Vanilla OS 22.10: An Arch and Fedora-compatible Ubuntu The first release of Vanilla OS is based on Ubuntu 22.10, but a slightly different desktop conceals much more dramatic changes under the hood. 22.10 Kinetic is the first stable release from the Vanilla OS project, and as its version number suggests, its parent distro is Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu", which appeared in October. …
[Author here]
> they've diverged so much from what Ubuntu offers
The project's website is quite clear on this. Perhaps I should have echoed that more strongly.
The idea is that Ubuntu is the best baseline for modern general Linux compatibility, and they have a good point. There may be more Alpine container hosts or RHEL/SLE servers under maintenance contracts, but for gamers and the desktop, Ubuntu is more likely to be supported than anything else.
I use KDE, with a tiling script, and it is great - especially with a largish monitor which is where desktops I going.
My daughter recently installed PopOS (she is an engineer) and it looks like a pretty good alternative. I think the current version is Gnome based (although they are moving away from Gnome, which is interesting).
Gnome is not going to kill off other desktops. Too many of us like them.
The robustness of immutable root + the ability install all major packages out of the box (Appimage, Flatpak, Snap, DEB, RPM and AUR) sounds amazing. The only thing that would stop me from loving this is that it defaults to GNOME. I would much prefer if it gave you the choice at installation whether you want GNOME, KDE or Xfce. Or, an even bolder move, just ship it with KDE by default, as there's a lack of great KDE distros beyond Kubuntu and OpenSUSE and the GNOME "market" is already very crowded (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, ...).
Another question I would have is how fast the desktop and core components are updated. I'd assume it uses whatever version the non-LTS version of Ubuntu ship?
[Author here]
All fair points, actually.
I suspect that, in time, if this project survives and does OK, they may settle down on, perhaps move to a basis of LTS versions, and perhaps offer a choice of desktops. I don't see anything in it that technically requires GNOME. I personally share your sentiment, and those of some other commenters -- I do not like using GNOME at all. For me, the stable sensible no-nonsense desktop is Xfce, and has been for 10-15 years now.
As I wrote at the time...
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/
... IMHO Microsoft successfully disrupted and fragmented the FOSS xNix desktop ecosystem merely by _threatening_ to sue. GNOME 2 wasn't great but it was good enough and everyone agreed. Even Solaris used it.
Since then... It's a confused mess.
• GNOME ≥3 remains contentious.
• KDE 4 was a mess, which is why Trinity exists, and KDE 5 is frankly not much better.
• MATE is the huge unwiedly GNOME 2 codebase, forked by a small team, and is going to be hard to keep useful and modern.
• LXDE was pretty decent so its developer moved on to LXQt which frankly isn't. At least not yet.
• Enlightenment stalled in 1999 and took nearly 15 years to move on, and since then it's alienated people and been forked.
• Budgie is pretty but doesn't do anything really new.
• Pantheon is pretty too but its functionality is very limited.
• Unity is great and moving forward but it still alienates people who want everything to work like Windows.
For my money the only projects doing interesting stuff in the Windows-like space are the Chinese desktops.
Between Deepin, UKUI and the one nobody else uses, ChromeOS' Aura, those 3 probably have 10× more users than all the above put together.
As I said: a mess.
I do not agree with your reasoning for TDE. Pearson just liked KDE 3 and wanted to keep it going. His choice, good for him.
KDE 4 had its problems no doubt but if you are going to describe KDE 5 as a mess you've got to do more than assert.
I've never not used KDE (except for occasionally trying the lightweight alternative Opensuse automatically installs and rushing back) so cannot make comparisons but I cannot think of any problems I have ever had with KDE 5.
I also don't know why anyone distro hops. And Opensuse has always included everything should I care, which I don't.
FWIW, I am planning an article on the problems I have with KDE.
And for context, I met with 4 of the KDE dev team at the Ubuntu Summit, and had an hour-long chat with them about it.
I listed a bunch of things that don't work, or work very badly compared to other desktops. This was ad-hoc, unplanned and unscripted.
I think it's a fair summary to say that they were shocked and indignant. So, we went through them, item by item.
Some, to be fair, are fixable if you look deep in the settings in non-obvious places. However, the majority of them were not. Basically they are core functionality for things that the KDE folk just don't do, or don't want, or nobody ever thought of, or which they have decided are too hard. Some are even functions that older versions of KDE used to be able to do, but the functionality has been removed.
KDE, famously, has a million options, but they are options for things that the KDE folk want and use. They are _not_ options that reproduce the functionality of the desktop whose design KDE is based on (which is, basically, Windows 98 or NT 4 with IE4).
