don't like Linux distros that much. But IMHO Slackware and Gentoo are the best Linux distros (with or without plasma). PS.: Plasma is the default DE on Slackware and is one of the two DE that Gentoo facilitates with profiles.
@@rafaelgil6895 Yeah, sometimes I miss my Slackware setup with plasma, I used to git clone all the slackbulds in /usr/local/ports and used as a ports system. ;·)
@@BrenoSilveira94 Cool! Slack is probably the closest thing of a BSD that we have. I tried using FreeBSD in my home server but gave up due to the lack of drivers and some problems running my emacs, but I want do make it work someday!
@@rafaelgil6895 Yeah, that was the reason that I used Slackware for so long, poor drivers support on FreeBSD or OpenBSD for my desktop at the time. But now FreeBSD/OpenBSD runs smooth on my T430. And my next worksation/homelab I will build for BSD from de ground up.
Unfortunately, KDE or the distro itself has been problematic with every distro I've tried over the last year or so, and that has continued with a new computer. Fedora KDE: Cursor disappears over Firefox on some video sites (has not happened for a while) Shade button does not work (may be Wayland) Second monitor flickers on and off when vlc is full screen on it Has recently developed more glitches Feren OS: Issues with various applications. One example: Okular menus are missing almost all entries. Krusader viewer broken Kubuntu: Looses monitor configuration and application placement when no activity occurs for a while. Second monitor flickers on and off when vlc is full screen on it Firefox icon disappears from quick launch Alt-tab fails to show window, but shows icons instead Does not show window geometry LMDE Looses monitor configuration and application placement when no activity occurs for a while. Others that had issues I don't remember: Debian (may have been video issue) Mint (Probably same as LMDE: will try again)
@@dunkelwelpling I haven't tried OpenSUSE, mostly due to the fact that I'm used to the Debian way of doing things (even though I started with Redhat many years ago), but OpenSUSE seems to be a pretty good distro. Also, the biggest problem I had with KDE was that it couldn't keep the display settings, and this was KDE specific, and would probably have been the same on all distros. The problem is said to have been fixed in version 6 for the move to Qt6 and Wayland. I went back to IceWM for a while (I had used it for many years in the past), then tried Openbox. It can be customized to behave almost any way a user could want, and I'm happy with it. Even when I move to Wayland, I'll probably use Labwc because it is intended to be a Wayland compositor that looks and feels like Openbox, including nearly identical config files.
currently openSUSE tumbleweed (well Krypton) with wayland on Nvidia RTX 3060Ti (wayland has been working well)...for now I'm waiting for SUSE's MicroOS to mature little bit more, hopefully usable when KDE plasma 5.27 is out. my family has also been using openSUSE, the Leap version. Also few of my friends also use openSUSE
same card, same distro (not krypton, just tumbleweed), not using wayland tho. i get flicker problems whenever i run my monitors above 60hz. if you have high refresh rate monitors, do you also have flicker? interestingly i had this same flicker issue on windows too, but only when playing a specific game in fullscreen, so it seems like a very nvidia-side issue. said game (Terraria) has a native linux version, and that one has run with no flicker on x11, which is doubly interesting
I've used Kubuntu for my desktop since it first came out - 1st - love KDE as an environment 2nd - love that it is Deb based 3rd - Love that it is ubuntu - this means that I run ubuntu server on my server and on my raspberry pi I add the backports to get the latest plasma
I use Cachyos (Arch Based btw) and I quite like the nord theme and the power profiles and it is a comfy distro to be on. Speaking of power profiles are those going to be in future versions of plasma? I would love if we could get something similar to system76 power but integrated into plasma by default!
Why don't you just use Arch, you will have a more clean setup, making your system easier to debug and fix if anything happens, and with the archinstall it is easy to install Arch ?
@@zeocamo I'm Just an intermediate user who can't read the arch wiki and I also want to keep my dual boot with Win10 alive and I don't know how to dual boot through terminal commands. It is simpler for me to use Cachy.
Ciao Nicco The best distro for me is the one I don't even notice, the one that does not bother me or interfere with my work. I am used with XFCE and Cinnamon. Said that, unfortunately KDE does interfere daily with my work. I always test distros on VM for 6-12 months to understand how they work and behave before using them in production. I tried KDE Neon and I had KDE-related updates every day (and I am talking about 250MB to 1.1GB updates every time), I always had to reboot after the update (which is not the case on other DE) and often I had to reboot multiple times after the same updates had to be re-updated and applied. At the end, with a last update a couple of months ago, the system just got stuck and did NOT restart. I deleted the VM (yes, I am lazy and noob). After that I tried Fedora KDE (for a vanilla, maybe more stable experience), I thought maybe it will bother me less. No, same thing. Daily huge KDE updates and multiple reboots. I gave both systems the same CPU cores, disk space and RAM. On both systems the update process also takes incredibly long time (XFCE or Cinnamon 1-2 minutes, KDE 15 minutes minimum on same PC, even with parallel download tweaked on dnf Fedora). I also noticed an important use of RAM on both systems (more than 1.6GB at boot). I would really love to use KDE. I believe that KDE created a great ecosystem with a lot of useful tools. On paper it is almost exactly what I need. But in practice it is memory hungry and it does heavily interfere with my daily work. Everyone talks so good about KDE and I also see a lot of value in it. But the above described problems really annoy me. Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing some tweaks? By the way, thank you Nicco. I follow you and you are doing a great work!
I'd recommend Manjaro. The updates come every couple of weeks (I think every week at the fastest, but I don't keep track and it might be more common.) although of course they'll still be quite large and reboots are common. I don't mind the large updates, in fact I never really thought twice about them, but KDE might just not be for you.
