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Review: Kubuntu 25.10
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Throughout my trial with Kubuntu I found my thoughts swinging back and forth, pendulum-like, between being impressed with some of the technical work which has gone into the 25.10 release and being dismayed that some of these issues made it through the beta phase. Perhaps no one is using the new "snapshot" development releases Canonical has implemented this year? That would explain some of the obvious bugs, like the inability to install Flatpak bundles which was reported within hours of the stable version becoming available.
On the one side, we have some tricky migrations such as the move from GNU's core utilities to the new Rust-based alternatives. The migration of sudo and the core utilities both seem to have gone well and I didn't encounter any issues at all with this change. There may be little incompatibilities lurking under the surface, but if they are there, I didn't run into them.
On the other side of things, Plasma 6.4 is one of the heaviest desktop environments I have ever used and its Wayland implementation is one of the buggiest I have run in the past five years. This isn't a hardware compatibility issue with Wayland, in case you're wondering. While writing this I'm also running Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 with Cinnamon running in a Wayland session; its Wayland implementation is virtually flawless and smooth on the same hardware. These issues are specific to Plasma, or at least the Plasma packages available through Kubuntu.
The live session and installer are well done on Kubuntu and the distribution is easy to set up. On the other hand, there were multiple problems with package management. Flatpak doesn't work at all, Discover pulls in Snap packages even when they are disabled in Discover's settings, and the Snap bundles of Firefox & Thunderbird are massive. I don't want to fetch a few hundred megabytes of packages every time my e-mail client updates; this is just a waste of bandwidth and disk space.
Plasma has a great settings panel and I like that System Settings makes it fairly easy to change the behaviour of the desktop. On the other hand, I wish Plasma used better defaults so I didn't need to keep going back to the settings panel to change screen dimming, disable annoying sounds, and reduce visual effects.
In short, Kubuntu does some things well, but it has some obvious bugs which should have been caught in testing and the Plasma implementation here is sub-par. I enjoyed getting to test drive the Rust-based utilities, but I wouldn't recommend this desktop experience for a regular computer user.