Review: Kubuntu 24.10
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
During my trail I found myself wanting to separate my impressions of Plasma 6.1 from my views on Kubuntu. While they are naturally closely wed, I came away thinking of them as separate components.
Kubuntu, as a whole, worked quite well, especially for an interim release between LTS versions. Apart from a minor setback with my video settings early on, Kubuntu performed well in all aspects. My hardware was detected and functioned properly, the install experience was easy, the system was stable and performed fairly quickly. The Kubuntu project was mostly conservative in its approach to adopting Wayland and this has resulted in me having an above-average impression of the distribution and its Wayland session. (Too many other distributions adopted using Wayland by default quickly, often with poor results.)
With regards to Plasma 6.1, my overall impression was less positive. Yes, it is stable and fairly responsive, but the experience is unpolished in a number of areas. Admittedly I got off to a good start with Plasma - I liked the welcome screen, the soft light theme, and the simple tour. I liked Discover as the software centre too, it was quick and proved to be a solid software manager.
What bothered me creeped in with a dozen little annoyances over a period of several days. It was the little things you don't notice at first, but which start to bother a person after a while. The loud beeping when changing volume levels, the buggy handling of files in Dolphin, and the way the application menu's transparency made it harder to read launcher names leap to mind. For the past 20 years I've been praising how flexible Plasma is and its multitude of options, but I spent so much time wading through the System Settings panel in this trial to disable or fix minor issues that I think I spent more time searching for things to turn off than I did checking e-mail some days.