Ok, feedback of one: I don't care about the installation. I can install anything just fine. Should I though? Is this version better than the last one? Is it better than windows? Mac os? True os?
How is it better? Should i care about kde neon? What if i am mainstream Ubuntu with that gnome ui that wants to be MacOs (or wherever it is lately), will Neon appeal to me, why?
Stuff like that, otherwise you provided yet another installation process screenshots and we have enough of them lately.
It is my purpose to provide enough information so that anyone reading my articles can answer these questions for themselves, but I agree that there is definitely still a lot of room for improvement.
The rolling GUI/LTS underpinning is the unusual thing about KDE Neon. So I'd find a second review after about 6 months and at least one major KDE version update of interest - any glitches? config files need delete/or OK? That kind of thing.
Might also be fun to show various end user activities using KDE Plasma 5 oriented software (photos with digiKAM, music management, audio applications &c) and if they have got the desktop indexing and search sorted out yet.
The installer is used only once and not very interesting.
Default preinstalled apps are nice to know, but again not important.
Interesting things would be:
- How does this differ in practice from other similar distros like ubuntu with kde, debian (stable or unstable?) or fedora?
- Is package management different? E.g. other repos, are snaps supported? flatpak?
- What additional software is added or missing in the repos compared its ubuntu lts base? Is this actually a standalone distro or "just" an added repo?
- What are the drawbacks or advantages of this distro compared to ubuntu+kde (kubuntu is just a flavor of ubuntu, not really a separate distro)?
- How many people are working on this distro?
- What about security? Do they have their own team?
- Can you contribute packages to Neon or only to ubuntu?
I always wanted to like KDE but never really good hooked on it way back when I was surveying desktop environments over a decade ago. Have been on xmonad on my main desktops for quite some time now and just going with GNOME, Xfce or LXDE in whatever other scenario I need X11 in. I am now running KDE on my media PC and am very happy with it - it is very streamlined yet configurable. There are keyboard shortcut possibilities for pretty much anything I'd want.
I might just be replacing Lubuntu with this as my default "just need Ubuntu with a graphical environment" dist.
KDE feels amazing on Manjaro. I always liked KDE but it has always felt rather immature (severe bugs, clumsy design, questionable architecture) and now it feels complete finally. I would probably prefer tiling window managers if I had a huge display and used terminals a lot but as long as neither applies to me KDE seems the best of all the options available today (XFCE is not bad too but it lacks native support for Win7-like task panel).
And what would I get and why would I probably need it? In fact the only things I want from a DE are a Win7-like task panel + pretty and convenient window decorations. Another thing I love about KDE is Krusader - the best Linux file manager I know (I've tried using it in a GTK environment on Ubuntu but it looked ugly to the point of unusable).
KDE is convenient for a lot of things. At least, handling of the desktop / wallpaper, the amazing command runner, the menu with its search bar that also supports running commands, the network, bluetooth, clipboard management, the task manager, the configuration center, the overall integration that pretty much stays here event without KDE's window manager (which is amazing too). I'm not speaking about KDE applications because they are usable outside of plasma, but I tend to like them too.
So yes, if one day I found that an advanced tiling window manager is what I want, maybe I would keep the rest of the KDE environment.
Yes, you're right. I've forgotten the command runner isn't a standard feature of other DEs/WMs... As for BlueTooth - I have never managed to make it work - it worked on Ubuntu (although it used to take me ~10 minutes of random switching to make my BT headphones work with it but at least it would always detect them, the problem was setting them up correctly) but doesn't work on Manjaro+KDE at all, fortunately I don't really need it. As for clipboard management - it can be helpful in many cases but in my everyday work it only annoys me as I can't find how to disable clipboard erasure on Kate exit.
For what it's worth, krunner works well outside of plasma. I've found that the one of lxqt is quite nice too. I'm lost with runners from other desktop environments. No auto completion, no history or no calculator.
I've found that clipboard is wiped on application exit in X11 when no clipboard manager is running. Annoying when this happens. KDE's one is Klipper, and I tend to set it such that it keeps and history or 50 items.
Off topic: by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using Wayland compositors is sadly the main thing that keeps me from using Wayland. Which is too bad, since my WQHD screen support in X is so so. I hope this gets fixed in a not to distant future, I rely on this feature.
