 I've been using Katie neon on my various computers for the last month or so and that means it's time for my long term review So when I do these long-term reviews, basically what I'm trying to do is get a sense of of how well the distribution will work on hardware for a Medium amount of time so I consider a month to be a fairly good time frame to get a sense of what a distribution is all about So this time it was Katie neon about a month ago I did my first impressions and I've maintained most of my views since then and I've changed some of them as well So what's Katie neon like after a month of use? So before we jump in let's first talk about what Katie neon is and what it's not so what Katie neon is is a Distribution that comes to us from the Katie project and at the end of the day That's its most important feature it comes to us from Katie, which is going to give us the purist form of Katie that we can get anywhere in any distribution So if you want the most bleeding edge access to anything that relates to the Katie project Katie neon gives you that Opportunity so that's where it differentiates itself from things like Kaboom to which is basically the same thing But it is a distribution that has older versions of Katie plasma and is more associated with Ubuntu than Katie neon is so at the end of the day That's what Katie neon is it is the purest form of Katie that you can get period So the first part of the review that we have to cover is installation so this takes us all the way back a month ago and I actually had to kind of Refresh myself on the installation It's because I kind of forgotten and that's kind of the point the installation of Katie neon is basically like any other Calamari's based installer that you're ever going to find it's exactly precisely the same as any of the others and it's forgettable it worked really well and After I installed it again Earlier a couple days ago just to test it off again make sure I didn't forget anything about it The process was just as good as you'd expect with any other calamari's installer for me It was actually a little bit better simply because it didn't do that whole pause and make me wait thing Well, it scans all my hard drives. It just moved right into the installer, which is really nice So the installer which you've seen a brief glimpse of during this period of the video is Just a calamari's installer and it works really well. So once you've installed it The next thing to discuss is the out-of-the-box experience. So what's it like when you first install it? Well, if you've ever used Katie plasma before basically, that's what this is. It's a very minimal version of Katie plasma sitting on top of an Ubuntu base and At the end of the day if you've used Ubuntu before you've had this experience the difference between them is not all that much There are a few things and we'll talk about those as we go along But for the most part it is a plasma experience as you'd expect now depending on which ISO you downloaded You're going to have different versions of Katie plasmas So if you're using the user edition, you're going to get the latest officially released version of Katie plasma If you're using the testing edition, you're going to get the pre-release software from Katie So depending on which ISO you're using is going to decide on how bleeding edge Your Katie plasma stuff is they also have a couple unstable editions But most people probably aren't going to be running those those are mainly for developers in terms of experience and what I chose I ended up going with the user edition and that's what I've been testing on all of my computers for the last month Now as I said the out-of-the-box experience is a plasma experience You're going to have the bar along the bottom as I'm showing you right now You're gonna have a few apps pinned there along the bottom It's going to be a very Windows-esque experience with a fairly nice wallpaper One of my favorite things about Katie E actually is their menu system. It's really nice It does remind you a little bit of Windows But they've done enough to the point where it just really feels nice to use it has search integrated It has the ability to move between different categories fairly easily You can resize it if you want to you can move it around, you know, it's a very nice menu system. So Out of the box, it's a fairly standard Katie experience in terms of pre-installed software This is where it's really interesting because out of the box I expected there to be quite a bit of k-suite stuff So when I say that I mean things with K at the beginning of the name. So, you know Conqueror and Crusader or You know, whatever all these Katie E applications K mail things like that You'd expect those things to be installed, but they're not now It does have some Katie E stuff installed out of the box things like Kate and Katie connect those things come pre-installed Consoles obviously here K write is here. So there's a few K applications, but there's not all of them and Honestly, that's a little bit refreshing and it's better than I expected because I expected this being a Katie E neon or Katie project You know project I expected there to be a lot of Katie stuff pre-installed But there's not it's a very minimal install, which is nice because it means you can build yourself up from the bottom and Put all the applications that you want there instead of having to deal with all the stuff that the developer wants there So that is really nice now in terms of other pre-installed software. You get things like VLCs installed When views installed things like that you get Firefox as a default web browser But there are a few things that are actually kind of missing like Libre office is not installed by default There's not a mail application There's not a in like a mp3 player or something like that. None of that stuff is installed You'll have to go find that yourself. So when I say it's minimal, it really is quite minimal in terms of pre-installed software Now, let me show you what my setup looks like. So I've up to