I’m currently on Kubuntu 24.04 and I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of new features, especially with KDE Plasma where I’m still on v5 instead of v6. Missing on things like HDR capability for gaming for example.

With 26.04 coming in a few months, is it worth it to upgrade right now to 25.10? Will I face any problems?

Or should I just go ahead and wipe it with the latest Debian stable which seems to already be more up to date? Or should I switch to Fedora or OpenSUSE or something else? For Arch, Endeavour OS and Catchy OS seem like the best options, but I don’t know if I want to move to a rolling bleeding-edge distro that could break at any time. They seem more like an enthusiast distro than anything else to me. But, that’s just the impression I get.

Here’s what I’m looking for in a distro:

  • Non-commercial preferably and especially not from the U.S.
  • Good for gaming, NVidia graphics card compatibility and gaming device support.
  • Stability and robustness (I don’t have time to mess around fixing things. I’d rather have slightly older software that works, than bleeding edge software that breaks.)
  • Also trying to move away from Snap.
  • Not interested in immutable distros.
  • Ease of installing 3rd party drivers and codecs (This is something Ubuntu does quite well actually)
  • Must have KDE Plasma as desktop.

Any suggestions?

UPDATE:

I’ve decided to upgrade to 25.10 and I’m blown away! My system is BLAZING fast. Like what is even going on??? Games perform way better now. KDE 6 has loads of really good new features. It’s so polished.

I did run into a problem enabling HDR in KDE settings though. Will have to check that out.

Also some themes don’t work anymore. Will have to look into that as well but that’s no big deal

I’ll give this thing a try for a while. At least until 26.04.

UPDATE 2:

Now I’ve done it. My PC freezes completely when I log into my wayland session after I enabled HDR in KDE’s System Settings. I got no way to set it back to off from the command line.

I’m gonna have to recover from a snapshot.

    • ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.caOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      True. As I mentioned to someone else, I can always take a snapshot with TimeShift with my BTRFS partitions, upgrade, test it out, and roll back if it breaks.

      Or, like you suggest, create an image, install another distro, try it, and revert with the image if I don’t like it. But that just takes a lot of time I don’t necessarily have though.

      • ruuster13@lemmy.zip
        21·
        2 days ago

        I like btrfs snapshots but they do not at all ease my mind like a full backup does. Amen to the not enough time argument, though modern clonezilla has gotten much faster and takes advantage of modern storage medium speeds.