@@Wolficefang Well, Alex Even though I like Manjaro, I am not really into arch-based systems. Both for laziness and personal preference. I rather use non bleeding edge software in favour of stability and I am more familiar with the debian family ecosystem. When I tried Manjaro I liked it, but I had heavy daily updates (if I remember correct). But even that is not the point. I have almost daily updates on Mint Cinnamon too, but in most cases are small ones and do not require reboot unless they are kernel updates. And also, even more important, with a debian based system update I am (almost) sure that it will not break anything .. and this is not the case for an arch based system! Debian and arch are the usual dilemma: bleeding edge vs stability! For me a good compromise is something based on debian testing, like ubuntu or mint. They have "old" software but not up to 2 years behind like debian stable. Also, in case I need some very recent software for some reasons, flatpaks and appimages are there to help. Anyway all these are just my personal preferences. The only thing I was surprised about was the annoying major daily heavy updates of KDE, and I thought I was doing something wrong.
Plasma is a glittering DE and looks gorgeous. I love it. However it is full of bugs here and there. All these features, which are also his strong point, must be maintained. This involves a titanic effort. This is why GNOME offers a more stable user experience. The GNOME team has decided to port only those features that they are able to maintain. XFCE also has a rather slow development process (about 2 years for a new release). But that makes it rock stable. And then XFCE is fast, fast, fast! The only features it lacks are integration with online calendars and a Kdeconnect applet
Arch was great for me, then a week ago I did an update that basically nuked Plasma-X for me and I'm fighting Wayland to stick with it. Considering doing a full system backup and put KDE in "quarantine" for a bit. 5.26.5 was sooooooo good for me until the update.
@@Lobaluna9333 Arch gets updates earlier than stable distros (still relatively late for KDE for some reason, like a week or 2 behind), so it's going to get more buggy updates. The way I usually deal with KDE is add plasma-desktop and kwin to my ignore list in pacman.
Just a few points about KDE on openSUSE - In the past we had some problems with Discover on it yes because of the zypper backend for Discover but this is not a problem anymore. The Discover on openSUSE is now stable as in others distros. About their "KDE brand theme", I personally found very ugly and the first thing that I do is change to default Breeze. And finally, they have a immutable distro too, the openSUSE MicroOS. Is a very new distribution and they officially support only GNOME and KDE Plasma for now, but is very stable and basically read for use. I use it with KDE Plasma on my production machine with no problem.
Nice thing about openSUSE is that the installer allows you to choose package groups or even individual packages that you want on your system. So you can just untick SUSE branding and have vanilla Plasma look out of the box.
by the way: tuxedo linux is pretty good and optimized ubuntu lts (with updated drivers and some apps). Ugly kde personalization, imho, but not a real problem. Out of topic : ma sei italiano?
I like plasma desktop and kde apps, but most annoying thing about it is when I install one app, all its cousins get installed. I don't mind it, but it effect my work flow, for eg:- when I search write i want to open librewrite but it suggest me kwrite because I installed Kate, or qt creator(ide) Installs 4-5 apps with same icon which allways confuse me.. Is there anyway to hide not user installed apps from showing on search result
After a tremendous amount of ball ball busting, with 5 different distros, I finally found something that works for me. Fedora Kde Neon, with x11 instead of Wayland. There are some issues with Wayland especially with an NVIDIA Gpu. I will say, hybrid graphics switching actually works and games run extremely well, seemingly better than windows at times. Be warned, if you use Wayland, you will have serious issues with things like Steam and some web browsers. Use x11 instead and Make sure to use TimeShift when you get things working right. The only thing better about Wayland is it has HDR support but, I couldn't get any HDR games working with it
I use arch and alternate between plasma and a riced combo of xfce with awesomewm. Kde’s great for days I just want that polished out of box experience 😊
KDE Neon doesn't even boot for me, so it's just Kubuntu (latest releases) with PPA for me. I used to run Arch, but I got a little tired maintaining it. Honestly, there's no perfect distro: Ubuntu's upgrade process is a hassle if you use ppas, Fedora's Plasma edition has always been weirdly buggy, in my experience, and all the other distros are just too small to even bother using because of the smaller repositories.
At the moment, I've been on KDE Neon for a month or so. But I do think I'll switch back to Kubuntu 22.04 LTS, as I find the continual updates to KDE a bit bothersome. OK, so I won't have the most recent version of KDE, but I prefer stability over being most up to date.
Right now I am using Nobara Linux, KDE edition. I switched over from Arch. I used Arch for years but I no longer have the patience for the necessary upkeep it requires. I decided to switch over to a Fedora based system. I could have gone mainline, but I did want the gaming niceties that Nobara provides, and it is still a point release. Totally somewhat off topic, where can I get the Jinx wallpaper that shows up at around 5:55?
I stay away from Ubuntu distros basically just because of Snaps now. If they made it easier to choose Snap vs package vs Flatpak, then I wouldn't mind.
@@new-lviv I'm waiting to see what their new Cosmic DE is like, for my laptop really did not like GNOME. I will give Cosmic a good go once it's reached a stable version! 🙂
Benn running the same Arch install since 2021 with KDE and I've never been happier. I also like Slackware though you have to really tune it unless you want EVERY KDE application ever made. I had a minimalist list of packages for it but I lost it.
Using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed KDE for a week... so far it has been pretty good. Not saying there are no issues, but nothing too serious. Beware if you have Nvidia card, stick with 470 driver. [edit] I should have noted that for 90% of my time in linux over the decade, LinuxMint has been my preferred choice, and this is really the first KDE distro I've actually liked.
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
Oh, one really good thing about openSUSE: since they have this openQA and test everything before release, they usually don't get affected by critical bugs.
Recently on Arch Linux and other Rolling Release distros we saw a problem with people that couldn't use their machines because of a problem in a upgrade of the GRUB. It didn't affected openSUSE because they spotted it with the openQA and didn't update the GRUB package until it get fixed.
The same happens for Plasma, we didn't get the Plasma beta on the "official KDE beta repository" on the day that it was release because of a bug, it took some days until they release it on the repositories because of that bug.
Is because of these things that openSUSE is known by its stability, even on its rolling release distro.
