 So it's been a little while since I have done a long term review of a distro and I have taken a little bit of a break from it simply because the last one was just so exhausting. I spent three months on Kino White and it was just kind of a pain in the rear end. So I took a little bit of a break but it's time to do another one. And I sent out a tweet asking for suggestions on my next long term review and one of the suggestions was Katie Neon. Now I do take a look at a lot of Katie distros but I have never actually taken a look at Katie Neon before. So I decided I was going to go ahead and use Katie Neon for a month. Now I'm going to do this long term review a little bit differently than the ones in the past. Instead of just doing one big long term review video at the end of my time with the distribution I'm instead going to split it into three parts. So this video here is going to be my first impressions and then I will do another video midway through where I talk about some of the things that I've done to customize the distro and some of my thoughts two weeks in and two or three weeks in and then I will do a final video where I kind of do a conclusion and that will be the actual review of the distro. So if you are interested in that kind of stuff make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss anything. Look at me doing all the whole YouTuber thing. So I've installed Katie Neon on hardware and the installation was fairly decent. So it uses the Calamari's installer and it didn't do the whole scanning through all my drives thing that Calamari usually does which was really good. I couldn't get it to install on the hard drive that I normally use for these reviews and I blamed Katie Neon for that. But if you've watched the channel for the last month or so you've noticed that I've had a hard time installing things specifically for these types of first looks and reviews and it turns out that it's not the distros and it's not me. It's the hard drive. The hard drive is busted. I don't know what's going on there. So if you have noticed that I have had a hard time installing things you now know what the problem is it was that hard drive is just kind of a dud. So I installed Katie Neon and on a different hard drive and here we are with Katie Neon. Now out of the box I hate this wallpaper. It's much too bright for me. It's interesting but it's not for me. I'm definitely going to change it. I wanted to leave it just so I could bitch about it for a second but it's not a good wallpaper for me. It's better than the Ubuntu wallpaper. Don't get me wrong but it's not a great wallpaper for me. Other than that the look and feel is just pure Katie and that is as it's meant to be. Katie Neon is developed by the Katie guys. So if you want the most pure Katie experience Katie Neon is probably going to be the one that you want to try out this distros going to get all the Katie features and stuff like that before any other distra out there. That is if you're using the unstable version of Katie Neon which I'm not I'm using the stable version. So this is going to be a little bit behind but it's still going to be the most pure Katie experience you're going to get. So this is based on Ubuntu and it does all the normal Ubuntu things that you'd expect. There is a little bit of a weirdness going on when it comes to the package management. So if I open up a terminal and get it on the right monitor because of course it's going to open up on the other monitor. There are two package managers installed and it's a little bit weird because sometimes it tells you to use the other ones. So when I the first thing I did when I install after I finished the installation was I came into Katie Neon and did an update just like I normally would. So I did sudo apt upgrade and then I did an and sudo apt update like so and I expected it just to go through and do what it normally does which is update the mirrors and then I think I have the switched around but just ignore that you know it updates the mirrors and then it does you know an update if I you know put those in the proper order but it wouldn't let me do it. It said you can use apt but we recommend you use something different and I was like what now it's that it gave you an option to kind of bypass the suggestion and I haven't been able to get that to come back up unfortunately so I can't show you but the thing that it recommended you to do you to do was do pkcon like so and update and it looks like that and the thing is is I'm not sure what pkcon is I'm really really not it does tend to not use sudo I think maybe you can use sudo and it just tells you not to I don't know it kind of reminds me a little bit of Nala to be honest with you I covered Nala a couple weeks ago and Nala was a really nice kind of replacement for apt and that kind of is what pkcon reminds me of it has a different user interface and it does the same things that apt would do but in a slightly different 2e interface kind of way I'm not sure what this is though to be honest with you I don't know if this is Katie Neon specific or if it's something that is on other distros and I've just never seen it before it's definitely going to be something that I'm going to have to look into and see what it's kind of meant to be and if you're meant to use this or if you're meant to use apt what the difference is between using pkcon and apt is you know I'm not sure what direction that rabbit hole is going to take me but it's definitely going to be an area that I kind of look into so the interesting thing is is that flat hub is installed by default so as snaps so if I again open up a terminal and then bring it back over to the proper monitor I can do something like snap install firefox and it will do it right I can also do flat pack install firefox and it will do it so this is one of the few distributions that I've tried that has both snaps and flat packs installed and has flat hub enabled out of the box so when you first install this you're going to find a huge variety of software