 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of as always let me remind you that there's not such thing as a best distro but there is such a thing as a best distro for you I think and it's our job to make it easier for you to find this perfect distro or rather best distro. So what I'm going to do today is divide this video into parts. Firstly I'm going to go through all of the most known and traditional distros that ship with kd plasma and I'm going to cover on how this ship kd plasma how well they work and I will not focus actually at all on the differences from a distro point of view such as the package package manager and such because that's not really the point I'm going to talk about what experience would they give you for kd plasma because this video is about that. Secondly I'm going to go through some interesting distros that take a completely different approach that is they still use kd plasma but they mix it up a lot and then they include applications that might not be kd on once or you know the ones that you're used to so it will be quite an interesting trip and of course we start with kd neon because it's the kd distro isn't it well actually it isn't according to its own faq rarely do developers call it a distro even and I think that originated from some political issues when kd neon initially moved to kd because kd didn't want to make it look as if it was competing against other distribution that we're shipping kd so kd comes in four variants which is user testing unstable and developer so what's the difference between those so user addition simply has the latest kd plasma things that have been released so it's a rolling release as soon as something is released for kd plasma you get it testing gives you a glimpse into the future by giving you also things that are pre-released whereas unstable simply gives you updates every single day with the very latest stuff that is in git master and you can use that you know to be a developer or test the various very newest changes if you're a developer the developer edition is the testing edition but with some libraries to make developing easier out of the box so this last three obviously you should only use if you are a developer or know what you're doing as an example if you are a beta tester and you really want to try out and use some qa for kd plasma which would be awesome by the way if you're just a user then go for the user edition which however does have some flows firstly I have to remind you that yes it is rolling for kd plasma however it is lts that is the long-term support version it's a very stable but also old packages for everything that's not kd plasma so ubuntu itself so if you're used to you know new packages you don't get those in kdenion as much as i love kd plasma using something the same very day it has been released might still be prone to bugs sometimes we accidentally ship bugs to users and we notice when users start to complain sadly so if you want a super stable system I would still suggest waiting for a week or so for the first bug fix to arrive it is also important to know that neon has messed up in the past in some regards the latest transition from a major release to the next one not for kd which is always rolling obviously but for the ubuntu base has actually botched a lot of systems like I've seen so many people who said around the update script and then my system didn't wake up anymore and that has actually happened to my girlfriend too so I experienced that they also somehow shipped kd frameworks 5.99 which contained an essential bug fix for kd plasma very late like at least a week late and that was so weird especially because it contained such an important bug fix I don't know how 5.98 was that broken but still for something that's supposed to be super rolling for kd not shipping an important kd frameworks version immediately was very weird it also had some issues with packaging that I'm not too aware or expert about but in the past stuff like backhands for vlc and that kind of stuff has given me issues and I've discovered that it was neon bugs so be aware of that so it is a very interesting distribution to be clear it is a distribution but of course it has its own issues the next one is kubuntu so what is kubuntu relationship with kd well they're basically part of it I mean technically the webpage says it's developed by canonical which is pattern of kd but actually the developers of kubuntu are often part of the kd community if not developers of kd plasma itself so kubuntu has few changes to the kd plasma desktop it has the same wallpaper now it didn't use to it has its own kubuntu theme which of course you can change and revert back to breeze in just a click and you might also see some small changes here and there as an example I think they might be using single click selects folder instead of opening them or maybe they're not using margin areas for the panel if you don't know about that you want to notice and maybe they're also not using adaptive transparency I'm not sure about that though and they might be even using wobbly windows by default unless I'm actually using kubuntu right now but it's not kubuntu kubuntu it's a kubuntu that shipped with a kubuntu focus computer and I don't know if there's any changes that were added to kubuntu on top of that or if those are changes that kubuntu applies on top of kd plasma so there are some changes you have to find them out kubuntu also is not rolling it releases every six months and every new release packs up the latest version of ubuntu and kd plasma there is a kubuntu develop release upgrade tool