Which distro has the best and most complete KDE Plasma integration? Is there some kind of general consensus on this? What is your opinion? Can you give examples?
I know that KDE Linux was announced but that’s an atomic distro and I don’t really like that. It would be interesting otherwise even though I don’t feel that the world needs another Linux distro, but who knows? If anyone can nail it perhaps KDE can. It’s also still in alpha, so I don’t feel like messing with it right now.
But I digress, that is not the topic at hand.
In my experience Fedora has the most user friendly, functional and most complete KDE integration. While others such as Kubuntu, Debian, Manjaro and few more left a lot to be desired or just simply felt wrong as they had things like Discover and/or default KDE apps or parts of Plasma and system settings removed or crippled in some way or had unpleasant glitches in the GUI.
I never tried OpenSUSE but I’ve read recently that it has the most complete KDE integration and Plasma is the default DE for the distro. I also haven’t tested Debian 13 yet. I didn’t really like Debian 12 with KDE though.
So, I want to test something and I’ll probably start with OpenSUSE but I was wondering how actual long term KDE users feel about this. I understand, of course, that this can be very subjective but I’m curious to hear some opinions on this.
EDIT:
I forgot to add that the distro must have good and easy to use support for the latest proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
EDIT 2:
Never mind the NVIDIA drivers requirement. During the course of this discussion, and based on my previous experience, I realized, without a doubt, that getting rid of NVIDIA GPUs will be necessary if I ever want to switch to Linux. I bought a used AMD RX6600 and testing using that GPU and it made a huge difference in stability. So, good support for NVIDIA drivers is no longer required.
Oh yeah, I forgot about Neon, duh. Thanks. I’ll try that too.
EDIT:
Oh… this is a deal breaker:
“KDE neon supports the open-source Nouveau driver only, which should suffice for normal hardware-accelerated desktop use. The proprietary driver is not supported at all, and we recommend against trying to install it anyway.”
I forgot to add that the distro must have good and easy to use support for the latest proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
Its website says it is a “terminal centric system”. I don’t mind the terminal on servers but on a desktop I’d prefer a GUI centric OS. Also, I dipped my toes in Arch last year and I think it’s not for me. I can handle Fedora and derivatives but most of my Linux experience is on the Debian/Ubuntu side of things.
I may be wrong though and it was a while ago so I’ve added it to my list as this isn’t the first time I hear good things about EndeavourOS. Thank you!
For me Solus has been a very good distro. Good Plasma integration, stable rolling and very responsive. The only downside is that it lack of packages in his repos and idk about the nvidia drivers.
LOL, yeah you’re right I think it appealed to me because it has a GUI installer and at the time I wanted to use something Arch-based because that’s what Valve uses on the Steam Deck so I figured it would work. EndeavourOS does have a lot of console stuff. For instance, if you go to the KDE launcher and click the icon for eos-update (Endeavour’s updater), it pops open a Konsole window and runs the command-line updater.
Arch and its relative are definitely not for everyone. I think Discover or Flatpak can be installed, but I tend to avoid stuff like that and use the Arch packages instead.
My last thought about it is that since KDE (other other Linux deskops) update so often it’s nice to use a rolling release distro because I don’t have to wait long to try the new things. Generally I recommend Ubuntu’s KDE spin for people wanting to try KDE, but they don’t update the version very often (I think you’re stuck with whatever version was available when Ubuntu shipped, but I haven’t used it in awhile).
True, but it’s heavily modified and it’s targeted narrowly at portable gaming console use. Rumors of impending desktop release of Steam OS remain only rumors at this point. It would be likely a top contender if it actually happened, given it’s backed by Valve. Also, the fact that it works for a billion dollar company who hires professional devs, doesn’t me it’ll work for me I don’t mind tinkering but I want my desktop to be as trouble free as possible and I just don’t believe I can handle Arch, way below my skill level.
Also true, but I need to strike a balance between ease of use, stability and access to the newest packages and you can’t have all three in the Linux world. Fedora was as far as I was willing to go, I think it’s a semi rolling distro. All my stuff worked, I was able to install the most recent versions of all apps but stability wasn’t as good as Debian, but it was acceptable.
I haven’t heard of Solus, I’ve just read its Wikipedia page and it feels kind of exotic and yeah, availability of packages may be an issue.
Arch Linux and derivatives (like Cachy) offer the best experience I’ve found. Arch Linux is the most vanilla experience you can get IMO.
If you don’t want to deal with Arch, Fedora Plasma is a solid choice.