I had arch for a while, and just went back to an ubuntu lts distro, exactly for the problem you mentioned :) Tried opensuse tb and really liked it, sad that there is not great support for some nvidia stuff, like cuda
@@claudiocastellikurageart Since I wanted rolling release distro with the stability, I tried OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (OpenSUSE Leap (OpenSUSE) in the video) is the standard release version).
Unfortunately, it wouldn't boot the live CD on my Nvidia GTX1050, with no way to get to console.
I then found out about Manjaro, a tested version of Arch (manually tested instead of automated tested like Tumbleweed) with updates every 2 to 4 weeks and of course the AUR. It works fine so far, but we'll see with Plasma 6.
why dont arch neckbeards utilize this state of the art technology called "openqa"
OpenSuse Tumbleweed was the first Wayland by default distro that I know of. Fedora followed a month or two later.
IIRC Wayland by default was only with gnome, KDE standard install used X
Zypper is probably my favorite package manager......
Until the performance matches X11 & I can safely put a laptop to sleep, I won’t switch yet
never able to install tumbleweed
@@sylvershadow1247 wait, ive been able to use sleep mode fine with minimal battery loss, and that is still on s0 sleep. what did i miss?
openSUSE also releases Argon and Krypton versions. Argon similar to KDE neon gives you the latest builds of KDE on a stable base, where as Krypton gives you the latest snapshot of tumbleweed with builds of the master branch of KDE.
The best KDE distro is the one that have KDE run smoothly on your machine
well by that logic...
LMDE 6
bro that's clearly arch or debian
It’s clearly opensuse it’s so fast and underrated
@@Benito650 no its gentoo and slackware
@@mazdaxc90 no it's linux from scratch, like who tf use these distros anyways.
I switched from Neon to Garuda about a year ago as my main distro. Absolutely love it, I get the power of Arch but without the headache.
Garuda's custom tools for management works very well and makes most maintenance task a breeze.
Example 1: If I use a secondary packet manager to install something odd I get an alert that I should update the whole system to keep the integrity.
Example 2: I messed up my install by installing something I shouldn't (well, in the wrong way). Reboot, choose an older snapshot, boot with that and got the question if I wanted a roll-back... Yes please and thus I was back to before my stupidity.
I really like the "rolling distro" concept as end user and will likely not go back to "version update".
I usually base my install on the "Dragonized" variant since I love the looks but I need to change the looks to something more traditional, not fond of hovering menus (I keep start button, activity tray etc on the left side due to today's stupidly wide monitors).
And from my experience their user forum is a good and pleasant one
I'm about to install a Linux system for my 75 year old neighbour (runs win 7 now), I'm leaning towards Garuda for him as well (but more likely the XFCE variant)
That’s interesting. I’ll check it out with my spare crap laptop. I use opensuse and love it for some similar reasons. They have snapper rollback enabled by default, and a wonderful forum. But, I’ve used snapper a couple odd times now (really nice), but I always have to look up the commands to set the system to the rollback once I’ve logged into it. Garuda prompting with a gui is a nice touch.
Cool, love the user friendliness of Garuda KDE but hate two things:latte dock and the theming :) I did try to work on both kden drsgonized and other and I tried to change the look "back" to normal KDE. Unfortunatly things get worse than, latte is alwaysa utostarting and the desktop get corrupted. Denna like the user should leave the drsgonized version more or less untouched. So yeah.. I switched back to Manjaro KDE that is clean very fast and no issues, just works.
Absolutely LOVE Garuda, in all its flavours. Using LXQt at the moment but KDE Dr460nized and Gnome are excellent too. Had some issues though, esp. with KDE. A work in progress. Love the look of it, totally and uniquely Linux. I'm a Windows power-user switching to Linux now and Garuda is my distro of choice.
@@PaulMrPKcom Good thing we are shipping Plasma panels as default next release 🐉
Why not use Linux Mint XFCE for your 75 year old neighbor? Seems more user friendly
Arch + KDE = ❤
Thank you for the video!
I would recommend Opensuse tumbleweed easily because like you said, it brings the latest version of plasma and kde framework but OpenSUSE has a great support of btrfs too. They made snapper, a tool that make it easy to rollback your system to an old snapshot.
Tumbleweed is not really an immutable OS like kinoite is, but I think it's a good compromise and easy to use OS if you want to be able to rollback when something bad happened.
Now thanks to you I want to try kinoite to make my own opinion about it.
There is Opensuse Microos, which is an inmutable OS based on Tumbleweed, so if you want something rolling and inmutable, that's the way to go. Just keep in mind that the KDE version it's still on alpha, but in my opinion its usable.
I recommend you to try openSUSE MicroOS with KDE Plasma. Even if it says that is Alpha, is very stable and I use it on my production machine since a while with no problem.
But be careful because is hard to go back to non-immutable distro after get used to it. 😅
What Gnome is to Fedora, KDE is to Opensuse(Tumbleweed).
Thanks!
KDE Neon is just amazing. Moved to it from EndeavourOS and Neon just works!
Same here. Used EOS KDE for 6 months before one day an update completely broke it. Moved to Neon and loving the stability
OpenSUSE is a distro for someone who needs to get the work done, period.
Not only is it rock solid but it is also well designed and has very sane defaults out of the box. It just works!
And if it doesn't, there are snapper with btrfs to roll back to previous "working" snapshot if/when SHTF. I've been using it as my main distro (work and personal life) for almost 3 years now and I'm not planing on moving to anything else.
P.S.
OpenSUSE has it's own beer, I mean what other distro has/brews it's own beer?!
All this pretty much. Its hard for me to settle with an OS and feel "home", but Opensuse did that for me. Suse Linux Enterprise was also the first Linux I played around with as a kid so I have fond memories.
Whats weird is that Opensuses effort regarding KDE are all community based, the image of it being THE KDE distro comes from the old day of .. Novell I think? Back then it was company backed, now the only thing that is backed officially by Suse is that other DE that looks like a tablet os. Dont know why.