to switch from one release to the next one and this system makes it so that it's less bleeding gauge but maybe more daily stable if you're into that there is though an lts version which uses both ubuntu lts and kd plasma lts whereas kedinion was using ubuntu lts but bleeding kd plasma should use the lts version of kubuntu probably not if you don't know what that is although this would probably require its own video to explain carefully but let's just say that it's more meant for like I think companies who need super stable systems that never change but as far as backfixes go this stability is an significantly higher compared to the latest version of kd plasma unless it has just been released kubuntu does come with a bit more applications out of the box some people call it bloat I personally disagree I feel like there are applications out of the box that you might need but if you're the kind of person that doesn't like that be aware of that and also an important note that you might not like some applications come as snaps as an example firefox and you might not like that personally I don't actually next up is a fedora kd which as far as I'm aware ships kd plasma completely vanilla or with very small changes and the idea is the same one as kubuntu you publish an update every six months fedora kd is also able to switch between major versions so from fedora 36 to 37 to 38 in the future and you should not have any issue regarding that it's very interesting that fedora often tries to be the most modern I think kd plasma distro as an example they were one of the first if not the first distribution to switch to willand for default for kd plasma which will give you a better kd experience no doubt about that however it's still not ready for all users and you might see that it doesn't work for you so you have to try it out and if that doesn't work you just switch back to x11 fedora also offers a very interesting project which is different from the kd spin of fedora and that is fedora kino ite kino ite I don't know how it's pronounced this is one of the very few immutable systems with kd plasmonet basically you install applications as flatpacks and for os changes you use rpm os3 which has atomic and safe updates and it uses potman container engine out of the box so if you're just a user this makes the os particularly rock stable and solid at the expenses of not being able to tweak it under the hood but you shouldn't care about that if anything goes wrong there's also this night feature that allows you to switch to the previous version like dual rollback and it also has friendly developers who come to academy this counts for the entirety of fedora actually open suza which I think is pronounced like that it's probably not it's actually the distro I have less experience with it's the only one that I've never used actually so it has both a rolling rollies like kedi neon and a non rolling one like fedora and kubuntu now the rolling release is called thumbbleweed or tumbleweed I don't know but please know that tumbleweed is rolling for both kedi plasma and all other packages this is very different compared to kedi neon which is only rolling for kedi stuff in thumbbleweed you get everything new so I think you kind of need more to know what you're doing in this particular case if you want to use thumbbleweed but you can also just use leap so open suza does apply some changes on top of kedi as an example they have this tool called k suza install to help you install extra features such as multimedia supporter plugins not on the download media fair enough they also say they have attractive branding which I guess means they have their own kedi plasma theme fair enough and also some other changes I couldn't find an extensive list but as an example I do know that baloo doesn't index file content by default which you might agree with it might lower their sources needed for baloo and the other end it's very nice to be able to search for something as a content of a text file so I don't know note that discover which is kedi's application for the store installing stuff integrates with open suza a bit worse compared to the previous systems as far as I know so you might have issues with that however as far as I know they're the only ones that are doing open q&a which is very interesting so very quickly what's open q&a you have a set of tasks that you optimize to do on a fresh system and then you take screenshots of what happened and you compare them to reference screenshots to make sure that everything works and they do this a bit for kedi plasma to like you open dolphin and you check that dolphin is indeed still looking normal and opens normally and you do some tasks they do a little bit of open q&a for kedi plasma which is super helpful so yeah that's very nice it's something that should be known and to be honest I don't have much to say apart from that it should really try it out see if it works for you sadly it didn't work for me for weird reasons but it might be your distro preference next up is manjaro kedi which funnily enough is the only distro I would not recommend on this list so why is that well they have some management let's say problems firstly they forgot to update their SSL certificates and they suggested getting around it by changing the date of your system which is not not a good idea and they did it again five months ago and this was the third time so what and it's a bit of an issue because you can actually trust that what you're downloading is actually manjaro and not like manjaro with some extra things inside of it that might be trackers or such