Yep, definitely what we already knew. I’m surprised to hear it’s the default on the Slimbooks actually; that sounds like exactly what they were trying to avoid with the way they pitched Neon.
I agree on Neon being great, I love KDE’s pace of updates. I read Nate’s blog every week religiously. I’m spoiled to the AUR these days, though. Just for that I can’t go back to non-arch based distro. Been rocking Manjaro and have the least headaches out of anything I’ve tried.
It seems the hesitancy was fear it might be considered the de facto way to install KDE.
It’s been clarified to be primarily for testing due to it’s bleeding-edgeness.
Definitely this is huge. Proton and the respective Wine advancements are exactly what needed to happen. And the headlines about some games running better on Linux really gives it a good look.
This! Gnome is absolutely a foil to adoption. Everyone I’ve seen try to start with Ubuntu has bounced right off back to Windows. You’re already wrapping your head around a new OS, you do not need an entirely new desktop paradigm.
So happy Valve went with the setup they did.
I would install Manjaro. It runs KDE, which is super familiar, and maybe more polished than Windows. And it is Arch-based, which means you have access to AUR apps, which makes finding programs super easy. It’s like if the MS app store actually had every program on it.
Keeping the explanations simple.
Don’t start with Ubuntu/Gnome. The desktop is way too weird, and app repository is limited.
Don’t start with Mint or Cinnamon or LxDE. Linux nerds will recommend these, but they feel “old” and are not really lighter on resources than KDE.
Highly recommend Arch-based distros. AUR feels like a miracle coming from the Windows paradigm of tracking down installer EXEs and MSIs.
I think the spotlight on KDE from Steam Deck definitely helps. It’s polished as shit, and it acts like Windows by default, and that is a good thing.
I hope the contributors are anonymous…
Nate’s blog has been really encouraging people to submit bug reports. So I think the goal of Neon is to have the bleeding edge KDE with a stable base, to rule out confounding factors as much as possible. I don’t think it’s a bait-and-switch since the product hasn’t changed. They’d probably just really rather it be used for people willing to submit bug reports.