So, I am at present using KDE Neon; as does the entire household. I have no intention to switch to another distro as I am happy with it. I removed any of the Ubuntu ads in the terminal when I run apt. But I may want to change distros if Ubuntu starts being pushy with ads and other BS (kind of like MS is with Windows).
So, what is a decent alternative to KDE Neon that is not an Ubuntu based distro? I am looking for stability, but also reasonably up to date packaging.
IMO Fedora KDE is hard to beat here. It’s on every laptop in my house.
Yes. That’s one. But what about video decoding? I heard there was a patient against the Fedora team with that h264 decoding nonsense. So, they had to disable hardware decoding or something.
A good illustration of how FUD remains around forever, unfortunately. The TL;DR version is that everything is fine.
Fine? But how does that work? What happened?
I’ve seen no issues on Manjaro Unstable. But we will have a to wait a few weeks, till Plasma 6 makes it into Stable, probably the next Stable update…
Fedora 39 looks pretty good as well.
Whenever you are using that phrase (or the equivalent “I read that”) while being unable to recall where and when you heard that, you should keep in mind that it’s probably some anecdotal subjective point of view 
It was a video I watched. Hence, heard. I watched a video of Brodie Robertson’s about that matter. 
Anyway, maybe Fedora might be the only option as far as the future distro goes. I prefer not to go Arch based on my household computers for a few reasons. Rolling releases like Arch can break at times.
I’ve been using openSUSE for a few months and love its implementation of KDE. Currently on 6.02 and I haven’t had any issues. It’s a rolling release so I think that qualifies as “up to date.”
No major breakage, or anything? I think I am debating between Fedora and OpenSUSE at this point.
With openSUSE (e.g. both Leap and Tumbleweed) you have at least the choice between X11 and Wayland - the soon to be released Fedora 40 will be Wayland only…
Well, I’m already on Wayland with all of my computers. So, that’s not an issue to me. I am trying out Fedora in a VM. And to remove packages with dnf feels a lot faster than using apt to remove stuff (and it also removed any dependencies for those apps at the same time that I choose to remove, which is nice). So, I could make a script to do that and then install the Flatpak versions. I prefer to keep most of my apps as Flatpak to keep it more separate from the OS itself.
If that’s your goal, then you might like Fedora Kinoite even more, which has all apps as Flatpaks, and the base system is read-only with a bunch of safety tech to make it less likely to explode (a very technical explanation, to be sure: ).
As for your earlier question about the media codecs thing, there was a patent scare that lead to a lot of distros–not just Fedora–removing support for certain H.264 codecs to avoid risking accidental patent infringement. It was mainly the commercially backed distros that did this, as they actually have assets that someone could go after in court.
I can’t remember exactly all the details, but at least in Fedora, there was a deal stuck with Cisco to license the codecs legally, and they’re now provided to users at no charge. I guess someone is footing the bill for this, maybe Red Hat. I’m guessing the other distros that previously pulled the codecs did similar things.
If anyone wants to look back at how it all happened with Fedora, here is the post explaining the situation within Fedora’s Discourse, with links to further Bugzilla/other discussions of the situation. Other than the literal “lawyer” legal discussions, they were pretty up-front and open about what they were facing and figuring out how best to handle without risking the future of the project.
Now having said that, Fedora’s approach to Nvidia drivers is what keeps me away, personally, but if that’s not an issue then I would echo Nate’s endorsement (Fedora was wonderful for me for several months, until it wasn’t because of how it handled Nvidia kernel modules) as long as your configuration has no Wayland-related issues.
I guess it’s best that the Internet does away with H.264 and goes with all open codecs. This nonsense needs to stop with codecs I find.
Anyway, I’ll try out that Kinoite variant and see what I think. Of course, I will be doing more advanced stuff that requires me to edit configs (since I do GPU pass through). So, hopefully that works out when I feel it’s time to ditch anything Ubuntu based.
Yes, but that video is a year and a half old now, so about a decade in Linux dev time.
Or last week in FUD years. 
Not an issue for me. I did away with anything Nvida for a reason; to have better compatibility and a better out of box experience. Only Nvidia GPU I got left is an old 750 ti that’s used exclusively for GPU pass through for when I want to run Windoze with accelerated graphics. Other than that, all AMD or Intel.
But since I use AMD, is it still an issue? Because I see that for AMD graphics, that in the Mesa stack, the H.264 decoding was disabled according to that article. Just wondering it that’s still a thing.
Okay. But since I use AMD graphics, will this still be an issue with H.264 and H.265 codecs? Because I don’t want to do workarounds and compile from source to have hardware acceleration again; just because another rich, greedy pig filed a lawsuit. This is making me think of Nintendo right now.
For programs that use those codecs, you’d likely need to install the RPMFusion versions of the relevant libraries (ex. ffmpeg), and/or use Flatpak versions of the end programs (ex. VLC) since those can use a ffmpeg runtime that’s posted to Flathub with the patent-encumbered codecs still enabled.
Using the RPMFusion repositories can introduce a few challenges when package versions get out of sync between it and Fedora itself, as IMO dnf doesn’t handle or communicate those conflicts as cleanly as openSUSE’s zypper does, but it’s manageable.
Have you “heard that too”?
It is completely untrue.
Fixed point gets messed up when people install software not included in the distros repo because the packages are old, that is never a problem on a rolling release.
Roling release distros will become broken if not updated regularly, fixed point most likely will not.
As an example, wait with updating 3-5 months on Manjaro stable and it most likely WILL be broken next time you update. Update it once a week with the gui and you are fine and should NEVER have to reinstall again.
With a fixed point, you SHOULD reinstall each new release. It can work to just update, like updating from win10 to win11 works, but it will NEVER be as clean as a fresh install and the recommendation is to ALWAYS reinstall when changing to a new fixed release.
It’s a matter of choice.
Not sure, my distro I think solves it with the mesa package somehow, I don’t really bother with it since I have Nvidia. (maybe I should though, because I use my AMD cpu as renderer on my desktop).
But you will get limited refresh rate on AMD and hdmi because of licensing (hdmi forum). 
Nvidia wins in this instance, because they have the license built into the chipset unlike AMD.