> I've found that clipboard is wiped on application exit in X11 when no clipboard manager is running.
I've never encountered this behavior in any DE before moving to KDE5 and even with KDE5.
> KDE's one is Klipper, and I tend to set it such that it keeps and history or 50 items.
Although I admit clipboard history can be useful and even I used to have a task made easier with it, now I really don't want a clipboard manager to keep history.
> by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using Wayland
It doesn't work as it is meant to, reliably with all the apps even with X11 with KDE5.
I think I encounter this behavior outside of big desktop managers, when using an openbox session for instance.
For clipboard history, I understand that you don't want everything saved. I think most clipboard managers allow you to delete entries. (But you have to think about it)
>> by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using Wayland
> It doesn't work as it is meant to, reliably with all the apps even with X11 with KDE5.
I'm curious, in which situation it does not work correctly?
> I'm curious, in which situation it does not work correctly?
I can't remember particular cases already but sometimes middle mouse click won't paste anything or will paste old clipboard content and only Ctrl+V works the meant way. It seems this happens either because Ctrl+C/V and MMB actually use 2 independent clipboards that are not always synchronized correctly or because some UI toolkits have some quirks with this part.
Yes, I actually rely on mouse paste and Ctrl+V being independent clipboards (though usually clipboard managers offer to synchronize them, which I've never tried, so I can't say if it works flawlessly, and I can imagine glitches here).
Yes the amazingly tiny command runner that stays on top of screen and you fiddle with pos in kwin setting to make it appear somewhere sensible. I rather use dmenu/rofi for this.
> I've tried using it in a GTK environment on Ubuntu but it looked ugly to the point of unusable I've tried using it in a GTK environment on Ubuntu but it looked ugly to the point of unusable
Could you elaborate what you mean by that? Whether you run an application on a qt-based DE or gtk-based or motif or no DE... does not matter at all in my experience. The only difference is the default gtk or qt theme used (easily changed) and what the window decorations look like.
Some text was unreadable (i.e. almost-white on white), some most of the icons was missing, the rest just ugly. I have no idea how to change the Qt theme in vanilla Ubuntu or Xubuntu, all the other Qt apps (e.g. VLC) looked fine (I believe the problem only affects apps build against KDE frameworks and not against pure Qt).
Ah, so wrong default config of qgtkstyle and colors. In kde selecting the gtk theme is very simple via system settings but gnome insists on things like tweak tool instead. You can use qt5ct to set the config.
> (I believe the problem only affects apps build against KDE frameworks and not against pure Qt).
Not in my experience. It is just that some of the more basic qt apps behave better with missing icons or wrongly configured colors.
I like the concept of "Stable OS, Updated GUI". I've been running it for a while on my laptop.
Good:
* Things just seem to work. The notifications and system settings are pretty easy and slick. The start menu is good.
* Annoying: I miss Ubuntu's Unity keyboard shortcuts. Not just that, but holding down "meta" key showed the shortcuts. I also had trouble doing... I think it was adding a hidden network? There was something in the network manager I couldn't do. AND: To this day I don't know how to make a multi-line taskbar like you can do in Windows.
I never liked KDE (Been using Linux since 2005) but this 5.1.x is making me swing my vote over.
> To this day I don't know how to make a multi-line taskbar like you can do in Windows.
Right click on the task bar at the bottom, goto "Configure Task Manager". There's a setting for how many rows to allow.
The only other thing needed is to have the panel tall enough (You'll have to play, I don't know what this height is) and it will then start doing multi-row/line task bar when you have enough windows.
Also you can check the "Always make rows box" in that same settings dialog to force it to always be multi-line.
I used to use KDE Neon installed on my work 2015 MBP. Very happy with it and missed the keyboard shortcuts so much that I switched back to KDE on my new laptop from PopOS.
I'm not sure what the point of kubuntu is any more since that's what most people will get and they'll get an old and outdated experience as a result. IMO KDE Neon should become the new Kubuntu.
BTW what I miss using KDE and willing to extend it is a concise widget toolkit. I've taken a look at source code of some plasmoids and it seemed quite extraterrestrial to me, certainly not something you can start with quickly and easily so I've ended up using a widget (a "plasmoid") that just displays HTML and serving HTML content to it (and even that widget was not really easy to install).