this point I've been showing you b-roll from a virtual machine that I use just for the b-roll So this right here is what my system looks like So I haven't done a whole bunch of customization It looks mace mostly like what my first impressions video looked like back a month ago But I've been happy with this particular setup I wanted to use as pure a KD experience as possible. So I didn't go installing any docs I didn't move things around all that much. I pinned my applications then I used it this way now I have changed some settings. So I've changed it so that when a new window spawns it spawns on the correct monitor It still doesn't follow it all the time, which is dumb But it does it more often than it does with that settings is not set by default I've changed several keybindings so that if I have an application open I can quit it with control Q or super Q I can move to different workspaces using the super and the number keys keybindings I'm very familiar with from a window manager perspective. So that's basically the changes that I've made and I've been fairly happy with this particular setup. I'm not a desktop environment guy anymore I'm a very much a tiling window manager guy So one of the biggest problems that I've had is when I have two windows open The way that focus works in a window manager is when I move a mouse over here It makes that window in focus with a desktop environment I have to click on that in order to get that to be focused. I can't even tell you the number of times I've thought I was going to put OBS in focus so that I could move to a different scene with a keybinding But really audacity was still in focus and I pressed a key in audacity That has a completely different meaning and messed everything up It was not a great thing because I was not paying attention to where the focus is. It's just a matter of habit It's not that big a deal but that's something that Really tripped me up and it trips me up every time I go to a desktop environment now I'm and I know that there's a Setting in KD plasma because of course there is that I can use to make it so that the focus follows the mouse But I found that kind of clunky. I didn't want to really do that just because Most people aren't going to do that. So I decided to just do the do it the way you're supposed to do it So another thing that I really actually gotten used to doing is the the alt tab thing where I can switch between different Applications and stuff. I'm not obviously used to doing that in a window manager So that was something that I kind of had to work into my workflow and again, that's not Katie's, you know neon specific But it's something that I kind of gotten used to over the course of using this Which was you know an interesting feeling because I'm not used to doing it now when it comes to software availability It's a little messy and the reason why I say that is because Katie and neon supports both snaps flat packs and the Ubuntu repositories and that makes it a little bit confusing as to where your applications come from and it adds a little bit extra responsibility on the user to Remember where things are and ensure that everything gets updated because when you install something from discover Which is the main way you will install software unless you use the terminal you're going to get suffer mainly from The Ubuntu repository so as you can see here if you look at the Creta entry here the Ubuntu repository is where you're going to get that by default But it also has snaps and flat packs or flat hub in this case Available to you so if you're just using discover to install software You can pretty much rely on knowing exactly where it's going to be updated from and if you do all of your updates From here as well It will update stuff for you that being said if you don't use Discover to Install and update your software it gets a little bit messy, so I don't use discover all that often I'll just talk about discover here in a second again, but I use the terminal So things like you know, I do pseudo apt install or whatever or I'd use You know flat pack install I'd never use snap install because I don't want to use snaps But you kind of get the point if you install things from multiple different places It's going to be your responsibility to make sure all of those things stay updated So it gets a little messy. So another thing that is Not to my liking is that it has snaps installed. I don't like snaps I don't want to use snaps and I don't you don't have these snaps you can uninstall snaps But let me show you the reason why I don't like snaps there is in your home directory this File right here and it cannot be gone or deleted if you're going to continue to use snaps It's ridiculous because we know from using Ubuntu that that directory does not have to exist But if you're using a different distro, even if it's based on Ubuntu, you're going to see that and it's just it's done I can't stand it and grant but again in terms of software availability There is a wide selection of software because you have access to the three Basically the three main and largest repositories in terms of software and Linux So if there's something you need to find chances are you will be able to find it from one of those three Sources personally, I've been getting most of my stuff from flat pack So I'm used to doing that as a fedora user. So all the stuff like furtium discord audacity obs Steam all that stuff. I installed through flat pack. Now as I said in my initial impressions There is another package manager on Katie neon that I'd never heard of before and that is called pk ton now From the things that I've been told and the things that I've read pk con is is the package manager that the Katie neon developers use To update and manage their packages now reason why this is confusing is because it's not a developer fronted thing and what I mean by that is that the first time you update your system it's going to tell you to use pk con and That's a little confusing if you're expecting this to behave exactly like a boon