Nah... I love OpenSUSE, but I hate use it with KDE, too much bugs. Discover don't work, Baloo the last time I tried don't work too. If want to use OpenSUSE I suggest XFCE or GNOME.
>what other distro has/brews it's own beer?!
Slackware's creator brews beer too, IIRC.
@@FagnerLuan it's weird I use it with kde and it's actually the most stable os for me
👍OpenSUSE leap with Plasma cured my distro hopping.
Home: Arch with KDE for >4 years now :) Currently on the 5.27 Beta
Work: Fedora KDE Spin with zawertun COPR repo for the latest and greatest
KDE Neon for me. It's been rock solid and I enjoy the combination of the latest and greatest KDE atop a stable LTS base.
For me it caused some problem in multi-language environment: when there are multiple system languages installed, Kde mixes them up in a very strange way, in a single app window...
Nope. It often gives me issues
Honestly, Kubuntu LTS. I've used it for years, and had absolutely zero reasons to hop from it. By default it's as good as it can get, and adding a few (legit) ppa's can turn it into a BEAST
I'm using Manjaro with Plasma and my OS install was 8,5 years ago! So that means, it still works and there were no reinstalls in that time. Sure, there were some issues once in a while, but nothing that I couldn't fix. So Manjaro can be incredibly stable if you are familiar with the Manjaro and Arch, and know what you are doing. Manjaro is easy and nice, but still for more advanced users. Plus, if you are a developer, Manjaro has also KDE beta packages.
Totally agree. I rate a distro on what it is like to use and live with. I have been on Manjaro for 2.5 years now and it is fantastic. I use a heavily modified plasma desktop and I am usually on the Unstable branch (which has never caused me a problem). I used to use the AUR (which is hit and miss even on Arch) but now I use Faltpaks for a few apps that are not in the repositories. It really is the most flexible distro that I have found but marred by these petty gripes and management squabbles which keep coming back to haunt it in videos like this.
@@phrtao If you know any of the devs personally, could you please get them to reconsider and put the grub menu back in instead of hiding it :) I've always preferred using Manjaro with an older LTS kernel (for stability) and going back from 6.1 (current ISOs) to 5.15, for example, is now a pain in the butt :) I don't use the AUR either, and do TTY2 updates as well. I must admit that my trust level in their decision-making processes has diminished significantly... unfortunately.
Yes, I have it since spring 2017 in virtual box. Once virtual box changed default graphics driver and Manjaro just crashed starting plasma. Once I lost some fonts or they looked weird, can't recall. Once I lost kernel and had to boot live distro, chroot, run mhwd or how is it called to choose one, download it and reinstall grub. Maybe I used very old kernel which was no longer available. Then I had some problems with dependencies and I'm quite sure Octopi is replaced by pamac, but whatever - actually this is problem of rolling distro, you are getting new stuff with fresh install, but not with updates.
Agreed. My oldest Manjaro was installed way back in late 2014, and is still current, having survived multiple hardware swaps in the timeframe. It hasn't been always smooth sailing, I had one particular issue (damn Nvidia) where I was tempted to throw the towel and reinstall, but I finally dug into the issue and managed to recover with hand surgery into the initrd. I hear a lot about Manjaro and its team, but that's mostly made up drama, which could happen within any team. I have my griefs, but for all the faults, it's been rock solid and better than every other distro I ever used (and that includes a lot of names since 1998).
Been using KDE since version 2.0 days and in my opinion the best KDE distro is OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Oh and Nico can I have different wallpapers for each virtual desktop back, please.... :)
18:40 You might be getting confused with bigLinux. Feren OS merely forks Kickoff to change its look a bit and uses said fork as its menu (although has a sister variant which does fill the screen instead).
However, bigLinux, if I recall correctly, does use a fork of Application Dashboard.
I actually messed up with NitruxOS... No idea how I got that confused, sorry
I have been a MX Linux KDE Edition user for about four years and I never broken it in a way that forced a reinstall. Their custom toolset is rock solid and has not failed in bringing me back from the black screen of death. Great distro should have gotten a mention in my opinion.
May have to give it another look. Until 23 couldn't even install MX since it shipped with the 5.10 kernel, which does not recognize newer wifi hardware. Wasn't like I could install it and then upgrade the kernel since I couldn't get an internet connection during install. Kind of soured me on MX/
I use EndeavourOS, an Arch bases distro, and they give you a choice of over 6 DE's. KDE Plasma is one of them and Endeavour installs it as is, other than EndeavourOS wallpapers, no changes from it's vanilla install as KDE packages it for Arch. You can customize it to your hearts content, as no matter what choices any distro may make for you, there just is no such thing as "One size fits all", and so many may not like what they get from any distro.
I love EndeavorOS, Arch and KDE PLasma! It makes my penguins happy! 🐧🐧🐧
openSUSE tumbleweed is the best rolling, when it comes to stability, latest bleeding edge, and with KDE Wayland it is also one of the best.
I've used openSuse for 10 (or so) years. I've tried to switch but rage quit any other
SUSE was my first daily driver, over 20 years ago!
This was because obtaining a CD or DVD was quite easy at the time :D
If you "need" Arch Linux, you might as well go straight to Gentoo... which was my daily driver after SUSE up to Ubuntu 15/16 I think.
I think the flagship kde distro should be opensuse. Though i am using fedora kde .. switched from manjaro kde a week ago. Oddly faced some ui freezes and crashes in fedora kde while installing window button plasmoid and a cursor theme uninstalling them resolved the issue
Suse has no KDE Desktop anymore on their enterprise distro.
They ditched KDE from it entirely, dont package for it at all and dont participate much in the KDE development itself anymore.
Kubuntu essentially pushed them out
They had a couple of pretty ugly disputes with each other. Sadly.
Manjaro
@@shalokshalom i didn't know that thanks for the info bro
For me:
OpenSUSE Leap (the best).
Kubuntu.
KDE Neon.