Looking at the screenshots makes me seriously wonder if any professional graphic artist / ui designer is working on that project... screens are mostly empty gray panels, with weirdly spaced inputs from the 80s , tiny fonts and bland colors... i don’t want to sound too harsh on the nice guys that worked on it, but if they want to have anything popular they should give UI a bit more love ( and i think now is the time when a popular lîux desktop is the most needed)
It's possible to make a user interface that's both functional and well-designed. Indeed, good UI design improves functionality by making it more accessible and understandable. Things like consistency of elements and appropriate use of whitespace help to avoid mistakes and confusion.
I have to agree with the parent – it's also surprising to me how often otherwise excellent open-source projects are let down by poor user interface design. A large part of this is probably down to the more technical nature of the teams building them, who are probably the group for which design matters least. But I see this a lot in things like internal admin tools too – developers can quite often develop UIs that are so bad they actually become dangerous, and I wonder if some kind of "useful design skills for software developers" might be a worthwhile thing to work on.
I’d like to address this comment because i think it highlights a common misconception amongst developer : a good looking UI isn’t first and foremost about being « pretty ». It’s about being meaningful. About making sense.
If all i see when i look at the screen is a huge big gray panel, then it means nothing. There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason. If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important. If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention.
Colors, font and layout are of the utmost importance when designning a ui because they convey meaning. Which is what a GUI is all about ( otherwise just use a terminal).
> If all i see when i look at the screen is a huge big gray panel, then it means nothing.
If all you see is a big gray panel, there's something seriously wrong indeed, because a panel without any content is useless. But that is not the case here.
> There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason.
The background color does not need a particular reason to "take up space". It is there when nothing else has a reason to be there. That's how a background works.
> If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important.
If the fonts look tiny, it means they're consistent with fonts elsewhere, including places where space is at more of a premium than in the installer.
> If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention.
In the screenshots, nothing especially requires your attention. There are no warnings, errors, etc...
If nothing requires my attention, then why make a screen in the first place ?
Of course something does requires my attention. There is content, and content has structure and different levels of importance. A screen in an installer is a step. A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere. Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome.
If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc
Those are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself when you see a screen like that. Just based on visual layout and style.
> If nothing requires my attention, then why make a screen in the first place ?
Of course something requires your attention, the content of the screen. But if you highlight everything, you highlight nothing.
> A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere.
It is.
> Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome.
They're on the left. I'm seriously wondering whether you even looked at the screenshots.
> If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc
If the background is the thing taking up the most space, it means that your screen is unnecessarily large for the task. That's unavoidable and not a problem to begin with. You can't just put multiple inputs in one "step", else you'd have a step with no coherent topic like Installation type+timezone.
I think you should have a look at some mac os installation wizard to understand what i mean.
In case someone reading this happen to be involved with the design of kde screens, i would suggest reading this kind of design 101 articles :
https://www.canva.com/learn/visual-hierarchy/
> it means nothing is especially requiring my attention.
Which is exactly the case in these screenshots. It is an installer step. The only "important" part is the next button at the bottom and it is full screen because it is an installer, hence lots of blank space (or slideshow distractions in other installers).
Also tiny fonts with huge screen sizes, and 95% of the screen real estate being wasted. And the installer icon is small, hidden in the top-left corner of the desktop with an icon that has low contrast with the background.
I loved the looks of classical Gnome. Say Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10).
My favorite design these days is an extremely minimal UI. A tiling window manager (StumpWM), Emacs, a terminal (xterm) and a web browser (Firefox). It's very efficient, and solves the design issue by having almost no design at all.
I tried i3wm for a while - are you able to compare that to StumpWM? I really like the idea of a tiling wm, but haven't gotten around to customizing it exactly the way I would want it.
FWIW, at least within certain bounds, design is functionality. My eyes aren't awesome (severe myopia + floaters), and, judging by the screenshots in TFA, I would have a difficult time working productively on KDE Neon due to some of the decisions around text.
How is it so different from Gnome 3's design? The parent's complaints were about wasted space estate, inadequate font choice and bland colors; Adwaita, Gnome 3's default theme, suffers from the exact same problems -- in fact, many desktop applications today suffer from the exact same symptoms, largely due to professional designers who should know better copycatting mobile design on desktop systems.
