This has generally been my experience with OpenSuse and why i tend to not like it. The problem with other suggestions comes with stale packages in the case of ubuntu/debian, Fedora being against non-foss, and people just being terrified of Arch like its the boogeyman.
Arch is certainly a whole lot of things, “complex” it is not. They literally “keep it simple, s[illy]”
Agreed
Is that a big problem though? Certainly doesn’t seem to be a problem for the f***ton of fedora users that are out there.
I love how the problem with Arch has nothing to do with the actual project. That happens a lot with Arch, where basically everyone else but Arch is at fault, and yet still Arch’s reputation takes the hit. With every other project I’d probably say that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but as an Arch user for now almost 8 years, I can’t really think of any time where my system broke and it wasn’t 100% the fault of my dumb ass.
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The issue I have with Arch saying that when the system breaks, it’s their fault is that they’re assuming everyone will know how to fix the problem just like they can, or that just because they initiated the issue that makes them the source of the problem instead of stuff simply being poorly designed.
Y’all are arguing about Neon’s userbase as if we’re all either developers or enthusiasts who install fish and picom and whatever Tiling WM is currently trendy on r/unixporn, that’s my issue. Not all of us want to deal with installing arch packages, or our systems breaking because a package is too new and bugged. It’s a lot harder to roll back versions than upgrade them, so the current Semi-rolling system is perfectly fine as far as I’m concerned.
I keep hearing about how Neon directly says “not a distro” this or “testing” that, but the official plasma website links to KDE Neon with the following paragraphs.
From the Get Plasma for page:
"KDE neon takes the latest Plasma desktop and KDE apps and builds them fresh each day for your pleasure, using the stable Ubuntu LTS base.
KDE neon User Edition is built from the latest released software automatically added and released as soon as it is tested.
We also have Testing and Unstable editions built directly from unreleased Git for helping develop our software.
It is installable as your Linux distro or from Docker images.
KDE neon is a KDE project."
From the Neon website:
"Solid Core, Latest Features
More than ever people expect a stable desktop with cutting-edge features, all in a package which is easy to use and ready to make their own.
KDE neon is the intersection of these needs using a stable Ubuntu long-term release as its core, packaging the hottest software fresh from the KDE Community ovens. Compute knowing you have a solid foundation and enjoy the features you experience in the world’s most customisable desktop.
You should use KDE neon if you want the latest and greatest from the KDE community but the safety and stability of a Long Term Support release. When you don’t want to worry about strange core mechanics and just get things done with the latest features. When you want your computer as your tool, something that belongs to you, that you can trust and that delivers day after day, week after week, year after year. Here it is: now get stuff done."
That’s the official marketing. The first things you see. Like it or not, there’s users who believed that advertising, including myself, and by switching to another base you are either depriving them of stabilty or easy access to non-Foss software. I trust KDE Neon to be semi-rolling because the only rolling parts are from KDE itself, the rest is tried and tested. If push comes to shove there can be bugfixes for those packages. There’s Flatpak, Snap, PPA’s, .Debs, and Appimages if you need anything newer than that, there’s simply not a great reason for the End Userbase to use any base with quicker release schedules when the Technical users can just change things directly on their individual systems or use Arch or Fedora Kinoite directly anyways. You already have multiple Arch distros (or just vanilla Arch) with Plasma, Fedora has two seperate KDE ones, so there’s no need to make Neon redundant.
As far as for the developers use cases, you make a product that has been marketed towards users and already have a seperate testing edition anyways. The status quo is fine. The whole topic here is based on the assumption that Ubuntu might become a bad base, but to me that is not the case yet, and all you edge cases should just go to your dream distros that already exist.
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it is for folks who expect to have decoding/encoding work as theyre use to or to get thumbnails on their videos, certain image formats,etc. Along with a fairly agressive stance on “progress for progress sake” which for Fedora works and i appreciate the work that community does but for the average user i think its not the best approach.