I feel comfortable enough with base arch, however I really liked the way garuda felt also when I tried it
I use Xerolinux, arch based. I started with Manjaro KDE and enjoyed KDE since but with Xerolinux I found amazing customization for myself and really love it.
I tried openSUSE and I love almost everything about it. The only thing I was pulling my hair with was network printing. Any other distro does it seamlessly, on openSUSE I couldn't do it
Been using KDE since v 1.01, mostly on FreeBSD & Red Hat back then. I find Opensuse Leap a very stable platform for KDE, if you care more more about stability than new features.
MX Linux w/ KDE for me. Tried Mint, POP OS, Manjaro, Endeavour OS, Fedora workstation and Kinoite, Opensuse, Spiral, AntiX. Until recently, I was pretty happy on Endeavour OS. But then i got a new Brother Printer and was having issues with WiFi operation. MX just worked perfectly, printing, and scanning
Endeavour OS with kde is what I'm using, it's been great so far.
KDE Neon. I had not a single time installing arch/archbased distro without something borked (kde included). I like bleeding edge because you get hands on newest and sweetest but Arch is just to much maintenance since i don't have enough spare time anymore. On Neon KDE packages are bleeding edge and it is fantastic. Most non-KDE software has flatpaks that work well-enough (not perfect) and are bleeding edge also. So all-around Neon is better than Kubuntu for me. Opensuse (tumbleweed) is always behind Neon for Plasma releases so no pass here. Fedora's installer appeared more confusing that installing Arch manually so no pass in that also.
I tried KDE Neon on VirtualBox and it broke immediately after installation and update. Got to the "select os" screen and froze there. Sure there may be some issues with VirtualBox itself but it's still a bit concerning. Plus the way they phrase in FAQ that "KDE neon focuses on KDE software, most other software is not supported and you should not be surprised if you can not install it or it stops working at any point in time due to an update". I got the impression that some non-KDE package could break and they wouldn't care.
Have you had problems compiling python scripts on Konsole? Why do they crash me on Konsole, on KDE Neon.
Same story here here, I came from Gentile to Arch for the same reason and the Neon. I have used Neon since shortly after it was released on all my devices. It is just Ubuntu with KDE's most recent releases. It is nice.
@@edoardomartino95 it is a VirtualBox issue not Neon issue. Neon is Ubuntu, so check that your VB is the latest version and that you added enough RAM for the VM, which is the usual culprit. On a side note then VB isn't that good IMHO, so perhaps try another hypervisor.
@@BjarkeBruun i'm not using kde neon on virtualbox; but on physical machine, on my desktop computer.
I've used Debian 11 with Plasma, EndeavourOS with Plasma, and Kubuntu. EndeavourOS offered the best Plasma experience for me because I feel that KDE benefits from rolling release. Debian's Plasma was too old, with Kubuntu being in the middle; LTS will be older than rolling release, but point releases and Kubuntu Backports PPAs can make up the difference.
My problem is that after running EndeavourOS for just about a year, I had to leave it behind. Arch-based distributions are not for me. Kubuntu's Plasma may be older, but the distribution itself is a lot easier to setup and works better on my hardware.
I switched to Garuda Dragonized (Plasma with heavily customized theme) and dropped Manjaro (what a shame). Love the theming of Garuda and that it's set up the way it suits me, I only changed the topbar into a panel on the bottom. It's also fast to boot, slightly faster than EndeavourOS, so I wouldn't say it's bloated despite the heavy ricing.
These two distros I can recommend, would have been happy to see them covered.
Arch Linux with KDE Plasma.
And I honestly have no idea how this concept of arch being "hard" is still going like we're still in 2012, you read the wiki for 2 minutes, copy and paste few commands and done. I am not a power user, not even close to one asi I use Linux for only a few months now.
Either way, I wanted Arch because I like the philosophy, and KDE has all the settings I need and do not need to configure it my way. It's a combo made in heaven.
Opensuse tumbleweed is just the best experience I have got in kde
Debian (12) KDE user here and I have to admit that this particular release is the most consistent (and stable) that I've ever seen around.
If you haven't try OpenSUSE you should try it. Because IT WORK as solid as rock.
Solus Plasma absolutely rocks
Hi. KDE is my favorite desktop. The best Gnome experience was Garuda but I could not stand Gnome morexthan few weeks :) I run KDE on several PCs and laptops. KDE NEON is clear winner desipte few crashes after updates a while ago. However Manjaro KDE is super stable and fast offering latest kernal etc. It works great for my daily use with both office and video editing apps. No hickups at least the last 6 months... So I don't know but Manjaro KDE is now the best option reg to my experience. :) Oh and did try most other KDE distros, still Manjaro and Neon Winns.
EndeavourOS is also a great option for people who want Arch and stable KDE
really stable is only Debian ;)
Manjaro KDE....by a lot. Nothing else comes close. Before anyone responds, I've tried Kubuntu, KDE Neon, OpenSUSE, Nitrux, Feren, Garuda, arch and Fedora with KDE and multiple versions of all of these. They all suck compared to Manjaro.
What's good about it? I mainly hear negative things about Manjaro.
@@stevecorinthian Well to start with it used to die about every 3-4 rounds of updates. Not so much anymore. I've had one update glitch with Manjaro in the last two years.
Secondly almost every computer I have installed it on just worked, even Macs including finding and installing WiFi drivers all on its on. (A process that has me banging my head against the wall with Fedora sometimes)
It has the AUR. So I can have all the software I want to install in one place and don't have to search all over the web for it. 10 mins in the AUR and pretty much everything I want is installed.
Manjaro is the most stable KDE experience I've had. The negative things I'm hearing including in this video mostly revolve around their website and internal practices (I don't care anything about that as long as the OS works)
@@dragonballjiujitsu with a rolling distro not running into issues after updates is a bit of luck, for me Manjaro was the distro that broke, for you it wasn't.
True, Manjaro's OOBE is quite good as a lot is pre-installed and ready to go, it's a preference whether you mind the manual setup of other distro's but this is a strength of Manjaro.
