KDE Neon User LTS Edition Released, Powered By Plasma 5.8

[bug77]

The politics aspect is significant as Ubuntu booted the project lead of Kubuntu and he moved on to this project. The reasons/justifications are highly political and I don't think anyone ever really got the full story.

Also they are putting significant work into Wayland, and I've yet to see a Ubuntu spin with a solid Wayland implementation. I'm holding out hope Mir collapses and just becomes a Wayland compositor in the end because that would solve a lot of problems for the greater community.

Wayland (the protocol) is implemented by Gnome or KDE. Lack of a solid implementation is because the protocol itself is new, it doesn't have anything to do with Ubuntu.

[Geopirate]

Wayland (the protocol) is implemented by Gnome or KDE. Lack of a solid implementation is because the protocol itself is new, it doesn't have anything to do with Ubuntu.

Well... yes this sounds good on the surface, but Fedora just shipped default Wayland. Gnome and KDE can move heaven and earth, but it won't matter if Wayland is a second class citizen in the Ubuntu ecosystem. The Wayland experience is smoother on the KDE or Gnome spin of Fedora than their Ubuntu counterparts. I say this as someone who has primarily used the Gnome spin of Ubuntu for years until just a few months ago.

You can do a side by side comparison between Kubuntu and Neon now even though they use approximately the same pieces. There's a reason this project is gaining traction.

[bug77]

Well... yes this sounds good on the surface, but Fedora just shipped default Wayland. Gnome and KDE can move heaven and earth, but it won't matter if Wayland is a second class citizen in the Ubuntu ecosystem. The Wayland experience is smoother on the KDE or Gnome spin of Fedora than their Ubuntu counterparts. I say this as someone who has primarily used the Gnome spin of Ubuntu for years until just a few months ago.

You can do a side by side comparison between Kubuntu and Neon now even though they use approximately the same pieces. There's a reason this project is gaining traction.

That a really simplistic look at things.
At this point, Wayland has rough edges, it's not ready for prime time. Fedora has no problem switching to Wayland by default, as Fedora is little more than proving ground for RHEL. They don't care much if the user experience suffers, because Fedora users are a bit more used to it then Ubuntu users (and less used to than Arch or Gentoo users). Ubuntu takes a conservative approach to everything, so it shouldn't surprise anyone they'll be the last to make Wayland default, even if they didn't have Mir.
At the same time, all Fedora did was change the defaults. I can't imagine anyone wanting to try Wayland having too much trouble switching from whatever the distribution default is to Wayland. Or switching the whole ditro for one that has Wayland by default. All I was trying to say is the heavy lifting for Wayland support is in the court of Gnome and KDE. And, of course, Nvidia, if you want KDE on Wayland.

[mikus]

Sadly I found KDE and Neon to still be a basketcase as far as multi-monitor support, both continue to fix and regress about as quick. I presume none of the developers use more than one display, ever. I finally got Kubuntu+Neon PPA repo's stable in Neon 5.7.2 with my 3x HDTV setup here on an old AMD 7970 GPU, upgraded the system to nvidia 1070 and a clean install of Neon with 5.8 (presuming it was fixed already), and it's all the same weird instabilities, shifting desktop taskbars, and even resizing/losing displays when powering them off. Considering this is exactly what it was doing with my AMD+Mesa drivers prior, then got fixed, it's really disappointing to see them trip on themselves over and over. Only reason I ever upgraded off 14.04 was to fix kde's poor handling of multi-monitors, only to be greeted by - poor handling of multi-monitors in new ways...

Not entirely ruling out the new nvidia hardware either, but it otherwise functions perfectly so far, until the displays power off and all hell breaks loose. Caveat emptor if multi-monitor.

[Zoll]

This could easily be a PPA or even a snap...... a whole branded distribution seems silly just for one DE.

That's what exactly I'm doing, I used a PPA to install it on the top on Kubuntu 16.04

[Zoll]

Sadly I found KDE and Neon to still be a basketcase as far as multi-monitor support, both continue to fix and regress about as quick. I presume none of the developers use more than one display, ever. I finally got Kubuntu+Neon PPA repo's stable in Neon 5.7.2 with my 3x HDTV setup here on an old AMD 7970 GPU, upgraded the system to nvidia 1070 and a clean install of Neon with 5.8 (presuming it was fixed already), and it's all the same weird instabilities, shifting desktop taskbars, and even resizing/losing displays when powering them off. Considering this is exactly what it was doing with my AMD+Mesa drivers prior, then got fixed, it's really disappointing to see them trip on themselves over and over. Only reason I ever upgraded off 14.04 was to fix kde's poor handling of multi-monitors, only to be greeted by - poor handling of multi-monitors in new ways...

Not entirely ruling out the new nvidia hardware either, but it otherwise functions perfectly so far, until the displays power off and all hell breaks loose. Caveat emptor if multi-monitor.

At home, I have 3x HD displays and at work I have 2, almost now issues. The only issue I faced is when I decided to have a vertical panel instead of the traditional horizontal one. When dragging windows to the other monitor, the window get "stuck" in the middle but I can hit maximize and it gets restored on the correct monitor. That's the only annoying issue I have, otherwise everything be very stable across all monitors. Running NVidia 1080 using the latest stable drivers.

[Geopirate]

That a really simplistic look at things.
At this point, Wayland has rough edges, it's not ready for prime time. Fedora has no problem switching to Wayland by default, as Fedora is little more than proving ground for RHEL. They don't care much if the user experience suffers, because Fedora users are a bit more used to it then Ubuntu users (and less used to than Arch or Gentoo users). Ubuntu takes a conservative approach to everything, so it shouldn't surprise anyone they'll be the last to make Wayland default, even if they didn't have Mir.
At the same time, all Fedora did was change the defaults. I can't imagine anyone wanting to try Wayland having too much trouble switching from whatever the distribution default is to Wayland. Or switching the whole ditro for one that has Wayland by default. All I was trying to say is the heavy lifting for Wayland support is in the court of Gnome and KDE. And, of course, Nvidia, if you want KDE on Wayland.

I agree completley that the Gnome and KDE folks are doing the majority of the heavy lifting. The thing is Fedora is working closely with Gnome to move things forward, they want to move RHEL Linux over to Gnome3 sooner rather than later. The transition to Wayland will be a rough but the road will be smoother on the other side.

The Ubuntu team is working on Mir. They chose to do their own thing so Wayland isn't their focus. The KDE or Gnome spin of Ubuntu or Fedora should be about the same functionality and stability with the same version numbers (or ubuntu should have a slight edge) but that simply isn't the case. In my experience it's gotten worse instead of better.