Both include the proper Nvidia drivers. Arch installs them at the start when you use archinstall (similar to Debian’s text installer) and Fedora offers enabling the repos during the post-install welcome screen, after which you just do dnf install akmod-nvidia
EDIT: I should also mention OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I heard a lot of good things about it and I’d probably liken it to Fedora as far as completeness.
I hear you; I’ve been off-and-on tinkering with Linux for 25 years so I’m prepared for the pain of Arch
It’s a shame that Mint doesn’t do a KDE edition because last time I used it they offered to install the Nvidia drivers just like Fedora does. I don’t personally use Fedora but a colleague does and he’s been successfully upgrading between releases for at least four years now. It seems like a good option.
Yeah, me too, long time Linux tinkerer, but it’s been all Debian and Ubuntu and fairly narrow set of tasks, limited mostly to Apache and related stuff (LAMP). I never even got around to figuring out Docker which would likely make my life easier as LAMP is a pain at times.
I never managed to remain interested in any Linux desktop for too long, so far. I’m trying to put more effort into it these days as I feel Windows will become unusable in few years and Mac is not an option. I did lots of testing last year and early this year, then took a break. I’m taking a look at OpenSUSE now but it does feel unfamiliar. Debian 13 is next.
Yeah, I liked Mint but their recent changes to Cinnamon discouraged me from that distro, though it’s pretty good otherwise. Plasma is by far the best DE imho and most KDE apps are pretty good too.
I was on Fedora 41 KDE for something like 4-5 months. Yeah, there were repeating issues with system updates breaking NVIDIA drivers, but it took few minutes to fix them once I got the hang of it, a minor inconvenience at worst. Otherwise Fedora KDE was good. I updated to 42 without any issues other than NVIDIA drivers.
Kubuntu is out, I don’t like Snaps and their implementation of KDE bothered me. I used Ubuntu on my servers for years, removing Snaps, but eventually switched full on to Debian last year. Removing Snaps on Kubuntu breaks some stuff and they come back anyway after updates which feels like Microsoft reinstalling unwanted crap.
I’m looking at OpenSUSE Tumbleweed now and Fedora is my top choice right now.
Perhaps I need to take another look at Arch but it scares me. I heard good things about CachyOS, like being really fast and responsive, something about their CPU scheduler, or something. I’ve seen videos on YT where people showed Windows games running faster on CachyOS than on native Windows. I have one old, CPU intensive strategy game, Planetary Annihilation Titans, that I still play a lot but it ran very poorly on Fedora, I tried all versions of ProtonGE.
But Canonical blocks many programs from being installed via APT somehow. Even Mozilla stuff. If you run apt install, it installs snaps. And I hate something like that. It’s something I’d expect from Apple or Microsoft. Maybe there is a way around that or maybe that changed recently but I don’t want to switch to Linux to fight another corpo over the control of my PC.
Though I’ve read that Snaps are superior to Flatpaks for some reasons I didn’t quite understand. Maybe it’s another thing I should have another good look at and perhaps reconsider my attitude towards this. Ubuntu is a good distro otherwise and there is tons of documentation, knowledge and help specifically for Ubuntu.
OpenSuse takes your freedom away from you by disabling Kate from saving root files. And also kio-admin has been messed with too. If you want crippled then go Suse.
Really? That sucks. This is the kind of stuff I wanted to get out of this discussion. Seems that “Linux freedom” is just another illusion. I’ve ran into things like this in various distros in the past
It’s probably KDE Linux, which enshrines this as an explicit goal.
However KDE Linux is in an alpha phrase of development, so don’t use it in production unless you’re up for an adventure!
Barring that, most distros are missing something when it comes to good integration. Fedora is very good, and it’s what I generally recommend to people. It’s not perfect:
my notes indicate that I had to manually install phonon-qt6-backend-vlc samba-usershares kdesdk-thumbnailers qt-heif-image-plugin to get various things working properly the last time I did a clean install
Discover doesn’t show package dependencies due to a limitation in the DNF PackageKit plugin
The firewall config UI they ship isn’t KDE’s, since it’s missing one feature they want, but the one they ship instead is kinda ugly and not as well integrated
wsdd needs to be manually enabled if you use Samba sharing
QDbusViewer is unnecessarily present on in the default install
kio-admin can’t write to /
they override Plasma’s nice wallpapers with cartoony ones that I think aren’t as good
But that’s pretty minor stuff, and most other distros have a longer list in my notes. I have no hesitation about recommending Fedora KDE for someone who wants a high quality reasonably well-integrated experience.
I don’t mind tinkering but I want my desktop to be as trouble free as possible and I just don’t believe I can handle Arch, way below my skill level.