Yeah... please don't rely on the AUR too much on Manjaro, the AUR packages assume the Arch repos are used, Manjaro's holding back of updates is a major risk which I've had issues with before.
That's what the community is most vocal about, along with the infamous M1 project, but even here they messed up in ways they shouldn't, main thing being recently messing up the Mesa driver but also the KDE themes being incomplete, GNOME themes being broken despite them having the ability to use the delayed updates to resolve this and generally the distro needing more workarounds than it should in my experience.
But glad to hear you're having a great experience in any Linux distro, a distro is just a means to get the software on your system.
As Nicolas said, there's only a best distro for you and not in general, it's important to decide for yourself and not listen to people with different priorities.
That said, unless you get extremely lucky Manjaro's poor management will cause you issues eventually, but if you can resolve those, keep using it if it works for you!
@@dragonballjiujitsu It's not true, I tested Manjaro KDE, one day after clean install OS, system crash and DE not start after system update. Another time when I have again manjaro I see buggy.. google chrome: spotify web app laggy, cursor laggy - Somethink wrong with hardware accelaration built my intel card in laptop.. Many guys have bad opinion, in www linuxdistrowatch vote's is low. It's gut system for geek's who repair some buggy immediately. (My english is bad I know) ;)
I'm on Manjaro today. Before I was on NEON (and still on one of my laptops) and befor that I was on OpenSUSE, but main distro is Manjaro for me.
I use a customized arch for KDE since the AUR has the wallpaper engine for KDE plugin
I used to be a Linux Mint user with a KDE installed. However, I discovered Ubuntu and its other flavors, then ended up with Kubuntu itself. Now I am happy with what I am using right now. Also, I watch some videos on what distros are good for a newbie or a shifter like me so I have an idea with what works and not.
Linux mint is way better kubuntu still has the ubuntu bloatware and snaps(snaps are terrible for users)
Have you tried Ultramarine Linux which is a Fedora based version with a KDE configured desktop. It supposedly simplifies access to nvidia drivers and other "non-free" items that Fedora makes difficult to install from the get-go?
For Work : Kubuntu (presently using 22.10 as my XPS 9250 has broken sound /no wifi on 22.04)
For Home: Something Arch based (EndeavourOS currently)
I've installed and tried every version of Fedora since 1 and for some reason I just do not get on with it. Used to use OpenSuse, their KDE implementation was always good, but I hate the package manager
Aren't Endeavour and Kubuntu slow?
@@user-tc9tb3a No, not at all . My Computer is about 9 years old (with added 1060 and ssd) and its really very quick. Even most games I can play at decent fps @ 1080
I love fedora and think it's the best distro currently, but their KDE spin is a bit of a mess in terms of default packages it comes with. I don't usually complain much about bloat, I am able to remove everything I don't need in 15 minutes normally. But Fedora KDE just comes with many extremely old obscure programs that nobody else ships.
the setup for your videos are improving thats nice keep up the good work
I prefer Manjaro KDE over all other KDE distros ! .. any management issues mean nothing to me.. the OS rocks.
Been using Garuda for something like 2,5 years? Time flies... Dragonized on my main rig and itx-rig, plain kde on T61-laptop. Surprisingly headache free usage! Love it!
Kubuntu installer have option for minimal install.. so you don't need to install all the apps.
What about mx Linux kde?
I'm a BSD user and I don't like Linux distros that much. But IMHO Slackware and Gentoo are the best Linux distros (with or without plasma).
PS.: Plasma is the default DE on Slackware and is one of the two DE that Gentoo facilitates with profiles.
Plasma is amazing on Slack!
@@rafaelgil6895 Yeah, sometimes I miss my Slackware setup with plasma, I used to git clone all the slackbulds in /usr/local/ports and used as a ports system. ;·)
@@BrenoSilveira94 Cool! Slack is probably the closest thing of a BSD that we have. I tried using FreeBSD in my home server but gave up due to the lack of drivers and some problems running my emacs, but I want do make it work someday!
@@rafaelgil6895 Yeah, that was the reason that I used Slackware for so long, poor drivers support on FreeBSD or OpenBSD for my desktop at the time.
But now FreeBSD/OpenBSD runs smooth on my T430. And my next worksation/homelab I will build for BSD from de ground up.
Endeavour Os, just amazing
Unfortunately, KDE or the distro itself has been problematic with every distro I've tried over the last year or so, and that has continued with a new computer.
Fedora KDE:
Cursor disappears over Firefox on some video sites (has not happened for a while)
Shade button does not work (may be Wayland)
Second monitor flickers on and off when vlc is full screen on it
Has recently developed more glitches
Feren OS:
Issues with various applications. One example: Okular menus are missing almost all entries.
Krusader viewer broken
Kubuntu:
Looses monitor configuration and application placement when no activity occurs for a while.
Second monitor flickers on and off when vlc is full screen on it
Firefox icon disappears from quick launch
Alt-tab fails to show window, but shows icons instead
Does not show window geometry
LMDE
Looses monitor configuration and application placement when no activity occurs for a while.
Others that had issues I don't remember:
Debian (may have been video issue)
Mint (Probably same as LMDE: will try again)
Did you tried OpenSUSE? People say it's the most polished distro for KDE.
@@dunkelwelpling I haven't tried OpenSUSE, mostly due to the fact that I'm used to the Debian way of doing things (even though I started with Redhat many years ago), but OpenSUSE seems to be a pretty good distro.
Also, the biggest problem I had with KDE was that it couldn't keep the display settings, and this was KDE specific, and would probably have been the same on all distros. The problem is said to have been fixed in version 6 for the move to Qt6 and Wayland.
I went back to IceWM for a while (I had used it for many years in the past), then tried Openbox. It can be customized to behave almost any way a user could want, and I'm happy with it. Even when I move to Wayland, I'll probably use Labwc because it is intended to be a Wayland compositor that looks and feels like Openbox, including nearly identical config files.
