Ubuntu with KDE or Kubuntu

pibbuR

Feeling ... lonely?
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Hi.

I need KDE interface on my Linux installation (currently Ubuntu 21.10). I can either install Kubuntu from scratch (no hassle, I don't have anything important there), or install the KDE-desktop (or full KDE installation) on my Ubuntu OS.

Any advice?

Are there any other significant differences between Ubuntu and Kubuntu other than the default UI? I'm thinking of available software, system administration using the console.

Any problems with having Gnome and KDE installed at the same time?

I will run it on an intel I7, with 16 Gb RAM.

pibbuR --help

PS. I have consulted the net, but what I've found has only been very superficial. DS.
 
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1) I'd personally avoid Ubuntu altogether, if nothing else at least for the wild card that Canonical is, they have a controversial history regarding several points. One of which is having sent the user's desktop search requests to Amazon, and inject Amazon products in the search results. Another is the proprietary Snap store, which is not open-source and contains many software that should not as per their licence terms.

It's also a bit of a messy architecture. And they made some radical changes in the past, which is not always easy to manage for the user who upgrades to something different. Well, at least they're using systemd now.

That being said, there are many non-open source drivers that facilitate the integration of the OS on computers. So it's often considered an easy Linux solution, if you're fine with the potential issues above.

If not, there are many other good distributions, openSUSE being one of the best regarding the installation and upgrade of software.

2) As for the desktop environment, there shouldn't be any issue if you install both GNOME and KDE, at least on normal distributions, I don't know if Kubuntu has specific incompatibilities but I shouldn't think so.

A "sudo apt install gnome" should be enough, but I'd search or ask in their forums first to be on the safe side, as I see GNOME is not in the default desktop list (doesn't mean much though).

If reinstalling isn't much of an issue for you, you could try.

Is that on a desktop or a laptop? I hear that Kubuntu (with its default KDE) is more energy-efficient and better-suited to laptops, though I have never tried - I'm using lightweight environments on laptops.

If you have a desktop, why not try first by installing VMWare and installing a virtual Kubuntu + GNOME in it?

3) I don't know them enough to tell the differences. It seems they're both on systemd, have the same package system, so they seem to be very similar as far as management goes.
 
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My main reason for using Ubuntu is this:
41Ive5gNhuL.jpg

(https://www.amazon.com/Ubuntu-Linux...s=ubuntu&qid=1639473831&s=digital-text&sr=1-1)

My Linux knowledge is patchy, so a systematic treatment of the OS is useful. Haven't found anything like that for Suse (although having used Suse before, maaaasny yeards ago, knowledge is as said (very) patchy).

Regarding Snap : I've mostly used Synaptic or apt for software installation.

pibbuR$>

PS. One option is of course staying with Ubuntu now, and then switching to openSuse after I've become a guru. DS.

PPS:What is a Unix guru? https://www.levenez.com/unix/guru.html DS.
 
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My main reason for using Ubuntu is this:

(https://www.amazon.com/Ubuntu-Linux...s=ubuntu&qid=1639473831&s=digital-text&sr=1-1)

My Linux knowledge is patchy, so a systematic treatment of the OS is useful. Haven't found anything like that for Suse (although having used Suse before, maaaasny yeards ago, knowledge is as said (very) patchy).

Regarding Snap : I've mostly used Synaptic or apt for software installation.

pibbuR$>

PS. One option is of course staying with Ubuntu now, and then switching to openSuse after I've become a guru. DS.

PPS:What is a Unix guru? https://www.levenez.com/unix/guru.html DS.

Ah, the important thing is to feel at ease, especially when learning or brushing up on something. :)

openSUSE (remotely based on Slackware) has a great online doc - at least the last time I used it, which is a while now. But I prefer a good book too!

Just for information, maybe for later, I found this book quite instructive for general knowledge on Linux administration. It's more a broad book than in-depth one, it gives a very good overview of the different components without being attached to any distribution.

It does show many practical commands and mentions many programs, it's not theoretical. For example, it shows how to create users, format a partition and so on. But if you want to focus on one distribution, the book you mention seems plenty to start with.
 
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Maybe try KDE neon. It's Ubuntu based but is essentially a lightweight distro to showcase KDE. You will get the latest KDE releases asap but everything else is a Ubuntu base.
 
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Any advice?

Are there any other significant differences between Ubuntu and Kubuntu other than the default UI? I'm thinking of available software, system administration using the console.

Any problems with having Gnome and KDE installed at the same time?

The main difference is the desktop environment, and the underlying system is almost identical. KDE and Gnome also each have their own application frameworks, so distros intended for one or the other tend to favour the apps built on the corresponding framework. But there's not usually any issue installing the other framework, and using those apps, too. The framework will usually be automatically installed when you install apps that depend upon it.

In my experience, installing the full desktop environments next to each other is a pretty good way to break things. In theory it should be fine, but in practice I wouldn't recommend it. I think it's best to pick a distro designed around a particular desktop, and stick with it.
 
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In my experience, installing the full desktop environments next to each other is a pretty good way to break things. In theory it should be fine, but in practice I wouldn't recommend it. I think it's best to pick a distro designed around a particular desktop, and stick with it.

You most probably have more insight than me, I usually stick to one environment. Last GNOME/KDE mix experiment I did was with openSUSE, which is not the same animal as Ubuntu. Perhaps I had to change the scripts a little bit, I don't recall, to me it's part of the routine in Linux anyway (even with a single environment) ;) But it can be daunting sometimes, best avoid that at the beginning!
 