My biggest complaint with Fedora is that to get my system working as i would normally use it im required to use a repo that isnt the official repos. Even though RPMfusion is well known I avoid using repos that arent the official ones. I generally always end up back using Arch as my daily even when using other distros occasionally just to test due to the fact that it generally just stays out of my way.
I think having to enable rpmfusion isn’t that big of a deal. It’s also kind of semi-official in that standard fedora will ask you in the gui if you want to enable it - as opposed to, for example, the aur, which the arch wiki and the aur homeoage will warn you about using. Aside from that, a kde project based on fedora would not necessarily have to exclude the rpmfusion packages by default.
it only gets enabled for steam and nvidia drivers, nothing else is on default (at least as of right now)
It has caused more than a few headaches for updates/upgrades for many. While its not as unofficial as the AUR its still not the Fedora repos and does cause some problems that arent present on I.E Arch or Ubuntu on the official repos.
THAT is a big problem.
I was a loud voice on the Manjaro forums, giving them sh*t for saying “Manjaro is for complete beginners” on their website and then on their forum acting like you HAD to understand arch while using Manjaro.
It is now removed.
I hope I don’t have to go on a crusade for getting false info removed on KDE too. xD
Joking aside.
It IS a serous problem if you have a userbase that are ill informed.
The responsibility to know what you are using and how to use it is on the user, but if the user gets fed “false” or vague info, it is on the provider.
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I think the most valuable thing Neon provides to users is the combo stable base + latest desktop. I think this is a successful model also adopted by other distros like Linux Mint and Elementary and it is what attracts users to Neon.
If we rebase Neon on Arch or Fedora, which value does Neon bring to the table?
Arch, Fedoras and many others already provide the latest Plasma so I think there is not much value to bring to Neon.
Debian, on the other hand, could provide a stable base for Neon, with a release cadence similar to Ubuntu, maintaining the value “stable base + latest desktop” provided by Neon.
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The problem with using debian is that both kernel and packages become sooo freaking ancient with their extremely long time between releases.
I actually do not know this, so some insight would be appreciated.
How much does KDE rely on kernel stuff?
Ie does it matter much if it’s 5.15 or 6.7?
Next question:
How much does KDE rely on OTHER packages?
If they rely on other packages outside of KDE those ALSO has to be up to date, or overridden manually by the maintainer to be pulled from another repo.
The reason we are at this point, I think, is that Neon was originally thought to be used by devs, not really as a daily driven system.
But now that users ARE using it, to a decent extent it seems, change is probably needed.
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I think it would be best if KDE wasn’t held back by ancient dependencies.
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Since when is one of the oldest and largest distros a bad idea? The amount of support you would have available to use would be a tremendous help. openQA is an awesome tool. It won’t find every issue, but the suite of tests are useful.
openSUSE developed the BTRFS sub-volume structure and their Snapper snapshot tool is better than Timeshift.
Debian SID and Debian Testing are not recommended by Debian and users are told there will be “no support.” This would be highly frowned upon. Just go over to the Debian forums and ask what they think of this idea.
Well, at least they aren’t owned by IBM. I don’t like the idea of a corporate owned distro, but they do have a large team and they do donate a lot of time and effort into all of Linux,
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You mean like Nvidia, that is one of the biggest contributer of code to the linux kernel? 
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The obvious one is Qt. It’s why KDE Neon packages Qt together with the rest.
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I think that’s a good thing for Neon. Firstly, if you develop KDE against a system with all the latest and greatest stuff you’ll likely develop software that can only run on the latest and greatest stuff. KDE should not rely on features only available in a last weeks kernel, it should be conservative in the requirements it has for the base system. And secondly, bleeding edge features tend to bleed and get in the way of getting stuff done. To me that’s why the whole stable base, rolling KDE concept makes complete sense.
As an end user daily driving Neon you may have other preferences, and that’s fair enough. That’s why there are so many different Linux distributions, there is no way KDE can ever develop a distro that pleases all those users and it shouldn’t try. The arguments here about rolling or not, BTRFS, Timeshift, Snapper, Flatpack vs Snap, etc are discussions that in my opinion that really do not belong in the KDE project. There is no point in trying to change Neon into something it never was, there might be a market for all of the things mentioned here, but that would be something different and not Neon.
