Hey guys,

I wonder if you came along this kind of issue with the Neon User Edition...
I have a HP DC7900 ultra-small form factor at the office, which usually runs Debian 9 (with KDE). It works, but a couple of days ago I wanted to install KDE Neon on it. It does not even load the system, as it hangs up on a screen that has only the prompt "login:" in the upper left corner.... and that's it, never passes that stage...

The hardware configuration of the DC7900 is:
Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 2.9 Ghz
4 GB DD-RAM 2
160 GB SATA HDD
Intel GMA 4500

This behavior is present only when installing Neon 5.11.3 or Neon 5.11.4, as it works fine with Debian 9 with Plasma 5.8.6. Nevertheless, it runs flawlessly with Debian and also with Ubuntu 17.10 (with Gnome) or Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, but not with the latest Neon.

Do you have any idea why?

Any help would be very appreciated..

Thanks a lot.

Since neon uses Ubuntu 16.04 as a base, and uses (K)Ubuntu's installer, the first place I'd suggest looking at is checking the image, it may have been corrupted. Perhaps try to download another copy of the iso.

How are you creating your boot media?

Thanks for the reply,

The media was created using the Startup Disk Creator on a Ubuntu 17.10 system at home. The same media was used a couple of days ago to install Neon on a ThinkPad X201 laptop and everything went just fine. Nevertheless, I observed that since last two iso's of Neon, it fails to install on the HP DC7900 at the office. I am using Ubuntu 17.10 on that system now, with no issues whatsoever. It is really strange, though.

KDE Neon in general its not really a suitable distro for everyday use (at least not for common users) since it gives a ton of trouble in some systems. But, if your livecd boots until the stage of showing you a login command prompt, and its usable (it doesn't keeps flickering and you can actually type in something), then try logging in with the user "neon" and when prompted for a password just hit enter, then just use startx to start plasma desktop and see how it looks.

If you can't log in, then boot the livecd with the options "xforcevesa nomodeset" to boot with a minimal graphical settings and try to install.

fralex wrote:KDE Neon in general its not really a suitable distro for everyday use (at least not for common users) ..............

You can't be serious.

Invictus wrote:

fralex wrote:KDE Neon in general its not really a suitable distro for everyday use (at least not for common users) ..............

You can't be serious.

Oh I'm very serious, just give a quick look at all the posts in this forum. That it works for you it doesn't mean that its a good/stable distro for everybody else. I'm still using it but it was the first time in like 10 years that i had so much trouble installing and configuring a distro. After all the struggle to install it, i had to get into another fight with the system performance in my computer, with random CPU and MEM usage skyrocketing and when finally getting around some of the problems by editing some of the systems files, that we shouldn't have to touch ever, then it comes a new update and it resets all the changes i made and the problems start again (i update in the hopes to see the issues resolved, but nah). For example, the 2 main performance issues that i have are: 1- I can't use normally the wallpaper slideshow feature because plasma eats up a ton of my cpu and ram (kde related but i didnt have this problem with other recent distros), the solution was to edit /usr/share/plasma/wallpapers/org.kde.slideshow/contents/ui/main.qml to comment out a couple of lines and add 4 other as indicated in a kde bug report. 2- I can't use a swap partition because the daemon kswapd0 randomly pops up to eat up alll my cpu and leave my system unusable for a couple minutes and the workaround i've found is just to remove my swap partition.

Then there is a ton of minor problems that are mostly just an annoyance : plasma discover works awfully bad on my machine, Muon works a lot better but it still has some issues with its ui, don't be able to configure the mouse scroll speed on Dolphin and etc. And to top it all, man isn't this supposed to be the official Kde Neon forum? the support here its really bad.

There's a little bit of bias going on here. People don't usually post to say "hey everything's going fine!" Many posts have to do with third party or hardware specific issues. I installed Neon after two weeks of being a Linux user. Any problems I have had have been self-inflicted. Do some people have problems with Neon? Of course. But then again, some people have problems with everything. To say Neon is generally not a good distro for a daily driver for most users is ridiculous.

If you read around this forum it has been repeatedly stated that if you want help from developers you should file a bug report or go to the IRC channels. This is a "community" forum, not the official support page.

Invictus wrote:... is ridiculous.

Not at all because if you read the description in the Neon page you can quickly realize that Neon its not really intended as a Distro but mostly as a test environment for KDE software so, its main focus its no really stability but testing of new features and that inherently means that its not aimed for normal everyday user. I realize that now, I'm coming from Linux Mint kde and despite its bits of problems and annoyances its by far a lot more usable and stable than Neon so its a mistake to recommend Neon to those that are looking for an alternative kde distro, like it was my case and many others i've seen around. You just has to accept that, as they themselves admit, Neon its just not really meant as a distro but its a cool alternative for testing new kde software in a debian/ubuntu based environment.

fralex wrote: Not at all because if you read the description in the Neon page you can quickly realize that Neon its not really intended as a Distro but mostly as a test environment for KDE software

You mean this descriptionfrom Neon's homepage?

You should use KDE neon if you want the latest and greatest from the KDE community but the safety and stability of a Long Term Support release. When you don't want to worry about strange core mechanics and just get things done with the latest features. When you want your computer as your tool, something that belongs to you, that you can trust and that delivers day after day, week after week, year after year. Here it is: now get stuff done.

Perhaps you are confusing the dev versions, which were the original releases, and are definitely the development test-beds you describe.

claydoh wrote:

fralex wrote: Not at all because if you read the description in the Neon page you can quickly realize that Neon its not really intended as a Distro but mostly as a test environment for KDE software

You mean this descriptionfrom Neon's homepage?

You should use KDE neon if you want the latest and greatest from the KDE community but the safety and stability of a Long Term Support release. When you don't want to worry about strange core mechanics and just get things done with the latest features. When you want your computer as your tool, something that belongs to you, that you can trust and that delivers day after day, week after week, year after year. Here it is: now get stuff done.

Perhaps you are confusing the dev versions, which were the original releases, and are definitely the development test-beds you describe.

I meant the faq page : https://neon.kde.org/faq

I mean come on, it shouldn't be hard to accept that Neon its mainly a testing ground for KDE software, i don't even want to know how the dev version works on my machines.

I must be reading that differently from you, then. Maybe because of a missing comma in " released software which will be available soon" (and as such is outdated now). I'll see if I can get the FAQ updated.

Neon User is providing the current official release Plasma, et al, and the (not mentioned in the FAQ) LTS variant has the current LTS of Plasma, et al. The dev versions have software from git. These are the testing grounds.

It perhaps is hard to accept that many people have few issues using KDE Neon on a wide variety of machines, and that it is stable and we can easily recommend it as an option, though it is not a newbie-centric thing.