New To Linux And Thinking About KDE Plasma

General
1

Top Of The Day To You All,

I am new to Linux and have been using Mint for a while, but I haven’t gotten the support I need for sound or monitors. So I’m thinking about switching to KDE Plasma, and I hope I will get better help on this forum.

I am running a dual-boot with Windows 11, but on different drives. Here are my system specs:
Processor AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 16-Core Processor (4.30 GHz)
Installed RAM 48.0 GB (47.1 GB usable)
Graphics card AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (24 GB)
AMD Radeon™ Graphics (486 MB)
Storage 1.18 TB of 14.55 TB used
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Monitor 1 is 34-inch 3440x1440

Monitor 2 is 54-inch 3840x2160 4K

Monitor 3 is 34-inch 3440x1440

What are your thoughts on using KDE Plasma and getting support from the forum?

Respctefully

2

The hardware support is under the KDE plasma level so the choice of linux distribution is important.

Personal I use Fedora KDE plasma, support for Fedora is good and support KDE here and over on the Fedora discuss is also good.

1 Like
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hi, welcome.

help is generally limited to what features plasma offers for managing your screens and the differences between X11 and wayland i that regard.

actual hardware support is more likely to come from you distro’s forum.

in general the more used the distro the better the support, but a distro the features plasma as their main desktop environment will generally have better support.

kubuntu LTS is good (that’s what i use and can recommend)

fedora KDE is also good, tho their hardware support may be less robust than the 'bunut based distros.

opensuse features plasma and offers two different release models

tuxedo is relatively new and the hardware support is perfect for the machines they sell, but they claim to test their distro on a wide variety of hardware.

i would avoid strait debian or any of the arch distros unless you are good at tinkering with the fiddly bits to get things working… there are a lot of users for those distro tho, so help may available (always worth searching the arch wiki even if you don’t use arch).

4

Welcome.
It’s difficult to give a satisfactory answer without any idea about what sort of support you need.
Firstly, you’ll properly need support regarding the distro, and not the desktop environment such as KDE Plasma or Cinnamon, if it is a hardware issue.
Secondly, at least it may also be partly related with the desktop environment, in which case I think KDE Plasma desktop environment is better than others - with no claim to being a neutral point of view. :wink:
Perhaps it’s better to test several distros and desk environments using their live iso’s, starting from the latest user edition of KDE neon.

5

Thanks, everyone, for your input. I am going to install KDE Plasma on Thursday, so I will let you know how it goes. I have nothing to lose and possibly a lot to gain. That’s how I look at things.

Respctfully

6

You always have the choice to just live-boot first and test things.

This won’t get the same performance as the installed versions and a few things are more limited, but anything that works then is likely to work once installed, no-installation needed, just a reboot.

7

you would be better off installing a distro that features KDE plasma, rather than just tacking it onto mint… if you want the best experience.

if you just want to try it on your machine then a live USB of a distro that features KDE Plasma is going to be more informative.

if you just want to play with it in your browser you can go to distrosea.com and pull up any of the distros that feature plasma.

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skyfishgoo, I plan to reformat the drive with Windows Disk Management, remove the dual-boot partition, and start fresh. Thanks for your concern.

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The installation was easy, and there were no problems with my monitors, just no sound. I installed Neon, FYI.