to now It's not a hard package manager to get a hold of it does basically the same stuff as apps does so you have pk and pk con install pk con search Stuff like that all that stuff works exactly the same way as app does in terms of at least syntax and in terms of Actually, you know working if you do pk con like update It's going to look a little bit like nala. It's not exactly as flashy as nala, but it has some of the same quirks as nala if you will so That's what pk con is once you have that first like warning That first time you try to use apt and tells you to use this instead You never see that again and you can use apt however you want because this is a boon to you can just use apt And that's what I've been doing. I haven't used pk con since that initial time so Which one they want you to use? I'm not exactly sure and I'm not sure why they try to push pk con on you What's the the advantages to it? It's never really explained all that well so for me personally, I just used apt when I had to or I used flat packs to install the software that I needed so that's what I've been doing So that takes care of software availability if there's a package that you want There's a good chance that you'll be able to find it within one of these sources I don't think there was a single thing that I actually had to build That I wanted most of the stuff is in flat hub And there might have been like I think I installed like neofetch and htop from the boon to repositories Those are like the only other things So software availability on kd neon is really really good So let's move on to the next section which is gaming now before we jump in and I show you some of the footage that I used During my gameplay. Let me talk about the fact that I'm not a gamer I think if you've watched the channel for any amount of time, you know that I say this often I'm not a gamer. I haven't been a gamer in quite some time The games that I play tend to be very Casual, you know, I like hearthstone. I like clash of clans, you know, those are the types of games that I've gotten into I'm not a first-person shooter anymore. I used to be back when call of duty was like a really big thing The first time at least, you know, like the first three or four I was a big gamer back then but not anymore And I was never really good at it. And that's part of the reason why I've kind of gotten away from it So as I talk about gaming Keep that in mind because I'm not a gamer So let's talk then about gaming itself on kd neon in terms of Installing steam and getting up and running. It was kind of a frustrating mess and the reason why I say that is mostly because the flat pack version of Steam has this really annoying habit at least for me on my account Where the first time you launch it opens up like four or five invisible windows that you can't see you can See them if you hover over the icon and it like will have like invisible windows as in the previews But on the desktop themselves, they don't show up. They're like ghosts And the problem with them is that you can't interact with the main steam window while those things are open And you can't close them You know, you can't like close them through the preview in kd In the kd panel like you would think you could so I actually had to use htop to kill steam Four times in order for me to actually get to steam now. This is not a kd neon specific problem I just mentioned it here because it happened to me once I got past that and Managed to get those invisible windows to close. I was able to install both warframe Orbital bullet and city skylines and I played all three of them two of those You're going to see b-roll here starting now in terms of performance. I thought it was pretty good. Now That's a very scientific statement. I know In terms of frame rate. I saw between 45 and 57 frames per second I didn't have bingo head open at the time when I recorded this so you'll have to take my word for it but on my particular hard drive, which includes a rise in 3,800 x and a In a radion rx 580 That's perfectly acceptable in terms of performance. It was very playable and yet in the warframe Example that is a windows only game as frog know where it's what it says in steam anyways And that means it's running in proton so the fact that it was running that well on my system is pretty good and My only complaint with it was that it made my the fans in my Computer spin up like a 747, you know It was very very a lot And now that might just be my computer. I've had that problem before with windows specific binaries So that might be something just going on with my hardware, but again just something to keep in mind in terms of performance itself it wasn't affected and It was very very playable. It was it was very good orbital bullet was similarly About 60 frames per second and again very very playable. That's not a very resource intensive game and it's a linux native game so It just played really really well city skylines was the surprise for me because I used it and normally on linux city skylines Is about the crashiest piece of nonsense software you've ever met. I love the game I want to play more of the game I'd love to start a channel where I you know just played city skylines because that stuff does really well on youtube But I can't because it's always crashing on linux and I refuse to use windows So when I used it on kd neon I expected it to be like that But I was surprised city skylines didn't crash one time in about 45 to 50 minutes that I played with it per day You know I played it a lot over the course of the last month on kd neon and it played Really really well. I'm not sure what the frame rates were because I never actually tested them but The in terms of you know like stability, which is the big thing for city skylines it played really really well So I was quite I was quite happy with that Those are the only three games that I tried. So if you are a gamer, you're probably a little bit disappointed I I'm not a gamer. So I can't tell you what destiny would look like if it even plays on on linux