HACKER Q&A
📣 JonathanBeuys

Kubuntu or Debian+KDE?


I am currently in the market for a new Linux distro and I would like to hear the HN community's take on it.

I have been thinking about choosing Kuduntu or Debian+KDE.

I find it really hard to come up with any pros and cons.

I came up with this solution:

They probably give me the same experience, but since with Kubuntu there are 3 vendors involved (updates travel from Debian to Ubuntu to KDE) and for Debian+KDE only one vendor is involved (Debian), Debian+KDE is probably leaner and will make less problems.

Any Hacker News grade thoughts on this?

These are the two installers I have in mind:

"debian-live-11.5.0-amd64-kde+nonfree.iso" from this page: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/

Or "Kubuntu 22.04.1 LTS" from this page: https://kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/

My idea is to install only the terminal version and then do: apt install kde-plasma-desktop

So I don't get Kmail and the other KDE applications. I don't need those as I use Firefox and Thunderbird.

  👤 tannhaeuser Accepted Answer ✓
Found Kubuntu very disappointing: power events like power supply plug-in being reported minutes late (and unexpectedly and using loud cheesy Windows-y sounds), can't get rid of super-annoying middle click behavior (closing a window when I want to open a link in a new tab), partially strange/buggy scaled rendering of Plasma widgets (when all I wanted was an approximation of Mac OS/Unity with a global window and a vertical dock), Firefox wouldn't support a global menu anyway, Firefox' regressive and annoying snap self-update, Thunderbird attempting to open links in Chrome/FF snap having a bug where it crashes and won't update preferences such as for registering as default browser, opening new windows behind others, ...

KDE Neon supposedly is much better, but after a month of circus I crawled back to Mac OS even though I had been using Ubuntu (with gnome until 3.0) since 2010.

👤 pabs3
Go Debian with KDE, or KDE neon (which KDE do themselves).