Personally, I use Neon because I need a stable base. I’m well aware that there is some risk involved in using the latest KDE and I’m knowingly taking those risks. But if you take away the stable base and extend those risks to my entire system I’ll just install Debian instead.
(And I also know the upgrade to Plasma 6 went badly, but that can only be fixed by doing a better job next time. A different base would not have prevented any of those mistakes.)
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You realize though that there are people working on KDE running fedora/arch in example already right?
This has not forced KDE software to only target those, the idea moving Neon to a more up to date base is about the maintenance burden around neon not about the baseline requirements of KDE software. They do a pretty good job of trying to support all in use systems they reasonably can and implement features based on that not based on w.e arbitrary libraries the development system is running.
If anyone developed software that way then things would constantly stop functioning on anything but the newest software/hardware and simply isnt a smart way to do anything. I dont think anyone develops software that way, even Apple who generally wants to drop support for older hardware/software as soon as they can.
I would argue that this statement implies you know 100% what the folks behind Neon intend it to be and where they want it to go.
What you think Neon is may have absolutely nothing to do with the past,present, or future of Neon itself. If there is one thing that I have come to learn is that users in the Linux community will always think that a Distro, piece of software, etc. is “supposed to be” whatever theyve decided it is regardless of anything the developers or anyone else says about it. I.E people constantly claiming the “unix philosophy” in regards to gnu/linux even though that was never really part of gnu/Linux as a whole to begin with people just decided it was.
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That is very untrue.
And also, do you not WANT to develop for the future?
Not rely, but be able to utilize. With Debian, that could sometimes mean you have to wait up to 2 years.
Why?
And, what do you mean by that?
A newer kernel does NOT mean you can no longer use it on old hardware, or that it is slower by any means. (except for if you use a 32bit cpu from like +20 years ago, sorry guys)
That is the beauty of the linux kernel! 
Is that not what KDE is?
Gnome is “stable AF” and KDE is “bleeding edge”?
And here I think is where the whole problem lies.
IS KDE Neon meant for usage as a daily driven system?
According to the webpage, it seems so.
According to some things I have read here on the forum from devs, I am not entirely sure about that.
My suspicion is that discussions are going on “behind the scene”.
Eh… That IS what a distribution does. KDE Neon is a “distribution”, I am still a bit confused about the whole concept.
The title of the thread is about KDE Neon, not the entire project.
Again, most likely nothing wrong with KDE, users on other distros seems to report they LOVE IT, this is a KDE Neon thing.
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you do, but also you need to consider the user base and what is realistic to implement for the largest portion of those users. KDE folks already do this pretty well.
KDE i wouldnt say is any more bleeding edge than GNOME, they just have different development philosophy and GNOME tends to prioritize different things than KDE and they see certain things as either unimportant or not something they care to implement.
Also if youre under the impression GNOME is 100% rock solid i feel you may not have used it in recent years 
Ofc, I would even argue that is the MAIN thing.
What is KDE Neon?
Who is it for?
How much effort should be put into making it independent with only a base VS. simplicity for the maintainers?
TBH, I have no clue, I started using KDE when moving from windows and just love it so never really seen a reason.
But I DO read blogs, and I can see that the mentality of the devs of gnome sometimes seems a bit “old” so to say. Idk so maybe I should just stfu. xD
GNOME devs have a vision for their software much like KDE folks do, its just a different one not necessarily old. GNOME will add new things they care about just as readily as KDE will they just care about different things.
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So ask yourself how exactly do they do that job and what the role of Neon is in achieving that. What happens to that good job if you take away Neon as it is right now?
Correct. I think I do because they say so on https://neon.kde.org/ :
I’d say the reasonable thing to do is to assume that’s what they want it to be.
I’ve been using KDE since 2001, I think I have a fair idea of what it is. You may want to be a bit less quick to judge.