from different sources and I think that that is great now the one thing that that means is that you're going to have to pay a lot of attention to the software store so the software store and this is going to be discover and the thing about discover is you're going to have to pay attention to the source so you have access to snaps flat hub and the regular repository so discover has gotten way better at choosing the sources over the last few years I guess a couple years now and it's definitely going to be easier if you are more used to using a graphical you know store to install stuff than it used to be I have to say I've given discover a lot of crap over the last five years discover when I first started using Linux was god awful it was slow most of the time the screenshots weren't here and if you they were here you couldn't click on them to actually make them bigger you know you just had the the little thumbnail there were no descriptions there were no reviews nothing like that there were no links to websites none of that stuff existed but now as you can see at least for some things the screenshots are here there's a rating system which is nice there is a place where you can donate and report bugs which is just fantastic a link to the documentation and the website the ability to choose where you're installing stuff from I opened this up and I'm honestly quite blown away at how much better it is than the last time I actually looked at it so I'm still not a graphical app store kind of guy I prefer to install everything from the terminal but this is way better than it used to be I don't know whether or not the changes that I'm talking about are something that go past that first like featured page like if you go into like any of these categories and then click on something do they have the same thing and this one appears to have all that stuff I don't know if that's going to be something that is kind of consistent across everything that's in the store or not but the ones that I've clicked on so far have all had that stuff which is really nice so let me talk about a couple problems that I'm having right out of the box which is normal for me right so the first thing that is probably the biggest problem I've had so far is that kitty neon will not let my monitors go to sleep I don't know what's going on there I've looked at the inhibitors which is something you're supposed to look at to see if there's something that's keeping your monitor your computer from going to sleep I don't know if that has anything to do with the monitors not being able to sleep because the computer actually stays on I just don't want the monitors to go dark but the monitors don't go dark they actually turn off for a second and then come back on and just show the lock screen with the time on it which is annoying because I don't want the monitors to be on at all so that leads me to believe that there's something that's waking them back up I just don't know what and I have no clue how to fix that so that's going to be have something that I'm going to have to look into because otherwise I'm going to turn the monitors off and that's paying the butt so that's one area that I'm having some problems with installing OBS and audacity both of those were fine I did have some issues with source selection where it kept wanting to choose the wrong source I'm not sure if it's using pulse audio or pipeware I haven't looked that far into it yet but there was something that I did eventually get that fixed just because I'm kind of used to fixing that kind of stuff because that just happens with pipeware and pulse audio all the time so that's definitely going to be something that you probably want to check if you're doing this kind of stuff where you're recording audio and stuff just make sure you're getting the right sources but you're probably used to that as well another thing that I've noticed that is just kind of a KDE problem the discoverability of the settings panel is still just really really bad every time I try KDE I come back to the same thing like they've done a better job of categorizing this stuff since you know over the last couple of years but there's especially when you talk you you look into like the the shortcuts or whatever first of all call them key bindings like a normal person shortcuts or at least keep at least put the word keyboard in there right keyboard shortcuts key bindings whatever it is I know I was looking for that and kept bypassing shortcuts I was like I don't know what that is eventually I got here but the categorization on the actual key bindings themselves is a little weird it seems like they bury most of the stuff that you're going to want inside k-win I guess that's technically where they're supposed to go but I don't know that that's all that user-friendly thing is how a lot of people don't know what k-win is so I don't know how well these these categories are actually for new users but then maybe new users don't care about key bindings at all maybe that's a thing so I spent a good portion of a half an hour or so splunking into all these to change the key binding so that I could change some of the things like so I can do super queue to close and things like that so the kd settings panel is still kind of a mess for me I'm gonna try to spend some of the next month learning it over again because I haven't spent a ton of time in the kd settings panel and quite some time since like the beginning of my kina white review and I don't think a lot of it's changed but I think I had so many problems with it in kina white where it kept crashing all the time that I just kind of wrote it off and didn't spend much time in it at all I haven't noticed any crashes so far on neon the only real system issue I'm having is where the monitors won't turn off so at least over the last two days has been much more stable than kina white was like I said usually when I chose a new theme or something like that from here in kina white it would crash so let me see if I can actually kind of stress