Yeah, it’s a bad idea that devs decided to follow through on, and now everyone is complaining about it as if people didn’t volunteer and should have known what they were getting into .
The issue I have with this whole discussion is that if the devs overpromised they should have said something years ago, it’s way too late to be making these decisions or dropping these loaded posts without consideration that Ubuntu is a perfectly fine base from the end user perspective.
Y’all want me to torch my entire install with all of my data sometime from now because you want newer dependencies. Nevermind that magbe those newer dependencies will create more problems for stable editions of Neon, if you keep that.
That’s like saying Mint is only interested in Cinnamon or Elementary is only interested in Pantheon? The goal is an independent desktop on top of a stable base, and I think that what that says shouldn’t trump the directly mentioned to users front and center stuff
Apparently it seems that this might not be feasible. Maybe it was feasible in the past, but the recent plasma 6 update made it clear (at least to me, and judging by various discussions here) that it might not be that easy and straightforward to keep up with that statement/goal where stable means “non-changing”.
That is what YOU choose to do when selecting a point release distro, you SHOULD reinstall with every new big release.
That is the POINT of having a rolling release model, that you should no longer EVER have to reinstall.
Besides, you can keep your home and data when reinstalling, not really that big of a deal. This is not windows.
What do you base that on?
As far as I can see plasma 6 works very well on other distros, especially the rolling ones.
But I repeat it again, if Neon were to change to a rolling release model, what is different between that and Arch, Suse tmblweed, endeveros etc?
Why would Neon even exist if they are almost the same?
As a matter of fact, I seem to be getting it RIGHT NOW on my rolling release distro: (I am actually a bit exited, thank you KDE)
Judging from the issues I’ve seen I have no reason to assume some rolling base would have prevented any of those. My own update broke, everything I did to get it working was packaging related. After that it was fine.
More upgrade testing and maybe releasing Neon a few days after a big release could be useful. But adding more stuff that changes onto the mix sounds like it’ll make things worse.
I have upgraded machines plenty of time successfully. You should not need a rolling release to prevent reinstalls.
Yeah, we all se you don’t understand how things work.
I’m so tired of this.
Or maybe, just MAYBE you could at least try to find out what happened.
It WAS on testing for a long time and worked just fine, but a MISSTAKE WHEN MOVING TO STABLE MADE THINGS NOT WORK PROPERLY!
That is your choice, be warned, there will be dragons.
A lot of distributions do let users upgrade between releases, but I have never seen a fixed point release not giving a warning about using such upgrades.
But then again, neon is not a distribution so nothing works like a “normal distro”, be it fixed point or rolling.
It’s what I’ve been doing for years. Never lost data. And if an upgrade broke (which is rare) I’ve always been able to fix it without reinstalling. (I’ve even completely replaced a PC without reinstalling.)
Yes, stick the disk of the old system in the new one, boot from a live cd, copy the entire disk to the new disk, install grub, reboot, continue where you left off.
From the download page:
“User Edition - Featuring the latest officially released KDE software on a stable base. Ideal for adventurous KDE enthusiasts.”
From the FAQ:
" […], using the latest [KDE] software the moment it’s released will inevitably result in a less stable experience compared to distros that delay software by days, weeks, or months.
As such, the ideal KDE neon user is someone excited to use the latest and greatest KDE software who can tolerate some bumps in the road from time to time, not someone with mission-critical reliability needs."
I think it is better now, I don’t know if it couldn’t be clarified a bit further…
Perhaps you could also discuss with your fellow KDE team members what you wrote in another thread - that (outside of KDE software) the user only should install programs as Flatpaks and Snaps - and consider communicating this on the website, too.
Today’s neon-user ISO works fine (20240307). Plasma 6 is in the box.
After the kernel update (16 packages), etc/default/grub was gone and quiet splash went crazy. Editing the bootline with quiet splash before ro, removes the very long boot splash. No such thing elsewhere, and this is a very old Neon issue.
For switching to Fed or Arch, well Arch has no ISO with a UI, Fed has one (calamares) with a daily ISO (Rawhide with linux-next). Arch is better if they let you create an ISO with Calamares (Arch_Neon). Otherwise, Neon in its actual shape is not a catastrophe. Those who have a healthy machine make it with no bug, but this is old stuff (Firmware/Grub/Kernel/Mesa/AMD ucode/ so on…).
Consider, instead, removing old machines like MS did in 11.
For the rest, we Timeshifted many times to plasma 5 under Arch with no cosmic issue after re-upgrading (rc1+rc2 + the beta ones). Same but less often with Fed_40 (linux-next).
Thanks for all the amazing work that you’ve done since the early days of plasma 6. A+
I would say probably because GNOME is their flagship? As it is in RHEL.
And probably because Fedora is kind of a “testing ground” for Red Hat’s future Enterprise Linux directions/decisions?
Yes it is true that Fedora only makes sense for RHEL as a testing ground for new technologies.
But RHEL is insanely stable. So testing stuff, having 13 months support per release, it is not rolling and unstable.
Especially as RHEL does not ship Plasma at all (but it is available through EPEL, community repos) this means that Fedoras KDE packaging is very independent.
There are also tons of people that are unhappy with KDE being a random side option, and it is discussed to make KDE the second workstation option.
I think having upstream KDE work together with Fedora would make tons of sense here.
As a Fedora user and someone who works with lots of H.264/H.265 media, yeah, this is annoying and prohibitive to my work as a video editor. It’s not a free software issue. It’s a patent issue. It affects every Linux distribution; even those in the EU because they have software patents too. Fedora would love to include support for encoding/decoding these formats, but legally, they are prohibited.
Here’s the easy solution: download your media players through Flathub. They just ignore patent law. You could also use Firefox through Flathub, if you want, which has decoding support for patent-encumbered formats too. In Fedora 40, Flathub is enabled out of the box. Just install those Flatpaks through Discover and it will work.
And what I forgot to write (and too often forget in general):
KDE Patrons
I can see Canonical (Kubuntu) SUSE (openSUSE)
and even smaller (hardware) players like TUXEDO Computers (TUXEDO OS 3) Kubuntu Focus (Kubuntu Focus 22.04 LTS) SLIMBOOK.
RedHat is just using GNOME and their packages differ from Fedoras.
There are RedHat members in the Fedora Council but not in FESCO (Fedora Engineering Steering Council).
It is complicated but Fedora is not RedHat. They do test new packages on Fedora and host a lot of the hardware, sponsor the project.
This project has many people and there are many working on KDE Plasma, they even proposed to have it as the Workstation edition, or at least a second Workstation edition.
So RedHat is indirectly sponsoring KDE through Fedora, they have no interest in Plasma as they dont use it, but Fedora ≠ RedHat
Speaking of which, I’m currently testing it out on another machine on my work PC, and it seems to work well. I’m currently considering switching from Kubuntu to Tuxedo OS once 24.04 comes out.
.
Can’t do these things too fast or else you’ll upset the apple cart!