KDE

Maybe I'm a bit anal but it really does just sound like what we already knew.

I've used KDE Neon for a while as a typical end user and it works solidly. You get the nice upgrade cadence for the kernel and software, but rolling release for the one thing I care about in my distro - the desktop!

I will say, that if they don't want to encourage people using KDE Neon as end users (I think it's just a disclaimer but whatever) I wouldn't ship it as the default distro for the KDE Slimbook; which is marketed at end users!

I've been daily driving it for years now. There have been a couple of issues during the Wayland transition which were fixed by unplugging and replugging a monitor but it's just been really good.

At the time of release there was very VERY good reasons for the "mental pretzel" or rather why it was described as a non-distro. All to do with how the landscape looked back in the day outside of KDE and Plasma land. I am glad its finally over tbh and those people that where ready to attack are either doing other things in their distro, or running a slowly dying linux blogg that is now mostly about US political conspiracy theories.

Beats Kubuntu I guess, although I never really understood Neon's appeal besides being a testbed. As far as "rolling" distros go, I think there are many alternatives that are more rolling and less rocky - as evidenced by the almost flawless transition from Plasma 5 to 6.0.1 on Arch. I also want to point to Sparky Linux's "semi-rolling" release as a fantastic alternative based on Debian's testing repos.

Wow. I haven't used kde since 1999. Looks like it's been the right choice.

iirc Neon started by Kubuntu developers as a way to install the latest Plasma on top of current Ubuntu release. And if this is the case then it's not really started as a distro the way Linux Mint or Bodhi Linux mesnt to be.

But as time progress, if Neon started contributing fixes to upstream in this case Ubuntu, and as well as implemeting changes such as using deb version of Firefox instead of Snap then Neon project is so much more than just an effort to package the latest KDE for Ubuntu, hence a distro terms suits them better in my opinion.

Regarding Plasma 6. I tried Neon live session and was surprised by the smoothness that made possible probably because of the Wayland transition, animation feels smooth and laptop fan did not even kicked in, but what i really like so far is the window scaling, i can set it to 125% or 150% and it does not seems like a hack. About the instability issues, its probably that i did not play with the live session long enough but my session is without a crash.

It's interesting they're changing the pitch from "everyday user" to "KDE enthusiast."

I definitely daily drove it for several years, and we even used it as our defacto developer distro at a previous job. It didn't seem to be too bad for that purpose.

Maybe not, but it sure feels bait-and-switch-esque. I suppose if that's really what KDE Neon has morphed into/is targeting now, it's better to be honest.

It seems the hesitancy was fear it might be considered the de facto way to install KDE.

It's been clarified to be primarily for testing due to it's bleeding-edgeness.