They do that by having payed devs, they have an influx of money from the corporate side.
Also, Gnome does not have a distro like KDE does with KDE Neon to my knowledge, so this is an unfair comparison.
Because everything written online is a fact?
I have read just in the recent days, devs here on the forum saying what is on the webpage might not be entirely accurate as to what KDE Neon is.
The measurement of performance and stability of Plasma desktop shouldn’t be technically tied to one distribution, KDE Plasma is way bigger than any distribution, and the desktop is actually having wide base of users across different distributions.
What Plasma desktop actually need is help with testing the desktop on a wide range of distributions and on different hardware. And the community needs to avoid having Neon as the default scale to measure the stability before official releases.
This can be done if KDE enters in real-time partnerships with other Linux communities that officially support testing new Plasma desktop like Neon, Arch, Fedora, openSUSE… so when it receives “ok” from those major distros, then KDE can safely launch its official Plasma release.
Yes, that is indeed very much where the problem lies.
KDE Neon was initially intended to be a solid base system with the latest KDE stuff to be used by people developing (for) KDE. If you skip the nightly/testing builds and take the stable KDE versions that results in a system that can be daily driven. Just like Ubuntu LTS or Debian stable can be daily driven, by a certain kind of user.
But ‘can be daily driven’ means different things for different people. If you want/need not just the latest KDE but also everything else to be the latest thing Neon (as it is right now) is the wrong distribution for you. That’s not a big deal, plenty other very good distributions exist and one of those will probably fit your needs.
True, because there is a feeling that the primary goal of Neon is and should remain to be to support KDE developers, not end users. This very discussion kinda proves their point, end users often want different things from what developers want. It might be a bad idea to try to support both with a single distribution.
I dont see how any of this means you know for sure what Neon is/was/is going to be for the folks who make it. The only thing youve managed to do here is reiterate the same things you have said and my point still stands.
The length of time you have used KDE has absolutely zero relevance to any part of the discussion and is only a means of putting yourself on an authoritative pedestal. you could use KDE for 100yrs and it really wouldnt make you the defacto person to state the intent behind anything in the project.
The fact still remains that the only people who can say the intent of Neon now/then/or in the future are the people who make Neon. Regardless of if they continue to use an Ubuntu LTS base or not.
I mean that is what was already happening. Unless I misunderstand you. From my POV especially the Neon and Arch (+derivatives) did a lot of testing and bug reporting.
So when it was close to release and no showstoppers where found, it was decided that releasing was ok.
Unfortunately some packaging issues happened for Neon user edition. Since I have no Idea about packaging I don’t know how this could’ve been prevented. But I am fairly certain more testing form other major distros wouldn’t have helped.
Im not sure if maybe a week or 2 so of calling for some brave users to test out the update process may have helped? Im not sure what the situation ended up being in this case so i cant really make a good call.
Essentially what GNOME & KDE maintainers on Arch do is either wait a few weeks or till an X.X.1 release before moving to stable.
It’s not “released” on Arch yet. It is still on testing branch.
KDE Neon was, to my knowledge, the first distro to ship it out with its “stable” release.
Mistakes were made during that process and ended up causing a ton of problems for “normal” KDE Neon users.
This was tested for month’s and AFAIK this issues did not happen in the testing or unstable versions. Something broke during the transition of testing to stable.
I lack the knowledge on how someone would test breakage between testing-> stable repos. Maybe there is a way but I don’t know how this could be done.
Correct, but KDE/Plasma will never be released on all distros at the same time.
Agree. My point was just that more testing from other distros wouldn’t have helped in this case.
Last time I used Ubuntu was some years ago, but Ive always remembered big updates being rather rough at times. I know Neon Unstable saw testing but how much in regards to the actual update process? I.E Stable → Unstable
though tbh this is a question separate from this thread i think though so probably should leave it at that. Id hope to get some sort of postmortem on the Neon update that clarifys what happened.
Yeah this was pretty Neon specific as I havent heard too much complaint from people using testing repos on Arch for example besides the usual bugs here and there but not catastrophic. Testing other distros wont help Neon with its updates.
To circle back to the original question: “Plan “b” for when ubuntu is no longer a viable/desirable/etc base for kde neon?”
Does it need to change base?
If we assume the answer is yes then a few questions needs to be answered:
Depending on the answers to above, further questions might arise like:
Why should KDE development be held back for the sake of being compatible with LTS distros that will not get those new releases anyway until the whole distro is upgraded, at which point those old dependencies won’t be an issue anymore?
I personally would prefer if KDE devs could make KDE software the best it can be and let the distros worry about supporting that with up2date dependencies. If you want to run the newest plasma with 3 year old dependencies, that should be your problem.
It think those two questions should be answered publicly regardless, because there exist more or less contrary statements…
That’s not really how distros work, they generally pick a base for core components and work from there. If you are relying on really new stuff a lot of distributions simply won’t support your latest version. Debian 12 actually includes KDE 5.27, but would not have done so if that would have required other core parts to be upgraded.
I also think you shouldn’t overestimate the usefulness of requiring the latest stuff for KDE. You might as a user might get better hardware support or performance from new versions, but you’ll generally get those regardless of what KDE has as minimum requirement.
Isn’t that already mentioned in Neon’s website?
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.
In their sum the statements are confusing, just some examples (I already mentioned the first one above):
“Is it a distro? Not quite, it’s a package archive with the latest KDE software on top of a stable base. While we have installable images, unlike full Linux distributions we’re only interested in KDE software.” (from the KDE neon FAQ)
And from the download page:
“Ideal for everyday users.”
It seems to me that it is consistent with what I quoted :\
For exaple if there is “only interest in KDE Software” when releasing this “not quite a distribution” then IMHO it is simply not “ideal for everyday users”… 
Hello GIMP, hello LibreOffice, hello WINE, hello…
All things among many others that should be tested permanently - and I honestly have no idea if KDE has the resources to provide a reliable flagship distro for an “everyday user”.
I stand by my statement in post #72. 
PS: And there are also those little things that makes a distribution “ideal for everyday users” like amongst others automatically running xdg-user-dirs-update and adding directories to a user’s Dolphin panel after creating a new user…
Well all the other stuff is just ubuntu, so it is tested - by ubuntu. If KDE isn’t changing any of it, do they need to retest it?
I don’t know, this certainly is a good question.
But AFAIK there have been problems with e.g. WINE and non-KDE Qt applications from time to time in the past.
PS: And perhaps I also should just shut up - I am not using KDE neon as a daily driver or in any installations for other people…
On the other hand I am a bit concerned about the reputation of KDE at the moment…
I’ll grant you that this statement is a bit problematic. Not because it isn’t true, but because there is no such thing as the “everyday user”. But this specific every day user likes Neon because of what it is right now.