I don't even know. I have it in my library. I don't think I've ever played it So uh cs go is the one that people normally use to benchmark this stuff But I'm horrible at cs go and I refuse to record myself playing it. So You're just gonna have to download it yourself and give it a chance because I wasn't going to Subject myself to you playing that game, which I'm absolutely Garbage at so yeah, that is the gaming section Honestly, I was surprised at how good gaming was outside of the whole steam nonsense there that I talked about at the beginning It was a good experience But it was a good experience for me and non gamer people who are gamers and play a lot of games may have a different experience I just wanted to be honest about that So that is gaming moving on to stability now. This is general operating system wise stability I had no problems like I didn't have outside of like one k-win crash when I was doing my Initial impressions. I haven't had any of those problems since and that's really nice Uh, I have had some issues where the Saming capability in the settings panel doesn't really work all that often. So I'm going to show you a picture here Of an error that I actually got this morning So I got this pick this error here this morning as I was trying to install another theme And this error just kept popping up and would not go away and would not allow me to interact with the window underneath it So I don't know what was going on there. That was just this morning Like I said and I haven't seen that since like if I open it up the settings panel now and go to appearance And then get new global themes and then sort by highest rated We're going to see if we have that same problem Nope, see nothing's wrong there and that's been basically my experience over the last month Sometimes I've had some issues But for the most part it's been fairly decent Usually the biggest problem I've had is when I tried to install something while I was recording obs And I think that there's some kind of incompatibility there between changing a theme Or installing a theme and running obs to record at the same time those things to those two things just do not go together And that's the reason why I'm not going to do that right now on camera when I haven't been using obs It works fairly easily like I've installed a couple different ones And uh, it works just fine. Usually that's the biggest problem that I have with katie and this time it turned out that It was a fairly okay situation So in terms of stability outside of that again, I haven't had any issues whatsoever and that includes When I received the notification that I could switch from the lts of 20 2004 to the 22.04 lts Which is something that just happened yesterday. I got this notification. It popped up Would you like to update and I did so I went through the process It took about a half an hour it rebooted the computer when it was done And it just worked the only thing that was really weird about the whole situation was it changed my Wallpaper like I had a wallpaper set back there that was completely different and it changed the wallpaper. So Yeah, I'm not I'm Not sure, you know, why I did that but it did it It seems to be a little bit weird a little bit invasive a little bit maybe even But you know, it did it and it's not that big of a deal. It's just something that I noticed So stability really good and you'd expect that it runs on a boon to lts You wouldn't expect it to not be stable. So I had no problems with that now speaking of problems Let's talk about some problems that I did have so There are a few so the first one is that my monitors refused to go to sleep So I think I believe I talked about this in my initial impressions I have not been able to find a solution for it since for whatever reason My monitors will not go to sleep now I have them set so that they'll go to sleep after five minutes and if you go down to the power menu in the The power management system here thing. It will tell you Exactly what applications are blocking your monitors from going to sleep. So right now. OBS is keeping my Monitorers from going to sleep. The thing is is that even if that wasn't the case like I had OBS closed My monitors still won't go to sleep. I'm not sure why now I when I talk about support here in a minute I'll talk about what I've done to try to fix this and who I've contacted for help But just needless to say I have not gotten to be fixed So That's honestly the biggest problem that I've had with katie neon through the out the month It's meant that I've had to manually turn my monitors off Which is a pain in the rear because the power buttons are in odd places in the hard to reach So that's the probably the again the biggest problem that I had with katie neon Another one that I've had an issue with it and this is a this is a pipe wire problem Not a katie problem But pipe wire after a reboot does not remember your sources So like the sources are there. I just not doesn't remember the default sources So every time I reboot I had to make sure that I was using the right microphone and not my webcam microphone That's always annoying And please whoever devolves pipe wire, please fix this because this is I mean it's I can't even tell you how many times I've forgotten to check that I'm using the right source And found that I'm not and I've ended recording a whole video Through my webcam microphone, which is garbage. So that needs to be fixed. I mean It's it's a bug But again, that's not a katie neon thing that is pipe wire specific that happens in fedora too So that's a pain in the butt the last thing that I want to talk about in terms of problems I had is the bugs that I showed you earlier. So I had this bug here I've had the settings application crash once or twice, but that was both that was before I did that first impressions video since then I haven't had settings crash again So I don't know what was going on there But there's but there have been some things like icons not showing up stuff like that that has happened Another thing that