I replaced Linux Mint with KDE Neon. I'll update this post with my experiences.

🤝 KDE and me

This is not the first time I have tried KDE. I first did so about 15 years ago. Back then, I tried lots of things, including Windows Vista, Open Solaris and Ubuntu with both Gnome 2 and Unity. I experimented with them, but I wasn't impressed, so I went on with Windows 7.

The next time I came across KDE was when I launched my Steam Deck for the first time in 2023. At first, I didn't recognise it, and I was surprised at how much it had matured over the years.

A couple of months later, when I started planning how to leave Microsoft, Google and the other tech giants behind since they started supporting Trump, my friends recommended KDE. I chose Linux Mint instead, but I also wanted to try the KDE Plasma shell. It didn't go well. Plasma didn't worked. While I was trying to fix it, I broke the Cinnamon too. 😅 I had to reinstall Mint to fix everything.

Although I liked Linux Mint, I still wanted to try Plasma. A few months later, I decided to try it again, replacing Mint entirely with KDE Neon.

👓 KDE Neon - The first impressions

💿 Installation: I had a rough start. I wanted to do a manual partition setup to preserve my /home partition. The installer reported that KDE Neon needs a 300 MB boot/efi partition. I checked, what else it needs, and I misinterpreted some old articles, and I created both a 100 MB boot and an 300 MB boot/efi partitions.

Obviously, it didn't work. Finally, it took me seven attempts to install it. By that point, I had realised that I only needed a 500 MB boot/efi partition, and that I had to reboot the live installer after each failed attempt; otherwise, the partitions couldn't be accessed for the new installation.

But in the end, it booted up nicely. The only issue was that the audio devices reported an error. Only? Well...

🚫 No KDE apps worked: The next issue came, when I wanted to launch an app. Neither Dolphin (file manager), Kate (notepad) nor Konsole (terminal emulator) worked. Thankfully, I could use the CTRL+ALT+F3 shortcut to hide the desktop and access a command line, which helped me find out what was going on.

The root cause was a library that had only been installed partially. sudo apt --reinstall libpulse0 and a reboot fixed it.

🪄 The magic of Linux: Two hours after installation, everything that worked under Mint was up and running. Most things worked without any reinstallation. Since my home directory was preserved, everything just worked as if nothing had happened. I was more than satisfied. It was amazing.

📆 Next days

📋 Clipboard: Windows now has an advanced multi-item clipboard with integrated emoji board. I use both frequently, so having something like them integrated is a good thing. While they are less streamlined than their Windows counterparts, they work well.

💨 Steam: I reinstalled Steam from a .deb installer, but it didn't launch next time. It was the desktop file. It pointed to the wrong place. It took me some time to figure out, how to fix all wrong entries and then how to make the shell recognise the changes. (I tired the flatpack installation too, but it didn't solve the issue as the problem was with the desktop entry. I use the official deb now.)

🔒 Lockscreen crash: The desktop environment would crash every time it was left unattended for a while. Nothing but reboot solved it. It turned out to be an NVIDIA-specific issue. I managed to solve it following this reddit post and this Arch Linux article.

It's a bit disappointing that the first article is more than two years old, and it has not been fixed. I mean, enabling three services and adding a setting entry to a file sounds pretty trivial for the devs to fix, but can be impossible for non-technical people, especially that finding the articles took a lot of searching.

🔄 Couldn't update the system: The entire system update froze to the point that it wasn't even able to tell what's wrong. Using the console and learning how to use pkcon uncovered the problem. A Linux firmware security update was unavailable at the source (501). This article helped me to wget and install it manually. Again: servers can be unavailable anytime. Why isn't this handled by the update manager?

🌙 No automatic light/dark mode: This will be added in the next minor update to KDE Plasma. Neither Windows nor Linux Mint had it built-in.

🎮 Increased stability: I appreciate that Space Colony (a retro Windows game) doesn't crash on task switching like it did under Mint.

✅ Summary

All in all, I'm happy with KDE Neon. I feel it still suffers the usual Linux desktop environment issue: there are critical stuff (apps not work, system update not work, VGA issue) that can't be fixed without technical knowledge.

But hey, it's still great with a bit a learning, so give it a try! One day, it could become as straightforward to install and use as Windows for everyone.