How to try out the latest version of KDE

I haven't had much time recently for messing about with Linux (rather than actually using it on my PC and laptop), but I came across an article recently on DebugPoint.com (via linuxtoday) which talked about a bug fix release in KDE with "almost all the bugs... squashed already". The KDE Announcements page says this is the third bug fix release after an "absolutely massive release" with "tons of new features and improvements."

I haven't tried KDE for years, so time for a play.

Here's how to try out the latest version of KDE. It's a live USB - so no need to install. These instructions assume you have Linux already. There are other guides available for other OSs.

1. Go to KDE neon and download the latest version. KDE neon is a "rapidly updated software repository" for KDE, based on Ubuntu. It's not a full Linux distribution - just a good way to try out the latest version of KDE if you are not running a rolling release distribution, like the Gnome release based on Fedora which you can download to try out the latest Gnome. Running Debian Stable as I am, I would have to wait over a year for the latest KDE to hit the repositories.

2. Find an old USB drive or SD card. 2GB would be ideal. A good way to make use of  those old memory devices at the back of your draw now that 128GB drives are as cheap as chips.

3. Plug it in and check the device name with this command:

$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-id

Look for the name of the USB drive: in this case it's sdb. (Note: not sdb1 etc as these are partitions of the disk.) Be sure to get this right, or the next step will destroy your hard drive.

4. In your terminal, navigate to the download folder and become root:

$ cd ~/Downloads

$ su

NB: the su command is similar to the su - command except it leaves you in the same folder. It also leaves you with whatever environment variables your system administration has set up for your user. As I'm the administrator and I have set any variables, that is not an issue.

5. Burn the image to the USB drive with the following command:

# dd if=neon-user-20201203-0947.iso of=/dev/sdb

Where if is the source (the file name of the iso image) and of is the destination (in this case the USB drive name we determined earlier). Make sure to get the destination right or you could overwrite your hard drive!

After pressing enter, you may not notice anything happening for a few minutes. If your USB drive has an LED, it will flash. At the end of the process, the terminal will report the successful completion.

6. Reboot the computer. Go into the BIOS if necessary to allow USB boot. There are many guides out there if you need help.

7. Enjoy playing with the latest version of KDE.

So what are my impressions? Well, it's very beautiful, and seems very fast and stable, even on my old and low-powered laptop. It seems to be more mature than KDE of the past, with less of the over adornment of bells and whistles, although it still has the abundance of configuration options of KDE.