I'm searching for a way to install kde neon on my kubuntu without formatting my hard drive, but I could only find how to install the developer's edition, not the user one.

5 Answers

How I fixed (Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial) non-upgradeable state after following (and sudo apt install neon-desktop).

(first, and after EACH step below, do sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade and sudo apt dist-upgrade)

• When packages were held back I had to to apt install packagename
  (actually for MANY packages, so pasted them [list of packages held back may be found via apt upgrade or apt dist-upgrade] to a list file then installed mass packages from a file)
• (sudo apt-get update --fix-missing dpkg –configure -a apt-get install -f didn't seem to help but may)
• When packages were in conflict, I removed them with apt remove packagename (as shown in upgrade or dist-upgrade conflict error such as: "packagename breaks something but packagename-y is set to be installed").
• After everything, sudo apt install neon-desktop again since some of the removed conflicting files were dependencies

Plasma (Wayland) didn't work (froze display), so did Ctrl+Alt+Del then after reboot I chose regular Plasma from the session menu before clicking login (Wayland may only fail with certain video card and driver combinations--I have "Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)").

Now my desktop works better than ever (faster and more stable) even though the system was changed from Ubuntu to Kubuntu (where I did a similar) to Neon (such changes are not recommended without reinstall but I did both)!

From

Can I turn Kubuntu into KDE neon with a PPA?

We recommend that you install a fresh KDE neon from the provided ISO images. But you can indeed add an APT repository to switch from Kubuntu to KDE neon. This is absolutely not tested or supported. If things take a turn for the worse you are expected to be knowledgable enough to repair your system on your own. A web search should quickly give you relevant information on how to do this.

There is a ppa here:

Directions from the above page:

Adding this PPA to your system

You can update your system with unsupported packages from this untrusted PPA by adding ppa:project-neon/ppa to your system's Software Sources. (Read about installing)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:project-neon/ppa sudo apt-get update 

I highly advise you download the developers edition from here :

They have both a stable and unstable developers branch.

kubuntu ppa shuold be safer way to keep kubuntus's kde updated

Starting from 18.04 ubuntu install Follow answer of @poikolos.

It works, but package dependency clashes were ugly.

Some notes on that:

Start without an existing kde intallation (which is easier). If it's a fresh install of ubuntu, don't use the kubuntu packages, jump straight to Neon.

You could simulate this booting in a virtual console and removing kde, or boot to ubuntu or xfce and remove it. That way there are no package conflicts.

libinput will be deactivated (unless wayland, I guess)

kde neon does not use the libinput mouse/touchpad drivers if it can use the older synaptics driver, regardless of what you currently have installed [in 2021 I don't know if this is still true]. On the laptops I use, modern Thinkpads, libinput is better, plus reverse scroll works properly. So, I removed the evdev and synaptics xorg-input drivers.

KDE control panel does not have rich libinput settings yet [at the time this answer was posted, it's better now] (neither does ubuntu 18.04), only basic settings are exposed. This may not change; libinput does not believe in lots of configuration and the dev over the years has resisted call after call for tweak settings. Instead, he makes the driver work better without intervention (with a lot of success now).

Neon uses the synaptic driver for a reason (I guess), so only change to libinput it you want; I mention this because I was surprised at losing my libinput behaviour.

2022

KDE Neon, the linux distribution, is not in a PPA, but it's still possible to install it on top of the corresponding Ubuntu version (although Neon team does not officially support it).

Add the package repository with:

echo "deb focal main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/neon.list sudo apt update sudo apt install neon-desktop 

Where focal stands for Ubuntu 20.04 (which is still going to be the only supported base at least until 22.04.1 is out, judging from past history).