I’m not a beginner anymore, but I’m much less interested in technical tinkering for its own sake than I used to be. These days I just want my computer to work properly without too much intervention from me.
I’ve been using Kubuntu for a number of years, but I’m also hearing increasing complaints about how Canonical is running things. I don’t think I’m ready to switch to a new distro yet, but it wouldn’t hurt to know what’s out there.
Is Kubuntu still a good choice for an “it just works” KDE-based distro, or has it been surpassed?
As someone who can’t quit KDE because of KDE connect, my go-to is debian. Debian 12 is an outstanding release, it’s stable, and it works. The only gripe is that debian famously has later releases than most distros, which can be a problem if you need a recent version of say, go or rust (you can still install manually but apt exists for a reason), but in general it’s not that bad and it’s of course a tradeoff between recency and stability.
You don’t need to use KDE to use KDE connect. 😉
I am using it with i3wm.
Happy DM hoping. 😊
For managing non-distro versions of language runtimes I suggest rtx.
$ cat .tool-versions
python system
nodejs latest
rust system
elm latest
$ rtx current
python system
node 20.5.0
rust system
elm 0.19.1
$ rtx local go@latest # go gets installed
$ which go
/home/andy/.local/share/rtx/installs/go/1.21.0/go/bin/go