Hello,
My company has deployed Ubuntu and GNOME on our 25 desktops for many years.
We are very dissatisfied with the recent changes in GNOME (Unity and GNOME3), so we have chosen to give KDE a chance.
We think, that KDE is a wonderful desktop environment that suits our needs, but we have troubles with finding a good Linux/UNIX distribution shipping KDE. Therefore I want to ask existing users of KDE about their opinion.

Our requirements include:
+ Good KDE expirience/integration
+ Easy to use for a novice user (not all our employees are computer experts)
+ Trouble-free deployment, installation and maintenance
+ Stable
+ Good hardware support
+ An up-to-date large repository of software
+ Easy installation of proprietary software (eg. Flash Player, Java, device drivers etc.)
+ Good integration with apps based on other GUI systems (eg. GTK, wxWidgets etc.)
+ Extensive documentation is a "must have"

I think, that this poll will not only be useful for my company but for everyone, who wants to switch to KDE.

Thanks for all your opinions
Jonathan Frank

I voted Kubuntu on the basis that it works first time. I must admit I didn't find either 10.04 or 10.10 worked very well but 11.04 and 11.10 which will be released next week are perfect on this old but upgraded PC of mine.

I have tried other distributions but came across problems with either the installation process or getting the sound and video working correctly.

you should consider what distro you currently use and whether using a different one with the same package management would facilitate rollout and support issues or if the current one has a good KDE implementation

you don't ask about support availability by the distro vendor or 3rd parties

you don't say how many desktops, if the number is large you might want to see what desktop support/management/rollout software is available and which distros it supports

you don't mention if you prefer a lts version or how many years the version you'd install would be supported nor if the de and sw need to be current and how current

Personally I'd skip Gentoo, Sabyon and Arch as they're not package based (in the .deb, .rpm sense) and might be harder to manage. I'd also skip Magia because the project is too new. And I'd look at PCLinuxOS and Pardus

You don't state what it is you're looking for that you haven't been able to find just that you've looked

Finally I would focus on distros used by companies similar in size and function

you don't say how many desktops, if the number is large you might want to see what desktop support/management/rollout software is available and which distros it supports

Currently we have about 25 desktops. We are rolling the operating system out by installing images over the network with a small linux image loaded by PXE. We use Puppet for configuration management. LDAP and Kerberos is used for authentication. For storage we have a NFS4 server.

you don't ask about support availability by the distro vendor or 3rd parties

We haven't needed paid support yet, but we prefer a distribution with extensive documentation and a helpful community.

you don't mention if you prefer a lts version or how many years the version you'd install would be supported nor if the de and sw need to be current and how current

We use to do a system upgrade once a year in the summer holiday, when we have time to test the new upgrade before we roll it out on all our desktops.

I'm wondering why do you ask here, instead of asking your technical personel, they probably will know what they like Since you have ubuntu background, I would recommend Debian Squeeze or Kubuntu Lucid Lynx. These ones will meet your requirements of stability and community support. This will be a personal opinion: keep away from monsters like Gento, Arch or simmilar rolling releasing distros, they cause real pain I wonder why you followed Ubuntu releases and didn't stick to LTS version, are there any special reasons for that?

keep away from monsters like Gento, Arch or simmilar rolling releasing distros, they cause real pain

No distro bashing please! And btw, what you say is absolutely not true. I've enjoyed my Arch install for more than four years now and there never was a problem. Instead I've had state of the art software all the time and was even able to fool my hardware into thinking it could do things it wasn't capable of...

That wasn't bashing, he just asked for opinion, I gave mine.

Same here

In your situation I would prefer Kubuntu or Debian, because your company already have experience with the system and only need to get some knowledge about the plasma-desktop.

Unless Canonical messes up everything ( I remember the start time increases because of playmouth ), it is a good solution and a good way to collect some experience with KDE before getting a new system under the hood.

NeonStorm wrote:Unless Canonical messes up everything ( I remember the start time increases because of playmouth ), it is a good solution and a good way to collect some experience with KDE before getting a new system under the hood.

If you want to eliminate Plymouth, check my brief writeup on Kubuntu Forums -- Plymouth is for pilgrims, not PCs.

Please note that there is also another Unix distribution that is well integrated with KDE 4: Pc-BSD.

I'd say Kubuntu. It hasn't always been the best, but the last four~five versions have been extremely stable, excellent and just amazing. The latest version (11.10 as of writing) asks you if you want to install proprietary software during the installation process. The only downside I've found is that Muon is not always the best package manager, but that's probably just because it's so new.