I've been playing around with a standard (no persistence) liveUSB install of KDE Neon's 64 bit "user edition", from here;
https://files.kde.org/neon/images/neon- ... n/current/
https://neon.kde.org/index
It's essentially the latest stable KDE Plasma desktop (along with all of it's KDE-associated applications, like text editor, email client, picture viewer, etc) on top of Ubuntu's latest LTS release (18.04 Bionic Beaver in this case). Actually it's a quite stripped-down distro OOTB, with few additional apps included (Firefox is about it, really). No biggie, as it defaults to accessing the huge Ubuntu BB repos.
I know many think of KDE/Plasma as big, bloated and slow (as it has historically appeared to be at times), but these guys have been very hard at work over the past few years, forging ahead with version 5 of the KDE desktop - and that hard work's really beginning to show. Although it's immensely "tweakable" (almost TOO tweakable) with a very full range of included desktop and panel widgets, the reality is you can functionally make it about anything you might want it to be. And that functionality/extensibility makes it
extremely user-friendly as a home desktop, once set up as such.
And the most surprising thing of all that I've noticed... it's incredibly fast/responsive, and boots to a very reasonable ~400mb RAM initially. And that's with many of the included (large!!) range of desktop effects and compositing turned "on" (i.e. - fantastic level of code optimizing). It's quite stunning, both visually and especially in terms of functional useability - once you are able to wrap your head around things, getting used to accessing the tweaks and actually making use of the feature set Plasma offers. Pretty danged amazing, really - and fun to just sit down and
use.
There are some bugs/downsides that I've noticed, though;
1) The Discover package manager - although actively being developed and much improved over the previous stable version - still closes/crashes occasionally.
2) There's an almost "deal-breaker", long-standing bug with the system tray, where if you tweak it to hide/show certain tray icons, it from then on refuses to popup the associated menus when the mouse hovers over the visible tray icons (network, clipboard, volume, etc.). I think one can re-install the panel applets
outside of the system tray (and remove the "broken" ones from within), but then the cool notification features of Plasma are lost for those particular applications.
3) I vehemently abhor flat, pale, non-gradient, non-bordered in-window themes... and KDE Plasma's QT themes, so far, are all about that type of visual theming (much like GTK3/Gnome themes). They are functionally/visually
far inferior - and give me a headache/eye ache after a while. They might be a nod to current style trends (i.e. - Windows 10) - but I believe the greater reason is that the move to QT (and GTK3, for that matter) has brought with it a requirement to completely overhaul (or just abandon) all of the beautiful GTK2 themes of years past... and nobody really wants to put forward the effort required to write (official) themes with such visual detail, in these new and more complex, more difficult theme languages (QT & GTK3). Bummer!
4) And if you want to manually modify existing themes, it seems an order of magnitude more confusing and difficult on KDE/Plasma - no single theme folder with it's associated config file(s) and elements... instead, numerous theme directories spread out individually throughout other system (KDE) directories - all somehow pointing/interacting with each other in a confusing, boggling way - as they draw the desktop visuals. Or maybe I've just not spent the time yet to get my head around it all (likely...).
But some of the available (in-repo) themes are OK/somewhat better, and there's also included tools within Plasma that allow tweaking colors and other visual elements to somewhat ameliorate those visual "shortcomings".
Sorry for the long rant - but I think KDE Plasma is overall fantastic, a potentially great home desktop solution for Linux (as long as devs don't get carried away in "feature creep", and instead focus on squashing bugs and visual polish). And they've recently received a couple of large financial donations, which helps assure further development and improvements in the future.
All considered, Neon is pretty darn great, and I hope to find room on one of my laptop hand-me-downs for a full install.
Bob