Somehow I had missed the news about Riddell leaving the project. I read Riddell’s blog post, and Nate Graham’s, and, well… they were a little disquieting. It makes me wonder, in light of the effort with the new KDE immutable OS, if Neon/Kubuntu are soon to fall to the wayside now that the main passion behind them is gone.
I am still trying to mentally process this news and what it means. I don’t like what I read. I do not know what the truth is, though like most things in life, it likely lays somewhere in the middle.
What has to happen is a greater level of transparency and external communication that involves all members of the community, including users and contributors, not just executives. It sounds to me like a lot of things are going on behind closed doors that should be done in the open. From a philosophical point of view, I tend to fall on the side of Riddell in that open source should be 100% democratic, not autocratic.
Neon and Kubuntu are two very distinctive initiatives.
Both will of course be affected by one of their contributors leaving however both will have been more than a one person thing.
Neon has likely a smaller core group but could attract new people, e.g. persons who are currently “just users” but either have the skills or are interested in learning the skills to keep it going.
I would be surprised if either Blue Systems or Tech Paladin have a public community.
FOSS communities like KDE or Kubuntu usually don’t comment on contributors decisions to get involved or stop being involved.
That is up to the respective individual and many don’t feel a need to comment on either
Reading Riddell’s blog post it seems it was primarily him and one other guy. I had no idea. I am enormously impressed by that. What amazing commitment he had.
I wish I had the skills to contribute. If there is anything I can do to help Neon I am more than willing. Sweep the floor, empty the garbage… whatever.
Oh, that. Given what a huge shift it was (both a rebase and the 5 to 6 change), it was remarkably low on hiccups. But, maybe because I have been through far worse transitions it did not overly concern me much. I expect that KDE Linux will have its fair share of similar problems, perhaps even more as this immutable Linux paradigm is only really getting off the ground now and unforeseen issues will likely occur.
I would like to go a step further, and add to this notion by asking should Neon have a future? I currently am using KDE via Debian, and there are many more users like me. In fact, the top 10 distros (according to Distrowatch) all have a version with KDE (except Mint and Pop). With that being said, is it really necessary that we waste effort and labor for yet another vanity distro? It would serve the community better were the contributors to Neon to focus their efforts elsewhere and clean up some of this redundancy of labor that plagues the Linux community like tumors.
Currently it does serve a purpose, providing latest KDE software on top of a stable base.
Essentially a way to get more testing of current releases of KDE software while not incurring the same for other components.
For example using Debian Unstable to have similar versions of KDE software would also incur a lot of “newness” of other things.
I was doing that for many years (2001 - 2018) and had to closely monitor various Debian mailing lists to know when to update and when to wait for a bit longer.
From what I understand so far, thanks to Ubuntu’s immutable version, the Ubuntu Core Desktop, it will also be possible to have a KDE Plasma session.
This Snap on Snapcraft indicates this:
Furthermore, KDE has several apps available in Snap versions.
I imagine it makes sense for KDE Neon to become an immutable-only distro, as it would make things simpler for developers, while Kubuntu would still be available for those who want an Ubuntu-based distro that uses KDE but isn’t immutable.
I really got into KDE with Plasma 6 and decided on Neon initially because it seemed like the best choice. It worked great at first but like a bike with a loose wheel, eventually things came apart. In part due to me having Nvidia cards (I know.. but it’s what I had coming in.) I was generally able to fix things but I got tired of the maintenance. It felt like Ubuntu was fighting against what Neon wanted to do. I would be hesitant to recommend Neon based on my experience, especially for someone new.
I use Nvidia (multiple) and have had no issues that were caused by them. The rebase went well, the upgrade to 6 went well. I found KDE 6.3 a bit flaky but that was solved over the next few releases. Many issues reported by Neon users were also reported across many distros, identical issues such as the black screen issue that was most prominent, even for gnome users. To me issues with more with kernels and libraries, not distros. Neon, in my experience has been virtually flawless.
I had mixed experiences: 2 of my PCs had no issues. 1 was a laptop with an nvidia gpu and the other 1 was a desktop workstation with dual nvidia. Only my “gaming” one had issues because of the deb packages of the famous wine:i386, but it was rather straightforward to fix and I believe I have posted the solution that worked for me in some post here.
In any case advanced users should realize that an LTS base may cause trouble if the bleeding edge KDE requires some other non KDE library to be updated (like Qt) for example.
Only my “gaming” one had issues because of the deb packages of the famous wine:i386, but it was rather straightforward to fix and I believe I have posted the solution that worked for me in some post here.
I has this issue too (libpoppler), but only with Plasma 5. Once the rebase and upgrade to Plasma 6 was done, that issue went away. The main problem with the LTS, if you can call it that, was in the last 6 months before the rebase, compiling programs was becoming an issue due to the age of the libs from 22.04 (GlibC mostly).
I have had far fewer issues with Wine since the rebase.
I know this issue with Neon’s future is a rather common topic, but Riddell leaving is a much more serious consideration than in the past. It rattled me a bit. I absolutely love Neon’s paradigm, and the idea of having to go back the the hassle of Kubuntu gawd awful release paradigm (either stale out of the box, or too new that apps don’t work) leaves me cold, and the idea of going to Fedora, Suse, or some Arch based nonsense leaves me even colder. So cold I would probably go back to Windows.
Neon is the only Linux distro that is not a maintenance nightmare for me. It has been 95% set and forget. I don’t know, maybe I am getting old and set in my ways, but constantly fiddling with my OS is no longer fun for me. Distro hopping in a futile search for Linux nirvana is no longer my thing. I just want to it work and be reasonably current. In 30 years of using Linux, Neon is the first to meet that consideration, and the only one that actually works (for me).
You are not alone here, I am also past the point of fiddling around making it my own. What I would rather want and KDE Neon (and KDE Linux to an extent) is a low-maintenance system where the core apps are updated when there is a stable release. The extra apps that I need should also do the same, but I found that most nowadays come from Flatpak rather than the Discover and KDE Neon’s repos.