because you cannot trust the website you're downloading it from because its certificates expired so not good news they also had controversies regarding their treasurer English is so difficult treasurer so basically somebody wanted to use manjaro money to buy a 2k gaming computer a Lenovo one which might be useful for development I guess and the treasurer for some reasons that aren't publicly known objected to it and then manjaro says he stepped down some other says he was removed the treasurer for applying the policy and there was like controversy there were updates from manjaro that sounded like they were written from a PR team with no idea what happened and just trying to cover everything it wasn't a good look at all they directly use arch packages for everything and there's actually a lot of controversy I've heard about that I have multiple times have I heard about arch packages complaining about how manjaro uses and interfaces with them and there's also a lack of communication issue as an example they packaged non-riddy changes from hasai linux basically they did this announcement in which they were like we are shipping the very latest hasai linux and the hasai linux project itself replied on twitter with like you didn't ask and please don't and that was that was not a good look either also allegedly manjaro has been faking their distro watch score using both but I found no hard proof of this it's something that I see a lot but that don't have proofs so who knows I would suggest you to go watch the video manjaro has a big problem by the linux experiment which summarizes everything very nicely much better than what I've just done and also explains what each of those things that I've just said actually means so go check it out of course all of this won't stop manjaro from working for you maybe you tried out and you see it works perfectly they do very little changes to kd plasma as far as I'm aware like they do apply their own theme and I'm not aware of any other customization of plasma so cool they also do a nice thing which is they ship their own kcms which is system settings modules that which means that when you open system settings you see some modules that are not from kd plasma but are from manjaro itself which means that manjaro actually curves for their things their own applications actually to work natively on kd plasma which is nice so try it out I don't recommend it but try it out finally for the normal distros we have arch linux and here's the thing if you are unsure on whether you should use arch linux or not don't because if you need arch linux you kind of know that you need arch linux that is my take on it arch linux is more of a for experts thing and if you really want a dutch word but don't know how to set arch linux up maybe try manjaro I don't know honestly I don't feel like I have to explain to you what arch linux is especially because as far as I know they don't customize kd packages at all that's the old point isn't it which brings me to the special mentions that here's those distributions that take kd plasma and do something completely different with it and the first one is thorough and west so what's the relationship with thorough and west and kd thorough and west has a developer that is part of kd plasma and that often does like patches to kd which is super nice and is a super nice person I don't know what to say so thorough and west has its own theme that you might like or not has very big task manager icons as an example it has a very interesting panel layout out of the box for which you have icons centered and also on the top a clock and notifications which is very interesting it replaces some kd apps with its own as an example you do get a custom a custom store for installing stuff and has some nice things like a transfer application that transfers your file from your windows install to thorough and west I think it has its own application look to and also uses the full screen app menu which looks okay there are some better looking options nowadays sadly but that menu doesn't get a lot of love lately and what else it's a very interesting experiment that you might want to check out then there is nitrox OS which uses plasma but customizes it a lot so you have a very interesting looking bottom dock deck which as far as I know is actually latidoc also you get a top bar with some applets and those applets work as sidebars which is a very interesting approach I think it uses custom everythings it has a custom style through kventum I think custom icons custom everything they have like their own look so they're doing interesting stuff in terms of packages so you don't use a pt here you can use containers to install stuff or app images instead of the normal applications you would expect out of the box like I don't know dolphin discover this kind of things they use maui applications with maui alternatives which look very interesting but in my opinion aren't quite 3d for everyday usage but that's something up to you to decide so something very different very bold and if you want to try it out it's nitrox OS if I had to make a guess and I'm going to do it maui is currently also developing its own shell which looks kind of how nitrox OS customizes kd plasma desktop to be so I think that in the future nitrox OS will stop using kd plasma and switch to maui shell but that's just a guess and that was everything so thanks everybody for following along I hope that I said some interesting things maybe maybe you knew some things but maybe someone didn't know about everything so I've been talking for 30 minutes I need I need to stop