I like Kubuntu and use it on all my computers (desktop and laptops).
currently openSUSE tumbleweed (well Krypton) with wayland on Nvidia RTX 3060Ti (wayland has been working well)...for now I'm waiting for SUSE's MicroOS to mature little bit more, hopefully usable when KDE plasma 5.27 is out.
my family has also been using openSUSE, the Leap version. Also few of my friends also use openSUSE
Are you German?
@@plutorocks1 no, Finnish.. I live also in Finland 🇫🇮
same card, same distro (not krypton, just tumbleweed), not using wayland tho. i get flicker problems whenever i run my monitors above 60hz. if you have high refresh rate monitors, do you also have flicker? interestingly i had this same flicker issue on windows too, but only when playing a specific game in fullscreen, so it seems like a very nvidia-side issue. said game (Terraria) has a native linux version, and that one has run with no flicker on x11, which is doubly interesting
For sure the best looking is BIGLINUX.
The most stable one is Opensuse
"If you're unsure on whether you should use Arch Linux, dont"
You sir deserve a medal!
I've used Kubuntu for my desktop since it first came out - 1st - love KDE as an environment 2nd - love that it is Deb based 3rd - Love that it is ubuntu - this means that I run ubuntu server on my server and on my raspberry pi
I add the backports to get the latest plasma
I use Cachyos (Arch Based btw) and I quite like the nord theme and the power profiles and it is a comfy distro to be on. Speaking of power profiles are those going to be in future versions of plasma? I would love if we could get something similar to system76 power but integrated into plasma by default!
Why don't you just use Arch, you will have a more clean setup, making your system easier to debug and fix if anything happens, and with the archinstall it is easy to install Arch ?
@@zeocamo I'm Just an intermediate user who can't read the arch wiki and I also want to keep my dual boot with Win10 alive and I don't know how to dual boot through terminal commands. It is simpler for me to use Cachy.
Ciao Nicco
The best distro for me is the one I don't even notice, the one that does not bother me or interfere with my work. I am used with XFCE and Cinnamon.
Said that, unfortunately KDE does interfere daily with my work.
I always test distros on VM for 6-12 months to understand how they work and behave before using them in production.
I tried KDE Neon and I had KDE-related updates every day (and I am talking about 250MB to 1.1GB updates every time), I always had to reboot after the update (which is not the case on other DE) and often I had to reboot multiple times after the same updates had to be re-updated and applied.
At the end, with a last update a couple of months ago, the system just got stuck and did NOT restart. I deleted the VM (yes, I am lazy and noob).
After that I tried Fedora KDE (for a vanilla, maybe more stable experience), I thought maybe it will bother me less. No, same thing. Daily huge KDE updates and multiple reboots.
I gave both systems the same CPU cores, disk space and RAM. On both systems the update process also takes incredibly long time (XFCE or Cinnamon 1-2 minutes, KDE 15 minutes minimum on same PC, even with parallel download tweaked on dnf Fedora). I also noticed an important use of RAM on both systems (more than 1.6GB at boot).
I would really love to use KDE. I believe that KDE created a great ecosystem with a lot of useful tools. On paper it is almost exactly what I need. But in practice it is memory hungry and it does heavily interfere with my daily work.
Everyone talks so good about KDE and I also see a lot of value in it. But the above described problems really annoy me. Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing some tweaks?
By the way, thank you Nicco. I follow you and you are doing a great work!
I'd recommend Manjaro. The updates come every couple of weeks (I think every week at the fastest, but I don't keep track and it might be more common.) although of course they'll still be quite large and reboots are common. I don't mind the large updates, in fact I never really thought twice about them, but KDE might just not be for you.
@@Wolficefang Well, Alex
Even though I like Manjaro, I am not really into arch-based systems. Both for laziness and personal preference. I rather use non bleeding edge software in favour of stability and I am more familiar with the debian family ecosystem.
When I tried Manjaro I liked it, but I had heavy daily updates (if I remember correct). But even that is not the point. I have almost daily updates on Mint Cinnamon too, but in most cases are small ones and do not require reboot unless they are kernel updates. And also, even more important, with a debian based system update I am (almost) sure that it will not break anything .. and this is not the case for an arch based system!
Debian and arch are the usual dilemma: bleeding edge vs stability!
For me a good compromise is something based on debian testing, like ubuntu or mint. They have "old" software but not up to 2 years behind like debian stable.
Also, in case I need some very recent software for some reasons, flatpaks and appimages are there to help.
Anyway all these are just my personal preferences. The only thing I was surprised about was the annoying major daily heavy updates of KDE, and I thought I was doing something wrong.
Plasma is a glittering DE and looks gorgeous. I love it. However it is full of bugs here and there. All these features, which are also his strong point, must be maintained. This involves a titanic effort. This is why GNOME offers a more stable user experience. The GNOME team has decided to port only those features that they are able to maintain. XFCE also has a rather slow development process (about 2 years for a new release). But that makes it rock stable. And then XFCE is fast, fast, fast! The only features it lacks are integration with online calendars and a Kdeconnect applet
Arch was great for me, then a week ago I did an update that basically nuked Plasma-X for me and I'm fighting Wayland to stick with it.
Considering doing a full system backup and put KDE in "quarantine" for a bit. 5.26.5 was sooooooo good for me until the update.
But, how did it happened? I'm new to Arch+KDE… I am still alive ;D (Hope to avoid what happened to you).
@@Lobaluna9333 Arch gets updates earlier than stable distros (still relatively late for KDE for some reason, like a week or 2 behind), so it's going to get more buggy updates.
The way I usually deal with KDE is add plasma-desktop and kwin to my ignore list in pacman.
@@AQDuck Thank you! Interesting to know. I will follow your advice!
Thank you for asking. I use KDE Neon
I use KDE with four PCs. Three have Debian 12.1 and one has SID 2023.1. Plasma works great with Debian. No issues.
