Looking for a normie KDE distro that works out of the box and is stable without issues.
Kubuntu, KDE neon, Debian with KDE.
Fedora Kinoite, specifically the version from universal-blue.org.
It comes with all codecs (and even baked in Nvidia-driver if you want!).
Why that and not the normal (mutable) Fedora Workstation KDE spin?
- Very simple by default. You basically only “own” your home directory, the rest is indestructible and taken care of.
- Has less bugs due to better reproducibility, and if something major should break, you can easily roll back without any waiting time (as opposed to Tumbleweed)
- And you can even rebase to Bazzite, a gaming distro, that’s based on the uBlue KDE version, or any other spin it you want cleanly
This. Or, nowadays secureblue Kinoite!
Its a hardened Variant of ublue kinoitr, but I tested it and especially using the “userns” variants, a lot works
- flatpak
- virtual machines
- fingerprint sensor
“userns” means user namespaces, a technology used by browsers, flatpak and Podman/Docker/Toolbox/Distrobox to create Sandboxes, isolating processes. It is used by default on Fedora, so these variants are pretty much like regular Fedora.
Dont think a secure Distro is user-unfriendly. It works pretty normal, but is simply way more secure.
If you want to use Firefox or Torbrowser, install their binaries.
https://github.com/trytomakeyouprivate/Recommended-Flatpak-Apps
Fedora Kinoite is the first time that I felt at home (besides Arch). It feels so stable and I never have to mess with it. KDE is also at the point now where it feels genuinely better than Windows or Mac
I’ve been using this for a few months now. It’s really good. A normie might want to look in to Slowroll though for extra stability. Is Slowroll even out yet?
It’s available, but still experimental I think.
Fedora kinoite
I don’t think immutable is normie.
How more normie could it be? You install all graphical apps via flatpak and since flathub uses reverse domain names it’s much easier to install via the store than on terminal
And want to switch to another DE? don’t reinstall your whole system, just replace the base layer.
Well immutable os have some limitation mainly from flatpak.
Debian 12 stable with KDE is smooth sailing
I highly recommend Kubuntu. I don’t use any snaps though. And I always install the LTS version. Been using it for over a dozen years.
I don’t use any snaps though.
Oh sweet summer child…
Same. I just keep my head down when the distro wars start, but it’s so easy to fix, never wiped it for like at least 10 years.
KDE Neon
Fedora KDE spin.
Fedora kde
You’re going to get a million answers, mostly people saying to use which distro they’re currently using. In my experience, KDE works just fine on any distro that allows you to install it out of the box, so I would choose based on other attributes of the distro, such as:
- Package manager: which are you used to?
- Update cycle: KDE 6 is out soon, so you want something which updates often enough to get it fairly quickly (at least semiannual).
- Stability: unless you want to have to manually maintain your system and learn how it works, avoid arch and arch-based distros. I have run it, its fine, but it’s not “normie”, and unless you really know what you’re doing, daily driving it can be stressful. Manjaro has the same issues, but takes away some ability of the user to fix them.
For instance, I personally like Debian and apt, but I would not recommend base Debian right now, since KDE 6 is about to come out and Debian will take a loooong time to get it. I have not personally used Kubuntu, but if it gets rid of any the bloat canonical has been adding to Ubuntu lately, it sounds pretty good to me.
Yeah, Kubuntu’s fine. It has some of the Snap stuff, but the “minimal install” greatly strips down unnecessary bullshit to the point where I even find vanilla Debian Plasma to be more bloated in comparison.
I used Kubuntu for most of my time on Linux before switching to Debian. Still fully recommend it as a basically “plug and play” distro with a quick installer that works OOTB.
There’s also a KDE-specific backports PPA which gets you new Plasma and Qt stuff fairly quickly, but that works best on regular releases rather than LTS releases. (The only issue is that, because it uses Launchpad, the Plasma updates can be super fucking slow to download, regardless of your network speed).
Then again, if someone’s going to be using LTS versions only, there’s not really that much of a difference between it and Debian Stable in terms of DE updates.
Manjaro.
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I never had an issue and I’ve been using Manjaro exclusively for 3+ years.
I think Arch has had issues that Manjaro was able to avoid in the meantime because Manjaro doesn’t push updates as quickly as Arch.
I think fedora kde is the one you should go with.
If you go with kubuntu you’ll be using snaps by default (which can be removed entirely with some tweaking) and they aren’t actually good (as with the recent steam issues)
Anything *ubuntu is not good for gaming.
Fedora KDE spin. One of the easiest to use distros without all of the annoyances of Ubuntu (e.g. snaps).
Feren OS. A bit more unknown, but it’s pretty good.
MX Linux with KDE?
If you have an AMD machine it even has a “advanced hardware system” iso for high end pcs
You have to reinstall mxlinux every time a new debian version comes out. Not really “normie” IMHO.
Do you really have to reinstall from scratch or is it sufficient to update the sources.list to the new Debian release and perform dist-upgrade like for Debian?
I read their documentation yesterday, and it strongly advised a complete reinstall. While they do have a tool that eases the process of storing your setup and then recovering it on top of a new install, it’s still significantly more complicated than just ‘sudo apt upgrade’.
