Best "Distro" I have ever run!

[GreyGeek]

Two years ago I gave my Acer Aspire v3-771G 17", i7, 16GB RAM, integrated NVIDIA 650M gpu laptop to my grandson because his (my previous laptop, which I had given him, was too slow. Sunday I found out that he hadn't used it in months and I asked for it back. Last night I installed Neon on top of the Kubuntu 14.04 partition. I used the ppa:graphics-drivers/pps to add nividia-prime and nividia-370. After the reboot I had a blazing fast display. The 650M behaved as if it were the primary gpu. EVERYTHING runs using the nvidia gpu.

This morning I decided to wipe the corrupted Win7 off the drive and give it all to Neon. The reinstall was faultless, but I did have to make some concessions because Neon's repository isn't as vast as Ubunut's, or that is what I suspect. First, my HP P1606dn duplex laser required that I momentarily give root a password before it would let me install the duplex plugin. The installation app demanded the root password and would not accept mine. Then I decided to install KMail. About 75-100 packages lined up ready to be installed. It looked like KMail wanted half the plasma4 desktop before it was willing to run. I noticed that Thunderbird was in Neon's repository and it only wanted to install itself, so I let it. A few clicks later and my roadrunner email account was up and running.

I inadvertently left this box unplugged when I began installing Neon at 7AM. At around 11-11:30AM, I'm not exactly sure when, I got out of the shower and glanced down the hall to my laptop and noticed the display was black. I clicked the mouse on the desktop and it popped back to life with the message that the battery had five minutes left and it was going to shut down. I quickly plugged the power cord back in and it began charging. Using the 650M gpu I got FOUR hours of battery life on this 2012 laptop!

Neon was twice as fast on my Acer 7739 and this laptop is probably 25-30 times faster than the 7739.

Neon is the fastest and best "distro" I have ever run.

[woodsmoke]

Neon's repository isn't as vast as Ubunut's,

Yes and very few apps are on the install, one has to do all that by one's self. But the very first statement on their page is:

What is KDE neon?

KDE neon is a rapidly updated software repository.

I don't know that Riddell really WANTS to "have a distro" as in Kubuntu or Pinguy.

Is this "the KDE distro"?

Nope. KDE believes it is important to work with many distributions, as each brings unique value and expertise for their respective users. This is one project out of hundreds from KDE.

I'm regularly switching the drives back and forth but..
mainly
I'm running Kubu 16.10 on my 6 core and it does great because i WAS, not now, having to do a lot of video processing from my GoPro but that is all over for now.
and
I'm running Neon on an ancient AMD and it does just fine except for the video card which cannot have an improved one because of the slot size.

The only "thing" that I've "noticed" about Neon is that when one clicks an app it appears in the panel and then disappears and then quite a few seconds later appears on the activity desktop.

wood just copyin' and pastin' smoke

[claydoh]

The up to date Plasma 5.8 and Qt sure make a difference. Should see similar gains when Kubuntu can finally get both.
I noticed the difference when Plasma 5.8 LTS arrived in Neon. Zooom!