I wonder if this is due to flattenning the UI of KDE 4, but failing to adequately compensate for the space that used to be occupied by the shadows, rounded corners, and embosses now changed to simple lines, etc.
Almost all screenshots in the article are of the installer which is "mostly empty" or a slideshow of random things for most OSs and does not seem any worse than the windows one.
Actually, the only apps shown are system settings and the update manager. Hence, I am somewhat confused what you are basing your (strongly worded) criticism on.
I just don't understand why the majority of them look so terrible, Xfce has weirdly become one of the better looking DE's now and it was designed to use minimal resources.
I've been having an issue with scaling in KDE Plasma with multiple monitors. Have you been able to resolve that with Neon? I have my 4k laptop monitor at 2x scaling, but then my 1080p monitors are also 2x scaled, and unusable. I've resigned to using 1440p on my laptop with default scaling.
As an old time KDE fan I had to give up on it because it mostly didn't work reliably after 4.x. I recently tried out Plasma on arch and was pleasantly surprised to see lot of it mostly works well - I can force font DPI and use fractional scale which means a combination of it works better on HiDPI screen than GNOME.
It still scared me few times when the lock screen didn't really lock after waking from suspend. Hopefully the Arch rolling release means I will get a fix soon.
KDE always was and still is a buggy, but hot mess. Also, they've been busy dumbing down the UX for a more "user-friendly" Linux which traditionally means focusing on the wrong elements. Which also means that previously easy things became impossible. A good and powerful file manager was replaced by a lame joke.
I really liked KDE 4 once. It was near perfect with 4.6. But then along came Plasma 5. Downhill from there. Instead of introducing new features and design they should've focused on bugs and stability.
Kde Neon started out ok for me but slowed a low spec laptop to the
point of being unusable within a few months. Other distros have run
fine on the same machine before and afterwards. On top of that, Kmail
somehow destroyed a couple of years of messages. I've been using
Manjaro with Xfce lately and wish I had done so originally.
I've been using KDE Neon since a few months after its initial release, and I'm very satisfied with it. Before that, I was for a decade on Gentoo (switching between wmii and KDE from time to time), and then on Ubuntu for a couple years (around the time I started using docker).
There are still bugs here and there (which is perfectly understandable), but it's the most polished KDE experience I ever had. I'm actually wondering if it's not the most polished linux experience I ever had - except maybe a vanilla Ubuntu using as much defaults as possible, but I just can't help moving from defaults after a short while (that's the main interest of gnu/linux, to me).
EDIT: oh btw, worth mentioning: I'm using the user edition (the LTS one). I initially used the developer edition, but I found its constant updates annoying, and things were a bit less stable than the user edition (as one could expect).
I've been running Kubuntu 18.04 and so far I like it. It's customizable without plugins. It's closer to GNOME 2 than Unity was and GNOME 3 is. After installing the Nvidia drivers it pretty much just works. I wish there were more themes that were compatible across Qt 4/5 and GTK 2/3. The default theme, Breeze, isn't bad but it wastes whitespace.
KDE offers the integration that I expect from a desktop. Plasma was way ahead of others, when it came to management of
* audio, including Bluetooth
* network
* display
Unfortunately, little care is taken on security.
KDE Wallet simply offers an API to all your passwords, without any separation. Users cannot tell which application just accessed the "wallet". Certificate warnings randomly pop up, asking for "yes" or "no" without any explaination. Plasma "integration" will ask you for full access to your Google account, but it is unclear what for. The calendar integration will require separate authentication -- to the calendar only.
I think Linux desktops were ahead of others, some years ago, but right now I struggle to recommend it to anyone.
80 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadThis was my first experience with KDE Neon, so I can't compare the installation to an installation of an earlier version.
Was there any information missing that you would have liked to read? I would appreciate any feedback you can provide!
Stuff like that, otherwise you provided yet another installation process screenshots and we have enough of them lately.
Thank you for your feedback!
Might also be fun to show various end user activities using KDE Plasma 5 oriented software (photos with digiKAM, music management, audio applications &c) and if they have got the desktop indexing and search sorted out yet.
Features, software, etc.
I would really like to hear what information or topics you missed in the review.
