Nate Drake explores the lavish new Plasma desktop in the latest Kubuntu. Is this the greatest KDE-based distro to date?
IN BRIEF
Kubuntu continues to be an excellent choice for KDE lovers. The installer is easy to set up. Although not all Gear apps are bundled, they are simple to download via Discover.
SPECS
CPU: 2GHz dual-core
Mem: 4GB
HDD: 25GB
Builds: AMD64
Kubuntu has been in development since 2004 as an official flavour of the Ubuntu operating system. Current iterations, including the most recent version 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur), use the KDE Plasma desktop.
Given that it has an Ubuntu base, Kubuntu 23.10 will be supported for nine months. Crucially, 2023 is the last year that Kubuntu will support 32-bit users, as it is currently only available for AMD64 architectures.
If you choose to download the hefty 3.7GB ISO, you can take it for a test spin in live mode or install to a drive. We chose to do the latter and, as we’d expect from a Ubuntu-based OS, the install wizard was a breeze, offering the option to install thirdparty codecs, partition the drive and, most crucially, encrypt the system drive via LUKS. The experimental ZFS install options are not available by default, though power users may be able to configure these manually.
As it was loading, the installer also helpfully displayed colourful icons of Kubuntu’s default apps and prompted us to use software centre Discover to download more as necessary. It also provides helpful links to Kubuntu’s extensive official support pages and community forums.
The official release notes state that Kubuntu 23.10 ships the eighth scheduled bug-fix release of KDE Plasma 5.27 (5.27.8).
KDE Gear has been upgraded to version 23.08, which means updates to a large number of tools and software libraries. Amongst these updates is one that hides temporary files generated by applications in the Dolphin file manager – a feature request has been pending since the turn of the century! You can also open duplicates of a Dolphin tab just by double-clicking on it.
After reviewing the KDE Gear 23.08 release notes, we saw that some of the updated apps such as Merkuro (which replaces calendar) and Itinerary are not installed by default, but can be downloaded via Discover. It does ship with v23.08.1 of advanced text editor Kate, though.
After checking the KDE website, we discovered that post-install there’s also a new welcome utility to assist newcomers to the Plasma 5.27 desktop. This didn’t display automatically, nor could we install it via Discover, as the software centre claimed it
