RHEL 8

[Brian Cluff]

On 10/13/2015 06:14 PM, Phil Waclawski wrote:
> Yes, and the UNITY thing on Ubuntu also beat windows 8 to the punch.
> That was when I switched to Kubuntu.  I've had a student testing kubuntu
> 15 and it looks like the customizations I normally do to KDE have been
> disabled (or hidden) in KDE 5....may start looking at Mint or something
> else.

Just curious, what customizations are you finding that are missing? In 
my option Kubuntu 15.04 was really a rough release and I haven't 
recommend it to much of anyone. Plasma 5 appears to have been adopted 
about 2 months too soon to make it the default desktop in Kubuntu. After 
about 2 months you could load the Kubuntu backports PPA and that would 
make things fairly nice.

There are a small handful of plasmoids that didn't make the port over to 
the plasma 5 environment, one of my favorites being the the 
"quicklaunch" plasmoid. At first I was pissed, but on doing some 
research I found out that the quicklaunch plasmoid has been abandoned by 
the author for years so it was bound to get dropped anyway. The good 
thing is that the effective functionality of the quicklaunch plasmoid 
has been pulled into the folderview plasmoid which changes it's behavior 
if it's put into a panel.

Anyway, cut to the as unreleased Kubunutu 15.10... It's a whole 
different beast compared to the 15.04 rlease, and in my opinion is what 
should have been the initial plasma 5 desktop release. All the crashes 
are now gone. Most of the missing features are back and the still 
missing ones are most likely your least used features and should be back 
in shortly. The desktop is silky smooth and noticeably faster than the 
14.x versions of KDE. Of course it could also be argued that Kubuntu 
wouldn't have been in such a good state if it hadn't released plasma 5 
to the wild when it did... oh well, it is what it is.

If you are currently running 14.04LTS then I believe that by the time 
you upgrade to the next LTS in 6 months, the desktop should be just a 
faster, smoother version of what you already know... only better.
If you are looking to upgrade sooner, then I think you'll still find the 
desktop in excellent shape... It might be missing a few minor features 
right now, but there is often a workaround till the feature gets added 
back in in the near future.

Probably the biggest change that might bite you is that KDE is now 
storing it's configurations in more standard locations like .config, 
.local, etc and a small number of other paths have changed as well, like 
the path to the service menus. A quick mv and a softlink quickly take 
care of the legacy location on an updated box.

Brian Cluff