The installer is used only once and not very interesting. Default preinstalled apps are nice to know, but again not important.
Interesting things would be: - How does this differ in practice from other similar distros like ubuntu with kde, debian (stable or unstable?) or fedora? - Is package management different? E.g. other repos, are snaps supported? flatpak? - What additional software is added or missing in the repos compared its ubuntu lts base? Is this actually a standalone distro or "just" an added repo? - What are the drawbacks or advantages of this distro compared to ubuntu+kde (kubuntu is just a flavor of ubuntu, not really a separate distro)? - How many people are working on this distro? - What about security? Do they have their own team? - Can you contribute packages to Neon or only to ubuntu?
I might just be replacing Lubuntu with this as my default "just need Ubuntu with a graphical environment" dist.
So yes, if one day I found that an advanced tiling window manager is what I want, maybe I would keep the rest of the KDE environment.
I've found that clipboard is wiped on application exit in X11 when no clipboard manager is running. Annoying when this happens. KDE's one is Klipper, and I tend to set it such that it keeps and history or 50 items.
Off topic: by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using Wayland compositors is sadly the main thing that keeps me from using Wayland. Which is too bad, since my WQHD screen support in X is so so. I hope this gets fixed in a not to distant future, I rely on this feature.
I've never encountered this behavior in any DE before moving to KDE5 and even with KDE5.
> KDE's one is Klipper, and I tend to set it such that it keeps and history or 50 items.
Although I admit clipboard history can be useful and even I used to have a task made easier with it, now I really don't want a clipboard manager to keep history.
> by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using Wayland
It doesn't work as it is meant to, reliably with all the apps even with X11 with KDE5.
For clipboard history, I understand that you don't want everything saved. I think most clipboard managers allow you to delete entries. (But you have to think about it)
>> by the way, the absence of Copy paste using select+middle clic when using Wayland
> It doesn't work as it is meant to, reliably with all the apps even with X11 with KDE5.
I'm curious, in which situation it does not work correctly?
I can't remember particular cases already but sometimes middle mouse click won't paste anything or will paste old clipboard content and only Ctrl+V works the meant way. It seems this happens either because Ctrl+C/V and MMB actually use 2 independent clipboards that are not always synchronized correctly or because some UI toolkits have some quirks with this part.
Edit: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/139191/whats-the-di...
Could you elaborate what you mean by that? Whether you run an application on a qt-based DE or gtk-based or motif or no DE... does not matter at all in my experience. The only difference is the default gtk or qt theme used (easily changed) and what the window decorations look like.
> (I believe the problem only affects apps build against KDE frameworks and not against pure Qt).
Not in my experience. It is just that some of the more basic qt apps behave better with missing icons or wrongly configured colors.
But there's other like https://github.com/faho/kwin-tiling
I like the concept of "Stable OS, Updated GUI". I've been running it for a while on my laptop.
Good:
* Things just seem to work. The notifications and system settings are pretty easy and slick. The start menu is good.
* Annoying: I miss Ubuntu's Unity keyboard shortcuts. Not just that, but holding down "meta" key showed the shortcuts. I also had trouble doing... I think it was adding a hidden network? There was something in the network manager I couldn't do. AND: To this day I don't know how to make a multi-line taskbar like you can do in Windows.
I never liked KDE (Been using Linux since 2005) but this 5.1.x is making me swing my vote over.
Right click on the task bar at the bottom, goto "Configure Task Manager". There's a setting for how many rows to allow.
The only other thing needed is to have the panel tall enough (You'll have to play, I don't know what this height is) and it will then start doing multi-row/line task bar when you have enough windows.
Also you can check the "Always make rows box" in that same settings dialog to force it to always be multi-line.
It is there by default. Simply make the panel a bit taller. You can also right-click to adjust the number of rows and to always arrange in columns.
I'm not sure what the point of kubuntu is any more since that's what most people will get and they'll get an old and outdated experience as a result. IMO KDE Neon should become the new Kubuntu.
It's possible to make a user interface that's both functional and well-designed. Indeed, good UI design improves functionality by making it more accessible and understandable. Things like consistency of elements and appropriate use of whitespace help to avoid mistakes and confusion.
