I’m not a beginner anymore, but I’m much less interested in technical tinkering for its own sake than I used to be. These days I just want my computer to work properly without too much intervention from me.
I’ve been using Kubuntu for a number of years, but I’m also hearing increasing complaints about how Canonical is running things. I don’t think I’m ready to switch to a new distro yet, but it wouldn’t hurt to know what’s out there.
Is Kubuntu still a good choice for an “it just works” KDE-based distro, or has it been surpassed?
Have you looked at tumbleweed? I’ve been using it without major issues for a few years across different devices. Perfect integration with plasma, rolling but stable distro, built in rollback feature, it’s great
If we are talking easy, and just works… You probably want Mint.
Edit: Somebody below has pointed out there isn’t a KDE edition of Mint any more.
I’ve been using KDE Neon for the past several months. It seems to have the best overall mix of out-of-the-box usability and customization. I haven’t found anything I can’t do with it and lots of packages are readily available. Also no “political” exclusions so it allows you to install all the portable packages like Snap, FlatPak, etc. Don’t use it if you don’t want it, but it’s there if you need it.
As someone who can’t quit KDE because of KDE connect, my go-to is debian. Debian 12 is an outstanding release, it’s stable, and it works. The only gripe is that debian famously has later releases than most distros, which can be a problem if you need a recent version of say, go or rust (you can still install manually but apt exists for a reason), but in general it’s not that bad and it’s of course a tradeoff between recency and stability.
You don’t need to use KDE to use KDE connect. 😉
I am using it with i3wm.
Happy DM hoping. 😊
For managing non-distro versions of language runtimes I suggest rtx.
$ cat .tool-versions
python system
nodejs latest
rust system
elm latest
$ rtx current
python system
node 20.5.0
rust system
elm 0.19.1
$ rtx local go@latest # go gets installed
$ which go
/home/andy/.local/share/rtx/installs/go/1.21.0/go/bin/go
Kubuntu is fine if you don’t mind the direction that Canonicla is heading.
Moving from Ubuntu to a debian based distro makes sense - a lot of stuff is familliar. Base debian is fine, but MX is a little more friendly. They have a KDE image here: https://mxlinux.org/download-links/