Ubuntu with KDE or Kubuntu
 

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.

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.

My main reason for using Ubuntu is this:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41Ive5gNhuL.jpg
(https://www.amazon.com/Ubuntu-Linux-…al-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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

All you need to get started. :p

https://i.redd.it/lrezkedmpe481.jpg

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). :)

https://i.ibb.co/RDBVqRm/Running-Linux.jpg

IIRC, Red Hat had nice guides with their installation media too.

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.

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.

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.

What few people might realize, is, that the term "Ubuntu" has a deeper meaning : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy

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

That's a good one! :D

KDE's terrible these days. I wouldn't use it unless you have a really good reason to - and I can't think of what that reason would be. I used it religiously for almost 25 years (from its creation in 1996, up until just a few years ago) but it's really gone to shit. Final straw for me was a pretty huge bug I had a ticket in for, it is/was acknowledged, but never fixed over the course of about a year. In the process of trying to get it sorted out / fixed, one of the (at the time) better-known KDE devs actually contacted me in private and said that nobody would ever fix that bug, because he was the only person remaining in the project who had the knowledge to fix it, and he was leaving the KDE project that very week, because he saw it as a dead/failed project.

I moved to Xfce, which I'd recommend. MATE and Cinnamon aren't bad either. GNOME 3 is an abomination.

KDE vs Gnome vs Others? - Frankly, I don't care . As long as an interface lets me do what I want and looks OK, I'm fine. I'm sure that there are better window systems out there, but I don't bother looking for them. Although I may, based on recommendations try Xfce (so thanks for the suggestions). Some time in the future.

My question in the OP was mostly a technical one, but I expected (and welcome) suggestions for other systems. But as said, I don't have any immediate need for leaving KDE and Gnome 3 (with Cinnamon).

pibbuR who (nitpicking mode on) personally reserves words like "travesty" for things (he considers) more important than most pieces of software. (nitpicking mode off) :)

PS. Another Linux joke:
Daddy, what are clouds made of?
Linux servers, mostly.

It is BTW fascinating how Linux, which started as a one man project back in '91 now has become a very important part of modern computing. Even supercomputers now use Linux as the OS.
DS.

PPS. I don't think I'll try MATE, I fear that one is mostly for Aussies. DS

That's bad news. :( KDE was doing great except a confusion due to some redundancy left in the configuration panels (at least in openSUSE), but overall a solid choice. I haven't used it in a while, so it's sad to hear about that.

GNOME since version 3 isn't for everyone indeed, I don't mind a desktop environment that is a little more "complicated" to use but which lets me do what I want. It reminded me the Apple philosophy a little bit, and sure enough, the latest GNOME versions seem to look like macOS (I suppose one can configure that differently, at least). So I suppose my gripe is subjective and mostly with the window manager.

From my little experience, if you don't want to start digging into the configuration files, the safest way is to use one of the default desktops offered by the distribution. It's been tested by more people, and there's more doc and support.

On the other way, digging into the OS files is what Linux is all about, and that's the best way to learn it, even if it's daunting sometimes.

For example I've used Manjaro lately, which is great except the package management, but the Arch User Repository is nice to have. It comes with Xfce (that I'd recommend), KDE or GNOME. Community Editions come with Cinnamon, MATE and other things - like Deepin for anyone who'd dare touching that.

Mint is a very user-friendly distribution last time I checked. It offers by default Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce, all great choices. If I had to be Ubuntu-related, I'd choose one of those.

To be honest, the choice of DE becomes less and less important to me in comparison to the package management, the available repositories and the general state of the distribution.

Well. I got problems. With the Kubuntu installation. It wouldn't boot. Sometimes.

That's not entirely true. It booted, but not into any user interface. Unless you consider an all black screen with (possibly) all black and unrespoinsive icons an UI. So i had to use the swedish button and reboot it, a procedure a Linux system (and therefore also me) sometimes is not enitrely happy with.

I don't know what caused it, may have something to do with switching between single and dual monitors. I didn't do much to find out, and installed good ol' Ubuntu with Gnome3/Cinnamon, possibly as a temporary solution. As I think I've said, after learning all there is to know about Ubuntu, I may switch to something completely different like Suse.

pibbuR who now again has to spend time configuring the system, which he actually thinks is fun.

PS. Three Linux jokes today (slightly modified by yours truly):

Q: The box says 'Requires Windows 10 or better'. What do you do?
A: Install Linux.

Q: Why can't the devil infect a Linux system?
A: Because 666 is not executable

Q: In computing, what's the only way to generate a truly random string?
A: Put a Windows user in front of vi and tell him to quit.

DS

No, you got an opportunity to learn (that's the Linux tao) :D

You shouldn't give up too quickly and ask for help if that happens again. There are a few people who know about Linux here, but that's the kind of problem I'd submit into their forums (after searching if anyone else already had it). I don't know about Kubuntu, but in other forums people are usually very helpful and tech-savvy.

You have a Swedish button? o_o That remembers me when I went to Sweden to work for a client and had to type on a weird keyboard for a few days. I loved the country by the way, beautiful and so peaceful!

My advice would be to stick with Ubuntu if you've already found a good book to learn from. You can still make your own mind and change later.

This little graph may be helpful to visualize the big families (or not). Distrowatch is a good source of information.

Oh, but I do (seek help). Lots of useful info on the net in general and in particular here. Hence the OP.

But sometimes, a quick and dirty solution is … well … when I don't bother … good enough.
The swedish button=the on-off button. Or in windows, Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Part of the (mostly) friendly insults echanged between the Nordic countries. I assume that the Swedes have a Norwegian button.

Yepp. For the moment it's ?Ubuntu. But I wouldn't be surprised if I eventually switch to Suse. Suse was the first Linux I tried, and I'm still kind of fond of it.

pibbuR who says thanks.

PS. Not a Linux joke this time, but a friendly Nordic insult, this time, for fairness reasons, told from the perspective of a Swede.

On Arlanda, the airport outside Stockholm. "Plane for London, due for departure at 17:30. Go to gate.". "Plane for Berlin, due for departure at 17:45. Go to gate.". "Plane for Oslo will leave when the long hand points right up, and the short hand points right down".

DS.

PPS. My main linux machine is on my LAN known as "Sinux", because that one has a mathematical/scientific theme. The Linux installation of my 2-1 is "Archaeopteryx" - lots of biology and extinct things on that one. When it's booting in Windows it's "Haloarcula", a single-cell species of the archae domain, with a rather unusual square shape. DS

I didn't go that far up North unfortunately, only saw pictures from a friend.

Here, after Norse mythology I switched to Greek mythology for names. I was hoping it would help remembering which god did what, but that didn't work.

(do continue with the jokes, they're great! :lol:)

Astronomy is your friend, since lots of things including has-beens like Pluto are named after greek/roman deities and surrounding entities.

pibbur who admits that the asteroid 6042 Cheshirecat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6042_Cheshirecat) is not named after a deity.