I wanted to talk about in this section is that covantum is not in the repositories Despite all the things that I said earlier about software availability being really really good Getting covantum on your system is actually kind of a pain in the tuchus. And if you don't know what covantum is covantum basically allows you to theme your system outside of the settings panel in Cool way, so it allows you to add extra blur and allows you to control that blur in a more fine-tuned manner than you would be able to in the settings panel And it does a whole bunch of other stuff too. Plus there's a whole bunch of pre-built themes that you can use through covantum So you'd think that covantum would be in a repository Somewhere, but it's not you have to build it yourself. And that was uh, that was that's weird That's just I mean it feels like it should Honestly, this should be pre-installed on katie neon. You'd think it would be but it's not So that was a little weird. It was easy to build but it's still something that I noticed Okay, so moving on then to community and support So when you're talking about like kabuntu or any of the other ubuntu flavors The community part is always like, oh my god, it's awesome because it's so big and it's ubuntu, right? Well, this is based on ubuntu, but it's not a an ubuntu flavor So in terms of community support, it was kind of hit or miss now I'm not saying that like the community is bad or anything. It's just small And if you are going to need immediate help The response time is not really all that great So if you're if you're needing immediate support the forums isn't the best place to get support I posted this one I think it was really early This morning or yesterday morning. I'm not actually sure it says it was Today, but I'm pretty sure it was yesterday Either way, I'm not sure what's going on over the time But the point is is that it hasn't received a response yet But I mean it was only been a day or so whatever I posted another one at the beginning of the month and that one did receive some responses But it took a couple days So The point I'm trying to make here is that if you need immediate, you know An immediate support the forums aren't the best place just because it feels like so Community when it comes to at least the kde neon subsection of the kde forums is pretty small So if you have a kde specific problem There might be a better chance of you getting help in the more general kde topics Those tend to get a little bit more traffic than the kde neon specific forum does So just to keep that in mind So in terms of places where you can get other support and probably that's probably more immediate kde neon Does have a matrix room and a mailing list So those are two places where you could get more Information and more support than just the forums itself So there are other places that you can get support other than just the kde forums The kde neon subsection of that forum just seems to be a bit abandoned Maybe not abandoned but slow is probably a better way to put it So in terms of support it's not great and really the only reason I say that is because The one place that I focused on was kind of slow now Like I said the post that I posted outside of the kde neon stuff had much more interaction So if you have a more general kde problem posting it there is going to have a much better community response So finally, let's talk a little bit about who this is for At the end of the day It really is for the people who want the purest kde experience If you are looking for the latest and greatest of kde software presented in the way that the kde project wants it presented kde neon is the best option for you. It's also A very good ubuntu based distribution. So if you are a an ubuntu person and you liked kubuntu, but you want more Up-to-date plasma versions kde neon is a good option also Forgive me about the dog. She's gonna bark for here for a few minutes If you aren't a plasma person And you don't think you would enjoy plasma. There's no good reason to run kde neon really It's it doesn't have any other versions. It's meant to be For the people who love kde want to use kde and want to envelope themselves in the kde ecosystem and There are those people out there a lots of them, you know, like and enjoy plasma And kde neon gives them access to the purest form of plasma Which is something that a lot of people will enjoy. So my overall experience of it with it was very good I did have some of those problems there at the beginning that I talked about my first impressions video but after that it was just a very good experience on ubuntu and Using plasma itself is a good experience if you like to customize stuff plasma Is where it's at like it you cannot find a single desktop environment out there that can be customized as much as plasma Period like it's the most customizable desktop environment ever So if you like that kind of stuff plasma is fantastic And if you do like that stuff and you like plasma kde neon is a good distribution for you to get into simply because it's the best Form of kde that you're probably going to find anywhere else. So that is kde neon again I really really liked it Now the question would be will I be keeping it installed and the answer that is no And the reason why is not having anything to do with kde neon itself. It's just i'm not an ubuntu person i'm a fedora guy I prefer uh fedora's version of kde. So it's just you know Really comes down to taste. I prefer fedora over ubuntu Therefore i'm not as much of a fan of neon on my personal systems But if I were to want that purest You know kde plasma experience kde neon would be my first choice So if you have thoughts on kde neon you can leave those thoughts in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you You can follow me on twitter at the linux cast or on mast on or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash 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 without you the channel would just not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time