This year I gave a talk at Akademy about my vision for how to get KDE’s software onto more hardware, and therefore more easily into the hands of our users. If you’re interested, here’s a recording! my talk begins at 1:44. Hope you enjoy it. đŸ™‚
Akademy 2020 talk: Visions of the Future
Published
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Nate’s talk starts at 1:44 đŸ˜‰ Great talk!
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Oh dear, I attempted to link to the exact start time, but it appears I failed. I’ve edited the post a bit. Thanks!
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Would you like to add timestamp markers to your Youtube videos? Those would be helpful and an awesome service. đŸ™‚
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Hey Nate,
I think that is a great vision you presented there and I’m personally looking forward to it!
Also a very good talk, in which you nicely shrunk the elephant in the room (“KDE is not a distributor!”) to a midge. I wish you all the support you can get!
And when you are through with your negotiations with KDE e.V., I would like to nominate Chakra (https://www.chakralinux.org/) as the KDE Distro. đŸ˜‰
Joking aside (this will not be decided on a simple nominate/vote), I do think that the half-rolling release approach of Chakra – latest version of Plasma and applications with periodically updated system core (kernel, mesa, etc.) – gives the best user experience. …and they do share the KDE love <3.
All the best
richard
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Is Chakra even still alive? The webpage is full of old screenshots and lists Plasma 5.10 as the latest shipping version. It isn’t mentioned on DistroWatch either.
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Why there is no sound on the video? I opened it on YT and the same, silence. I changed to different vid and sound plays as normal.
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Ah, the talks starts after 11th minute…
I was sure that when you said that talk starts at 1:44 you are talking about minutes… and all I heard was silence. LOL
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I agree that there is space for an official KDE OS that is stable, up to date and with certified hardware – KDE OS for the masses.
Netrunner, KAos and Neon all three offer a slight different approach to KDE plasma.
– KAos rolling release is slick and updated –
– Neon official release of KDE.. However, only KDE software out of the box.
– Netrunner slick and stable but it almost changes with every release.
I suspect consumers want a stable OS with up to date apps, at least this is what I want. POP_OS! seems to go for this idea too. However, they use Gnome which has an unnatural workflow for me.
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And there is Mageia, agnostic distro, which ships Plasma (and Gnome 3.38, Xfce,…). Currently in our Cauldron (dev version) we have qt 5.15.1, KF5 74, Plasma 5.19.5 and Plasma Applications 20.08.1. Under-the-hood we have Kernel 5.8.9, Mesa 20.1 (20.2-RC4 available) latest X.org stack (even Nvidia nonfree drivers), Firefox and Thunderbird 78-ESR, LibreOffice 7.0.1, some server applications like Apache,… for a community-driven distribution!
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Hello
I was wondering, is there any update of where this discussion is at within KDE on the topic of shipping KDE software on hardware?
I know this post s a bit old now but still felt it’d be worth posting a couple of thoughts as this is a super important topic. Very good talk and really good to see the push towards developing partnership with hardware vendors and have a KDE OS.
One thing in the talk that was left a little unclear regarding Neon is why it came about and the fact it is not only plasma and KDE apps that are rolling but also KF and importantly Qt! Sure we can think that the half way house between stable and rolling may not satisfy anyone, but I’ not sure that is true. In fact I believed it (at least did) satisfy many. KDE Neon came about precisely because of issues regarding integrating Plasma with other distros. Users experienced a lot of bugs with Plasma 5 because it was packaged with outdated version of Qt or not updated often enough. So the idea was basically, we’re going to have a stable base (e.g. Ubuntu LTS), but ensure that the Plasma / KDE environment is maintained so that users get the best experience. And to be honest, from a stability / hardware vendor perspective, I think this is exactly the right approach (though it might not be for nerdy users, but they can always install arch :)).
That said I would absolutely agree improvements are needed for Neon to be a suitable candidate (most you which you’ve suggested), namely:
– Newer kernels – definitely a must have
– More up-to-date non KDE apps (but in general I’d say the way forward would be to push for a better integration of Flatpaks with Discovery (mostly there), package manager (muon?) and Plasma theming (that is the big one), as this is needed for Plasma anyway!).
– Slightly more stable Plasma / KDE apps. I’d say that for stability purposes (and therefore credibility with hardware vendors) it could start as simple as having the option (a switch :)) to update to major version of Plasma and KDE apps only after the first point release. Though I love your “rolling switch idea” and be great to have a distro that allows you to choose at witch level you want to have the WHOLE distribution rolling, but developing something like that seems like a much bigger job (which could come in the future) than slightly tweaking Neon’s current approach.
Hope that’s helpful.
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