The KDE neon team is proud to announce the rebase of our packages onto Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver". We encourage all users to upgrade now. The installable ISOs and Docker images have also been updated to run on 18.04.

What is KDE neon?

KDE neon is a project to deliver KDE's wonderful suite of software quickly. We use modern DevOps techniques to automatically build, QA and deploy our packages. We work directly with the KDE community rather than staying far away in a separate project.

Our packages are built on the latest Ubuntu LTS edition and today we have moved to their new 18.04 release. This means our users can get newer drivers and third party packages. There is an upgrade process from the previous 16.04 LTS base which we have spent the last few months writing and running QA on to ensure it runs smoothly.

We have three editions for different use cases. A user edition for those wanting to use the latest released KDE software updated daily but only released when it passes QA tests. And two developer editions built from unstable and beta Git branches without QA checks for those wanting to test or develop our forthcoming software.

You can use our output via the .deb package archive, installable ISOs and Docker images. We also have work-in-progress Snap packages which we can put more development effort into now that we have rebased on 18.04.

The Upgrade

Many people have been keen for the rebase onto 18.04, thank you for your patience. We implement many QA tests in neon and are keen that they should all pass. A number of bugs have been found in the initial upgrade process which we have fixed. These major upgrades can still break, especially if you have a lot of third party software, so do take backups before you start. Please let us know on the bug tracker or forum how you get on. Enjoy your updated neon!