Kubuntu 18.04 'Bionic Beaver' Install and Review

It's release week for the various flavors of Ubuntu 18.04. Today, I'm looking at Kubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver". Kubuntu 18.04 sports the Plasma desktop environment and offers support for up to three years.

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[tubelarasa]

Just KNEW he would let us wait for the Lubuntu version 8D

Not a KDE fan, but it looks good indeed.

Nice & solid review DT!

[louistournas]

The Discover on Kubuntu 18.04 is broken. When you do a search for Firefox or Gimp, the top result is other stuff. This problem is still present in 20.04.
Also, in 18.04, when you do a update, again, you'll notice that it is broken. They fixed up the update part in 20.04.

[redrobbosworkshop]

Nice review Derek.
Though like you I tend toward the leaner distros, this has become my prefered full featured DE. A lot of the earlier bugs have been squashed and it's less demanding on resources than older versions of Plasma.
The Kubuntu theme is a Hybrid - dark panels and menus with light application spaces.
I still think you would much prefer KDE with the simple menu option (right click on the menu icon) as it's a traditional hamburger menu and zippy, plus in the monitor settings, pull the compositing slider all the way left to 'instant' - this disables the fade in/out of menues and application launch/close and again makes everything feel zippy.

I'll defend them on the wallpapers and themes purely becasue they do this differently. The wallpaper and theme changer screens link you directly to the outisde theme/wallpaper sources without taking you outside of the settings page, giving you one click access to thousands of options - it's neat and better then hosting this stuff locally IMO. Kind of like the discover software centre but for themes and wallpapers. Other solutions force you to search the web, download the files and install them using various methods. Here everything is broght to you and collated in a one click solution.

Then there is the Falkon browser. This really should be the default IMO. Looks and works great but it's footprint is tiny, about 5mb compared to the heavyweight browsers yet its full funtion. Much better than other small browsers as many are pretty buggy. It's a Qt browser though, so while it's light on KDE, it'll pull down a metric arse-ton of dependencies on a GTK platform :)

[migue]

I read a lot of good comments about KDE neon, and it also seems to be more popular than Kubuntu. We need a comparative review :D Nice video DT.

[professionallylay]

Another thorough and well made video. That said, I'm curious, what do you use to edit your videos for YouTube?

[indigowyrm]

thanks good video! I'm testing kubuntu out

[barkingbandicoot]

Hi Derek. Is there a problem with mpd? Cantata is my choice of music player. It is featured enough without too much bloat. The radio stations are configured and make this music player fantastic! If not for the radio I would choose the new simple music player Elisa.
Cantata is easier to use than Amarok, Banshee or Tomahawk.
NB. Cantata has a simple user option - you do not need to setup mpd. Too easy!

[larrywhite]

Thanks Derek, since you are test driving the 18.04 Ubuntu flavors I am curious witch one was the best ?

[iran]

very informative. nice job. subscribed. thumbs up.

[CrustyAbsconder]

I have an idea for a topic someday.

Take the Top 40 distos from the list of the past 6 months and compare their web-pages, and which have have the most helpful information and which have broken links, out-dated info, etc, but especially which have recent announcements or news that is current. And maybe throw in a few obscure distros that are unique but underrated by the list.

And then after that do a similar video comparing their wiki-pages, Facebook pages, Google+ pages, reddit pages, etc. to show that there is more to a distro than just ABCs and XYZ's.

[jonmahashintina]

every theme option has a "get new" button. but you didnt review that.

[sproid]

After diestro hoping with Ubuntu xfce and mate I realize how difficult it is to add themes and customize in general. KDE on the other hand is super easy. You click on look for more Themes and add them withing the KDE theme program.

[DieselTrucker]

KDE is the ONLY GUI I will download! Can't stand any of the others.
But I HATE Libre Office! The damned thing always ERR's out on me.

[rmcellig]

I think I will give KDE neon a look instead of kubuntu.

[davew]

Hmm where is Jamie Summers and Steve Austin with the bionic beaver.

[aaronrennyvargheseOriginal]

I like KDE, but I switched to GNOME when Dolphin refused to mount my iPad for files

[saumenroy]

Plz check Maui Linux based on kde neon.you will find it interesting.its not a resource hog like kubuntu but pretty and fast

[xetsuma]

They should use JuK instead of Cantanta it's a kde app and it uses gstreamer

[davew]

I mostly install audacious music player simple and works. I even found the equalizer presets file on a website. I am not a KDE fan I find plasma 5 a big buggy.

[leonidassavvides]

Having Ubuntu 18.04 how ADD Kubuntu same VM????