I have to agree with the parent – it's also surprising to me how often otherwise excellent open-source projects are let down by poor user interface design. A large part of this is probably down to the more technical nature of the teams building them, who are probably the group for which design matters least. But I see this a lot in things like internal admin tools too – developers can quite often develop UIs that are so bad they actually become dangerous, and I wonder if some kind of "useful design skills for software developers" might be a worthwhile thing to work on.
If all i see when i look at the screen is a huge big gray panel, then it means nothing. There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason. If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important. If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention.
Colors, font and layout are of the utmost importance when designning a ui because they convey meaning. Which is what a GUI is all about ( otherwise just use a terminal).
If all you see is a big gray panel, there's something seriously wrong indeed, because a panel without any content is useless. But that is not the case here.
> There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason.
The background color does not need a particular reason to "take up space". It is there when nothing else has a reason to be there. That's how a background works.
> If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important.
If the fonts look tiny, it means they're consistent with fonts elsewhere, including places where space is at more of a premium than in the installer.
> If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention.
In the screenshots, nothing especially requires your attention. There are no warnings, errors, etc...
Of course something does requires my attention. There is content, and content has structure and different levels of importance. A screen in an installer is a step. A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere. Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome. If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc
Those are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself when you see a screen like that. Just based on visual layout and style.
Of course something requires your attention, the content of the screen. But if you highlight everything, you highlight nothing.
> A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere.
It is.
> Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome.
They're on the left. I'm seriously wondering whether you even looked at the screenshots.
> If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc
If the background is the thing taking up the most space, it means that your screen is unnecessarily large for the task. That's unavoidable and not a problem to begin with. You can't just put multiple inputs in one "step", else you'd have a step with no coherent topic like Installation type+timezone.
In case someone reading this happen to be involved with the design of kde screens, i would suggest reading this kind of design 101 articles : https://www.canva.com/learn/visual-hierarchy/
Which is exactly the case in these screenshots. It is an installer step. The only "important" part is the next button at the bottom and it is full screen because it is an installer, hence lots of blank space (or slideshow distractions in other installers).
[1] https://elementary.io
My favorite design these days is an extremely minimal UI. A tiling window manager (StumpWM), Emacs, a terminal (xterm) and a web browser (Firefox). It's very efficient, and solves the design issue by having almost no design at all.
It can actually look really nice. See e.g. a some images from a random user with a similar setup: https://lepisma.github.io/wiki/misc/desktop.html
StumpWM is essentially Ratpoison reimplemented in Common Lisp. It's really good and stable, plus it resembles Emacs a lot. There's even a winner-mode.
There's not much to say except that you can tweak it till infinity and extend it in CL. But for me most defaults are pretty good already.
Some core devs are employed or have been employed by companies such as Novell, Nokia and Blue Systems.
Actually, the only apps shown are system settings and the update manager. Hence, I am somewhat confused what you are basing your (strongly worded) criticism on.
It still scared me few times when the lock screen didn't really lock after waking from suspend. Hopefully the Arch rolling release means I will get a fix soon.
I really liked KDE 4 once. It was near perfect with 4.6. But then along came Plasma 5. Downhill from there. Instead of introducing new features and design they should've focused on bugs and stability.
I've found one person to admit they preferred KDE 4 series.
Everyone else seems to prefer the older 3 series or the newer 5 series, me included.
There are still bugs here and there (which is perfectly understandable), but it's the most polished KDE experience I ever had. I'm actually wondering if it's not the most polished linux experience I ever had - except maybe a vanilla Ubuntu using as much defaults as possible, but I just can't help moving from defaults after a short while (that's the main interest of gnu/linux, to me).
EDIT: oh btw, worth mentioning: I'm using the user edition (the LTS one). I initially used the developer edition, but I found its constant updates annoying, and things were a bit less stable than the user edition (as one could expect).
* audio, including Bluetooth
* network
* display
Unfortunately, little care is taken on security.
KDE Wallet simply offers an API to all your passwords, without any separation. Users cannot tell which application just accessed the "wallet". Certificate warnings randomly pop up, asking for "yes" or "no" without any explaination. Plasma "integration" will ask you for full access to your Google account, but it is unclear what for. The calendar integration will require separate authentication -- to the calendar only.
I think Linux desktops were ahead of others, some years ago, but right now I struggle to recommend it to anyone.