I feel that matching the functionality of your inspiration is important. They do not.
Some off-hand examples:
* Support for the panel at the bottom of the screen is strong. Support for vertical panels is weak, because they don't use it much.
Examples:
- you can't control the appearance of the Start button.
- to be specific: you can't constrain the size; you can't choose icon/text/both; you can't control the number of lines.
- Xfce can do these. Windows does them automatically.
- you can't easily constrain the size of scaling of window buttons in the taskbar. (Windows does that automatically; but, as the move now is to icons instead, that is somewhat moot.)
* If you have a horizontal panel, it can't span 2+ screens. That was removed. Nvidia supported this on Windows decades ago.
* KWM's control keystrokes are different from Windows' because it didn't occur to them. This is a deal-breaker for accessibility. Windows sets the standard, and this is honoured by Xfce, LXDE, GNOME 2, MATE etc. Not by KDE.
There is a whole shopping list of stuff.
Some of the failings _also_ apply to Cinnamon, and to MATE, and to LXQt... but KDE has more such issues than any other single Windows-like I know of, and successive versions are not fixing it.
> I am planning an article on the problems I have with KDE.
Thank you, Liam.
I'm no big fan of MS GUI, but ALL the *nixes seem lame to me. A decade ago, one criticized my video card for not having enough 3D, but turned out it could not always display a simple window or menu even as 2D. (Sorry, forget which "revolutionary" desktop that was.)
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> KWM's control keystrokes are different from Windows' because...
Loooooong before common GUIs, unix had termcap and file key-mapping tables. We had a vast variety of terminals and keys and cursor codes. unix defined enough fundamental operations, we (or vendor) filled a table with codes our TTY had or we liked, and it worked. And could be changed if it made your fingers happy.
2+ years on KDE neon. I use it for work (law).
Dolphin is a decent file browser. I really enjoy right-clicking on a file and selecting copy location to copy a path of the file into my clipboard. I do it a lot.
KDE neon is less than artful at managing multiple monitors--I know because I have 3 monitors on my setup. In system settings, you can select any monitor as the "primary monitor," but the selection has limited impact. Getting apps and windows to automatically open on a preferred monitor takes effort (Configure Special Window/Application Settings) and behavior depends on the app. The settings tend to hold, unless you unplug a monitor or change the order of monitors.
I like (i.e., need) a GUI. I came to Linux because of Windows 10 telemetry. Hopped around on distros for about 2 years before KDE neon. Started with Solus Budgie, but had some issues installing certain apps. Tried Ubuntu Mate, but was not quite rich enough of a desktop, and Manjaro was amazing (or I was just blown away by KDE)--until an update killed it. Kubuntu froze randomly. I also looked at KDE on Fedora (but was less familar than Ubuntu) and KDE on MX Linux (ok, but seemed a bit noisy, feature-wise). KDE neon has (fingers crossed) mostly been just working for the past 2 years.
I use Ubuntu Mate on machines that I will only access via x2go (e.g., offsite or headless), as a desktop served via x2go server is a smoother connect process when its Ubuntu Mate than KDE neon, in my experience.
I do wish KDE neon would get more mention in distro discussions. I know it's claimed to not exactly be "a distro," but it is the version of KDE which has been the most reliable for me.
One issue I occasional experience with KDE neon is that the panel (I have vertically on the left side of my desktop) disappears and comes back after 2 seconds. This happens rarely--maybe a couple of times in one month, and then maybe not for months at a time.
Some basic but important things that have been working for me on KDE neon: editing applications on the application menu, scanning on an HP MFP M478 to a samba share, printing to HP and Dell printers on the network. Autokey (gtk) shortcuts work, as does a custom Kwin shortcut to dim inactive windows (via help from Reddit). Remarkably, PulseEffects started working recently (perhaps it had something to do with the Jammy Jellyfish upgrade), so now I have working equalization to add some bass to my headphones.
Frankly, on occasion, I look at my desktop PC running KDE neon, with many apps accomplishing things efficiently simultaneously, and I am in awe of the fact I have this powerful system doing so much, without the need of OS license from Microsoft, without massive amounts of telemetry (but some monitoring here and there, depending on apps), and without having an inordinate amount of skill to set it up.
I very much look forward to your article on KDE problems. (And, it is already good information to hear about the indignant reaction in your discussions.) There's all kinds of room for improvement, which I hope you will be able to encourage. I do just want to note that I have been able to make my KDE neon setup do a whole lot of useful things--hard to be sure where the credit should go, but it does let this GUI user get work done.
Main pc: KDE neon 5.26, X11, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32gb ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
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