KDE Neon Is Now Live: Providing Bleeding-Edge KDE Packages For Ubuntu

Following the news yesterday that KDE is incubating a new "KDE Neon" project, it's now been launched from FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, Belgium.

Sadly, it's no extraordinary breakthrough nor at this point does it seem to be fundamentally different from the former Project Neon. KDE Neon is about providing daily KDE packages to Ubuntu users.

It's described as on the now-public site, "Neon is a KDE Incubator project and we are still baking it. Currently we have an archive of KDE software built from unstable Git branches which can be installed on top of Ubuntu 15.10 flavours. Coming soon will be an archive built from KDE releases for users and live/installable images to install onto your computer."

Right now the packages are for Ubuntu 15.10 but they do intend to support Ubuntu 16.04. User and developer editions of Ubuntu with these KDE packages spun into an ISO are coming soon. The project is hosting their own APT repository rather than using Launchpad's PPA.

KDE Neon isn't trying to be its own premiere KDE Linux distribution. The FAQ page states, "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."

KDE Neon is providing only x86 64-bit packages. Besides packaging the latest KDE components, it is also providing the very latest Qt as well for Ubuntu. To learn more visit neon.kde.org.uk.