I use KDE 6 on Garuda, updated 2 days ago. Very nice upgrade!
Just a few points about KDE on openSUSE - In the past we had some problems with Discover on it yes because of the zypper backend for Discover but this is not a problem anymore. The Discover on openSUSE is now stable as in others distros.
About their "KDE brand theme", I personally found very ugly and the first thing that I do is change to default Breeze.
And finally, they have a immutable distro too, the openSUSE MicroOS. Is a very new distribution and they officially support only GNOME and KDE Plasma for now, but is very stable and basically read for use. I use it with KDE Plasma on my production machine with no problem.
Nice thing about openSUSE is that the installer allows you to choose package groups or even individual packages that you want on your system. So you can just untick SUSE branding and have vanilla Plasma look out of the box.
Gentoo. That's it! But I knew openSUSE is KDE flagship. Only openSUSE ship KDE with full function package, with every newest feature of KDE.
Kde Neon since forever! Tried most of mainstream distro but always came back!
by the way: tuxedo linux is pretty good and optimized ubuntu lts (with updated drivers and some apps). Ugly kde personalization, imho, but not a real problem. Out of topic : ma sei italiano?
Void linux + KDE plasma here
I wish I saw this video two months ago. I've been switching from Manjaro to KDE Neon. I would have used Kubuntu instead.
Manjaro is smooth as fuck. They fucked up a few times but the distro runs well.
Agree - no problems once you have it installed it can do everything !
I like plasma desktop and kde apps, but most annoying thing about it is when I install one app, all its cousins get installed. I don't mind it, but it effect my work flow, for eg:- when I search write i want to open librewrite but it suggest me kwrite because I installed Kate, or qt creator(ide) Installs 4-5 apps with same icon which allways confuse me..
Is there anyway to hide not user installed apps from showing on search result
I was using Neon for 2 years but switched back to Kubuntu 2 months ago when after an update "resume from sleep" did not work anymore.
The Linux Experiment (YT channel) has introduced me to Tuxedo OS - based on Ubunto but without Canonical's lean toward Snap and away from FlatPak.
After a tremendous amount of ball ball busting, with 5 different distros, I finally found something that works for me. Fedora Kde Neon, with x11 instead of Wayland. There are some issues with Wayland especially with an NVIDIA Gpu. I will say, hybrid graphics switching actually works and games run extremely well, seemingly better than windows at times. Be warned, if you use Wayland, you will have serious issues with things like Steam and some web browsers. Use x11 instead and Make sure to use TimeShift when you get things working right. The only thing better about Wayland is it has HDR support but, I couldn't get any HDR games working with it
I use arch and alternate between plasma and a riced combo of xfce with awesomewm. Kde’s great for days I just want that polished out of box experience 😊
Gentoo, definitely. It's more stable than Debian and it's customizable
KDE Neon doesn't even boot for me, so it's just Kubuntu (latest releases) with PPA for me. I used to run Arch, but I got a little tired maintaining it. Honestly, there's no perfect distro: Ubuntu's upgrade process is a hassle if you use ppas, Fedora's Plasma edition has always been weirdly buggy, in my experience, and all the other distros are just too small to even bother using because of the smaller repositories.
Instead of Manjaro, recommend EndeavourOS instead. It's basically Manjaro but done right and has excellent developers.
if you like and know terminal, I don't
At the moment, I've been on KDE Neon for a month or so. But I do think I'll switch back to Kubuntu 22.04 LTS, as I find the continual updates to KDE a bit bothersome. OK, so I won't have the most recent version of KDE, but I prefer stability over being most up to date.
Can't you just pause/stop the updates for a while?
Tuxedo OS
Plasma 5.27 + Ubuntu LTS
Perfect 👌🏻
Right now I am using Nobara Linux, KDE edition. I switched over from Arch. I used Arch for years but I no longer have the patience for the necessary upkeep it requires. I decided to switch over to a Fedora based system. I could have gone mainline, but I did want the gaming niceties that Nobara provides, and it is still a point release.
Totally somewhat off topic, where can I get the Jinx wallpaper that shows up at around 5:55?
I don't think many distros do KDE well, probably the best I have used is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Installing KDE on Linux Mint 💚
Being not too advanced, but a long-term user, I recommend trying kde neon or manjaro. Now I use manjaro since 2020 and it still getting better.
What about KaOS?
I can't believe you didn't include KaOS Linux. It's focused more on KDE and Qt than any other distro aside from maybe Neon.
Rank 1: Spiral Linux KDE
Rank 2: Feren OS
Rank 3: Kubuntu LTS
I stay away from Ubuntu distros basically just because of Snaps now. If they made it easier to choose Snap vs package vs Flatpak, then I wouldn't mind.
Currently using KDE on top of Pop. It would be really nice if System 76 had a Plasma spin, even if it's a community edition! 🙂
@@new-lviv I'm waiting to see what their new Cosmic DE is like, for my laptop really did not like GNOME. I will give Cosmic a good go once it's reached a stable version! 🙂
The only experience I have with a distro having KDE plasma out of the box is Kubuntu (Because I always choose GNOME) so this is interesting
You have forgotten TUXEDO OS, it comes from a german company, which is building laptops like System 76 with POP OS.
Benn running the same Arch install since 2021 with KDE and I've never been happier. I also like Slackware though you have to really tune it unless you want EVERY KDE application ever made. I had a minimalist list of packages for it but I lost it.
For me it is the BigLinux, a Brazilian Manjaro based with a lot of polish
Using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed KDE for a week... so far it has been pretty good. Not saying there are no issues, but nothing too serious. Beware if you have Nvidia card, stick with 470 driver. [edit] I should have noted that for 90% of my time in linux over the decade, LinuxMint has been my preferred choice, and this is really the first KDE distro I've actually liked.
I'm liking EndeavorOS.
Allows you install a vanilla arch with KDE, easy-peasy.
Gentoo + plasma + kvantum = ❤️❤️❤️
Rolling distros are useful if you have very new hardware