test this right on the video you never know we'll we'll choose one of these oh another thing that was really weird so I wanted to install covantum because I use covantum alongside the theming capabilities of kd itself to theme stuff right and I haven't actually done anything yet but I wanted to install I was very it was very weird the covantum is not in the repositories it's not in the Ubuntu or debium or any of those repositories I don't actually didn't look and see if it's a flatback I don't think it is but I ended up having to build it from source which is really weird because it's like it's it's on fedora it's on arch but it's not on Ubuntu it's just really weird but anyways I'm gonna go ahead and install one of these things we'll see how it goes I will say that this hasn't got any faster it's I mean theoretically I can go to the website download the thing and then install it that way faster than this does but maybe I'm just overestimating overestimating my capabilities there as well it's at this point after I entered the password in kina white where I had errors come up and things start crashing so we'll see if that happens here okay so I got it installed and then as you can see k when crashed as I was actually changing the theme and I have no idea why I did that and now things are full screen when they shouldn't be and it was a little weird dolphin crashed I'm not sure why but I did actually get the themes you know installed and up and running and I'm glad that my recording here hasn't actually you know been complete which I would have been very upset with because I'm almost done with this video and I would have had to start over again but yeah that seems to be still just a little bit broken I mean that experience wasn't good now the thing is is that I'm recording a video so it's possible that the reason why that didn't change very well and k when kind of completely crashed until I went to a tty and came back it's possible that the reason why it did all that crashing stuff is because I was recording a video maybe obs or something like that does something that conflicts with changing the theme or something and you just shouldn't do those two things at the same time I don't know it's possible I will try off camera and see if I end up having the same problem so that's definitely going to be something that I'm going to be playing around with because obviously as everybody knows watches this channel I customize things a lot so I'm going to spend some good time customizing KDE and I'm gonna test the hell out of this and see if I can get it so that's not actually as crashy as I think it you know is because I know that I have more KDE problems than everybody else seems to have so I'm it's just possible that I'm an idiot and I don't know how to use KDE and that's the reason why things crash I don't think that that's true I mean I am an idiot but I don't know whether or not me being an idiot is what's causing my issues with KDE we'll see anyways in terms of pre-installed software I have installed some things like I've installed Ferdium and Discord and Audacity and OBS and stuff like that there are some other things that oh I've also installed Crusader of course it comes with Firefox as the web browser it has quite a few of the KDE stuff so KDE connect KDE partition manager consoles the terminal Crusader I install Covantum I installed KWalt manager and Kwriter both here I don't see Kate which is a little weird like I figured Kate would be the default text text editor but Kwriter actually is the default oh I've installed mark text as well as the ocular and spectacle for screenshots the one thing that I'm actually really surprised at is that it's not the full k suite of applications so like K-Mail is not here a whole bunch of the k suite of stuff is just not here I figured that it would be so this is actually a fairly lightweight distro in terms of actual apps that they've installed VLC is here for media playback that seems to be the only media playback thing that they've actually installed so that's gonna be for both music and video if that's what you want to use it for otherwise you'll have to use your own or install your own so yeah those are my very early initial first thoughts on KDE neon two areas that I'm going to be focusing on in the long-term review and these are personal things for me that I'm just either interested in or whatever so the the first one is that really weird package manager the pkcon don't know what it is I want to find out I want to figure out what's different about it than apt the other thing that I'm going to be spending a lot of time on is trying to figure out where my KDE theming problems are coming from so I want to know why whenever I switch to a theme things go to the hell in a hand basket so there's obviously something there that I'm either doing wrong or it doesn't like my computer something I'm going to find out and I'm going to do what I didn't do in the kinaway review I'm going to drill down into that problem and see if I can actually figure out what's going on maybe file a bug report if I'm actually just having a bug or if it's a problem you know for me personally I can fix that kind of thing so that's what I'm going to be two of the things I'm going to be focusing on I'll also do some gaming see how well it does with games and I will talk a little bit about performance and stability obviously in the subsequent videos that I do in this series so that's it for this one if you have thoughts on katie neon you can leave those in the comment section below you can follow me on twitter at the linux cast you can follow me on mass center odyssey those links will be in the video description you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast just like all these fine people thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing people I'm so so grateful for you guys for your support I'm just always blown away that you guys support me so thank you so very much thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time