EnglishMobster

Neon FTW. Been my daily driver for a while now with zero problems.

I daily drive KDE Neon.

Sometimes install scripts don’t work as expected, since things check if you’re on Ubuntu or Mint or whatever specifically and “Neon” doesn’t match their regex. It’s usually not a big deal and fairly trivial to solve.

Regardless, I’ve actually started to get away from the command line and have embraced the app store. Discover is actually pretty darn good and has lots of the things I want to install. I can choose if I want to install from Discover via Apt, Flatpak, or Snap.

I usually install Flatpak stuff. The Steam Deck has taught me that Flatpak is generally as good or better than actually installing via apt - you don’t need to wait on your distro to update sources, and you aren’t adding random PPAs. Sometimes you need to fudge the permissions with Flatseal, but it’s a one-and-done thing.

I use Microsoft Edge as my browser (yes, really - the Chromium version is just as good as Chrome, it has nifty vertical tabs, I get news on my “new tab” page, and all my settings are saved there). I use Thunderbird for mail, plus Steam, Zoom, Discord, etc. Surprisingly few KDE apps are preinstalled, to be honest - the only KDE apps installed are the ones I want anyway.

I’m in the same boat. It was getting to the point where my whole computer would randomly lock up whenever I tried to share my screen on Zoom or when I opened the Windows settings menu. Opening the Start menu could take a solid 30 seconds sometimes.

Then I got an OS notification that was actually an Xbox Game Pass ad and decided I had enough. I installed Linux, and after a few days of distro-hopping I settled on KDE Neon. I WFH from it every day, using Zoom for meetings and Parsec to connect to a Windows computer in the office for work. No issues, except that Proton isn’t quite as performant as native Windows.

Yeah, I can’t find the source I originally read it from (I think it was on the KDE subreddit from a KDE dev there), but they gave a talk about it recently. I’ve only skimmed the talk but they do speak pretty heavily about KDE collaborating with Valve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0

Steam Deck honestly convinced me to move my desktop over to Linux.

I’m still dual-booting, but I only go into Windows if something struggles too much over Proton (looking at you Satisfactory). I’ve been daily driving KDE Neon for about 2 months without issues.

Plasma is a great desktop environment, too. Usually the desktop environments were what chased me away - GNOME was slow sometimes and always felt… off, Cinnamon doesn’t like multiple desktops despite claiming to, with the maintainers refusing to even acknowledge the problems, XFE is… XFE, and historically Plasma was always super crashy and bloated.

Valve’s been funding the KDE guys to make Plasma better and it really shows. Plasma feels like a modern desktop that can compete with Windows directly - and honestly beats Windows with how bad Windows 11 has become. (Last time I was in Windows it took the Windows 11 Start Menu a full 20 seconds to open - but don’t worry, it had time to serve me an ad for Xbox Game Pass.)

I dislike Cinnamon because it doesn’t “just work” if you have multiple monitors like I do.

Apps don’t sync properly on the taskbar across both of them. The only way to get them to sync properly is to disable the grouped taskbar. People have mentioned this to the Cinnamon devs for years now, and they don’t appear to use multiple monitors so they don’t care.

KDE Plasma works great with multiple monitors and has been 100% an upgrade over Cinnamon. Plus there’s more third-party support for Plasma than there is Cinnamon.