I am looking for a good KDE distro. Kubuntu came close, but the whole snap thing was a deal breaker and getting rid of it looked like a headache. I saw that KDE Neon is planning to include Firefox without snap, so this is sounding good.
-Is KDE Neon suitable for daily driving by an inexperienced user?
-How long until the 22.04 version comes out?
-What things does Kubuntu offer out of the box that I will need to do manually on KDE Neon? (video drivers? codecs?)

1. Yes, it should pose little difficulty if you have used another Linux distribution before. Otherwise, simply go to regular Ubuntu and forget about the snap or not snap matter, it is not a topic that newbies should be worrying about.

2. I have read that it is nearly ready and should not be further away than a few weeks, it has been held back due to a poll conducted by the dev team, resulting in users preferring to “wait a couple of weeks” to get Firefox in an alternative format to snap.

3. Neon is a very bare-bones but ready-to-use not-a-distribution, meaning you will have to install your music player, but it already comes with the codecs, you will have to install an office suite and Microsoft fonts (Verdana, Arial, etc) but it already comes with graphic drivers.

It's very easy to remove snaps ( or snapd altogether for that matter). It's also easy to use a regular firefox if that's your main "snap" problem. I personally wouldn't recommend neon to a newbie and as far as I recall correctly, neon has snap. If you don't want snap stuff, don't know/want how to remove it, don't use an ubuntu based kde.

eridani wrote:1. Yes, it should pose little difficulty if you have used another Linux distribution before. Otherwise, simply go to regular Ubuntu and forget about the snap or not snap matter, it is not a topic that newbies should be worrying about.

I have found real issues with Firefox snap from my time using it. Reading the whole Kubuntu guide on how to remove snap, make sure the system doesn't attempt to reinstall it, add the Firefox PPA and set its priority, then install Firefox, it looks a bit too intimidating for me and seeing the forum posts saying snap can somehow make its way back into the system even after correctly following the procedure, it just makes me want something without snap in the first place.

Neon doesn't have the Firefox Snap currently, and won't when it upgrades to the 22.04 base.

This is part of why the upgrade has been delayed, actually.