Hi folks, author here. Happy to answer questions.
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I'm sure if you're missing anything useful diagnostics-wise it's worth a FREQ though. A lot of us also do travel with our laptop to numerous FOSS events all over the place and encounter sub-par networks left and right, after all.
Myself and my family are running Fedora's KDE edition. The Fedora team has a long history of working very closely with the Plasma dev team, quite actively contributes upstream, and I haven't been disappointed. I'd vouch for this one from first-hand experience!
We also have a new project to produce a distro of our own in the works, called KDE Linux. That has recently had its first alpha release. It still has some real feature gaps and may not serve you well if one of the missing bits is something you require, but it's definitely worth looking into. It has a lot of next-gen ideas baked and some things we got to learn during the SteamOS effort, and think it has a place in the ecosystem.
In the dev community I generally see a lot of people running KDE on Arch, Debian and openSUSE as well.
edit: According to AI, LTS is not provided. Was my AI answer accurate, and if so is there consideration of an initiative to implement an LTS channel?
Personally I've had an issue with KDE on Fedora several years ago, possibly due unstable Wayland, but I don't know real reason. Something in the graphic stack failed. So that was a reason for me asking about it.
The company stuff in the background doesn't really matter.
The team working on KDE Linux are motivated by addressing some structural challenges that always plagued KDE Neon from the concept of trying to graft more recent SW on top of the Ubuntu LTS base, plus some lessons learned from the SteamOS project's way of handling updates, and fully utilizing more recent Linux/systemd features.
It's sufficiently different that sticking with the Neon brand and swapping it out for that userbase would have been pretty disruptive, so they felt it was better to go with a distinct identity.
We did in fact have versions marked as LTS in the Plasma 5.x generation, but the concept never quite worked that well practice (e.g. because distros generally shipped newer versions based on user demand and didn't really adopt the LTS releases, even for their own LTS distro releases, so the benefit calculation for them was different from your expectation) and we haven't kept them for the Plasma 6.x series. You can read some background here:
https://pointieststick.com/2025/05/01/notes-from-the-graz-pl...
It might come back some day in some form, but the discussion is ongoing.
Something I use a lot on xfce4 is the Alt-F11 shortcut (it toggles) that maximises a window over the bottom bar and removes the title bar.
In this way, with LibreOffice or say Inkscape I get the application menus at the top and the applications controls at the bottom of the screen. No hotspots - nothing pops up.
On Fedora's live KDE iso I can use the window control menu to supress the title bar on a maximised window and I can hide the bottom bar but its a faff requiring multiple steps.
How can we make this happen? I am a programmer but I am not in a good position to do this specific kind of programming myself. This seems tightly integrated to a lot of stuff I don't have a good understanding of. Is there a way to donate to specific features, could I do some crowdfunding to hire a dev to do this feature and if so who? Is there any way at all you can think of that I could effect this feature landing other than spending a few years learning this kind of development?
- X11 is nearing EOL, and once we drop support for it this will get a lot less painful to do.
- If we want to switch to a virtual desktop / paging protocol that supports this we need to switch away from the current one, and it just so happens that in late 2024 a new protocol called ext-workspace made it into Wayland that is flexible enough to work for this purpose.
I'd say at this point the biggest problem is designing a UX for it that makes sense and doesn't confuse the hell out of people. If you want to contribute to e.g. that design discussion in our VDG working group that could be a good place to start.
> could I do some crowdfunding to hire a dev to do this feature and if so who?
Someone else has pledged a bounty:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/bug-fix-per-screen-virtual-desktop...
I have three observations to make.
1) There is a pain point in KDE involving windows on top of another fullscreen window. Specifically, the Live Captions app. This is a design problem that other OSes like Microsoft Windows doesn't suffer from. What happens is, if you leave the taskbar in place and want to have the captioner running over video and make the video fullscreen, you can't with KDE. I eventually figured out a hacky workaround in that if I turn auto-hide on for the taskbar, I can then alt-tab the Window and it'll stay on top. I did see some talk about this window behaviour. It's nuts that an accessibility feature needs the user to make the taskbar auto-hide first before it works. It would be nice if there could be a setting where it is "this window is on top of everything".
2) SteamOS as having a large device-specific installed base, I think there is value in the KDE team encouraging Valve to turn KDE from a snapshot to a rolling release as Fedora has done where KDE is rolling but the rest of the distro is a snapshot. Why this matters, is because when it comes to bug reports and the like, the KDE bot basically closes them because Valve's KDE is "unsupported" because they only seem to rebase once a year or two. I know they did move to 6.2 with 3.7, but I found 3.7 buggy and thought KDE looked worse and had worse scrolling performance (maybe setting conflicts from the 5.27 version?) so I just switched back to the 3.6 version with 5.27 where everything looks right and scrolling moved smoothly. I know they changed the kwin compositor a lot in the 6.x series, and I suspect there are regressions in it, so if it isn't rolling, people are stuck with a buggy compositor? That sucks.
3) Setting upgrades.. so with SteamOS, Valve was shipping the 5.2x series of KDE. Now 6.2, and the next rebase is probably going to be 6.x on Wayland instead of X11. So there's a lot of legacy cruft settings that carry on and I think they cause glitches. I always used to do clean install of Windows versions, and think it would be nice to be able to do that in KDE, but there's a lot of legacy cruft with various settings and conf files scattered in various random folders. At some point it really should be cleaned up.. one central folder for all settings.. no some settings are stored in a KDE4 folder, and others are stored in this other one KDE5 introduced, etc.
Somehow or another, if you open a file in Dolphin on one of these network addresses in a non-KDE application, it seems to pass it through using a FUSE filesystem, which does work somewhat but not 100% in my experience (I don't really know how this works or remember when it falls down). The terminal view in Dolphin also `cd`s to this virtual directory.
Of course, if you really really wanted the sshfs mount for some reason, then this workaround doesn't help you.
Right now I have the TV disabled, but if I go to the Display settings and enable it, the TV and monitor have a huge gap for some reason and KDE can't apply the configuration since it says that there should be no gap between the displays. I can of course fix this manually and apply, but if I disable and enable the TV again it seems that it forgots my layout and I need to setup everything from scratch again.
But anyway, thanks for the fantastic work!