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Yeah, I cannibalised an old pc and stuck the parts in one of those open frame cases, for testing and troubleshooting. It's very handy for quickly plugging things in when one of my nearest and dearest want me to recover stuff from their corrupt disks, and so on. That thing's had more linux installations than I can remember, and I've found many ways to break them.

I think my last experience with multiple desktops installed was when I tried installing Gnome on KDE Neon. It was a train wreck after that, and I didn't even bother trying to fix it.
 
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Hi.
Any advice?

Hi!

I've been on Fedora for the past 6 or 7 years. I've had several installs where I upgraded from one version to the next to the next again over the course of several years without any issues.

I've changed machines over the years, and one time messed around and and to reinstall.

I've been using their Plasma desktop on my gaming machine for the last year and its been rock solid.

I have used openSUSE in the past; if you want to do a lot from a 'Control Panel' GUI like in windows, then I'd second openSUSE with Yast.

One other thing. Sorry to complicate matters, but the new steam deck will be using an immutable file system. If you're interested in that, the Fedora KDE immutable version is called Kinoite. I've been meaning to give that a try, but haven't gotten around to it.

Overall I trust Fedora and SUSE more than Canonical.
 
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Hi!

I've been on Fedora for the past 6 or 7 years. I've had several installs where I upgraded from one version to the next to the next again over the course of several years without any issues.

I've changed machines over the years, and one time messed around and and to reinstall.

I've been using their Plasma desktop on my gaming machine for the last year and its been rock solid.

I have used openSUSE in the past; if you want to do a lot from a 'Control Panel' GUI like in windows, then I'd second openSUSE with Yast.

One other thing. Sorry to complicate matters, but the new steam deck will be using an immutable file system. If you're interested in that, the Fedora KDE immutable version is called Kinoite. I've been meaning to give that a try, but haven't gotten around to it.

Overall I trust Fedora and SUSE more than Canonical.

Have you read his questions?
 
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Have you read his questions?

Thanks Redgly, yea I think so. pibbuR is comfortable with ubuntu and wants a kde desktop, says they install software with apt. I think I'm seconding your reccomendation of Fedora (dnf is a pretty close replacement for apt). And its been a very stable and up-to-date distro for me.
 
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Thanks Redgly, yea I think so. pibbuR is comfortable with ubuntu and wants a kde desktop, says they install software with apt. I think I'm seconding your reccomendation of Fedora (dnf is a pretty close replacement for apt). And its been a very stable and up-to-date distro for me.
Fedora has always been a great distro :)

I haven't recommended though, you're the first to mention it here.
 
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All you need to get started. :p

lrezkedmpe481.jpg
 
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All you need to get started. :p
What a mix, Yggdrasil with Michelangelo's painting of God ;)
I bet the video to install Red Hat is much shorter than the Slackware one, hehe.

By the way, here's what I got way back with a Slackware 3.0 installation CD-ROM (or the other way round, actually). :)



IIRC, Red Hat had nice guides with their installation media too.
 
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It would help to understand why you require KDE. I personally run ubuntu with xfce4 but that is just me. I've been working with or running some flavor of linux since 1988. My primary reason for running ubuntu these days is ease of using zfs; after growing tired of rebuilding a custom kernel for several years. zfs is absolutely fantastic with regards to durability and reliability (not so much for raw performance); but that is off topic. If i were you and you must use kde i would install ubuntu and kde on top as oppose to kubuntu since ubuntu has enough bugs and kubuntu is less supported (and yes ubuntu has a lot of bugs though recently 20.04 has become stable after we reached .3; I did try kubuntu once around 16 and find it somewhat painful i highly recommend xfce4 as a good compromise between gnome and kde.
 
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zfs is absolutely fantastic with regards to durability and reliability (not so much for raw performance); but that is off topic.

That's right, Ubuntu got ZFS somehow. It created another controversy but that must be very nice to use! I've read it was indeed a bit heavy on the system but I have never tried.

I used BTRFS on one machine and I was glad because it spared me a complete reinstall once, when I made a mistake in a big update. It had a tendency to create snapshots too often with some commands, but I could tune it. It's a bit complex to manage at first, but a life saver. I haven't done any performance tests to compare with other filesystems.
 
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At the time I was setting up my raids BTRFS had serious stability issues dealing with raid failure and fault tolerance. I can say given the number of cabling issues I've had (over time vibration causes a cable to become unseated); zfs does a fantastic job recovering from disk dropping off line as well as sectors being reallocated (which cause the sector to be zeroed. Can't comment on current state of BTRFS but since it is under active development it is a moving target.

I used BTRFS on one machine and I was glad because it spared me a complete reinstall once, when I made a mistake in a big update. It had a tendency to create snapshots too often with some commands, but I could tune it. It's a bit complex to manage at first, but a life saver. I haven't done any performance tests to compare with other filesystems.
 
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I (thought I) needed KDE for developing GUI applications using Qt. I should have known (or found out) that's not the case. In other words, I could easily have stayed with Gnome - I (probably) like Gnome (with Cinnamon) better than KDE.

At the moment I've got Kubuntu on my main Linux machine, and Ubuntu with Gnome on my 2-1 PC. I'm keeping it that way at the moment, we'll see how it works.

Anyhow, I've got the answers I needed, so thank you all.

pibbuR who thinks that the thread can safely derail now.

PS. I've got a lot oif Linux Jokes. DS

PPS. Here's one:
A Linux sysadmin walks into a pharmacy.
"ephedrine?"
"I can't serve you that"
"sudoephedrine"
"There you go".

DS.

PPPS. More will be coming in the thread. DS
 
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