Has anybody tried this distro

Nope, just saw an article on their new release though.

I pass on Plasma-only distros like I do on Gnome-only, Openbox-only etc. I respect that one DE is very likely easier to maintain for a small team of volunteers but Solus broke that mold.

This from the marketing blurbs was interesting, and a selling point: "Neptune 7.5 also provides a new solution for a complete system backup called Timeshift. It allows you to save a whole snapshot of your system and restore it even if your system is totally broken. You can even restore from a live system as long as you have the backup saved somewhere accessible."

^^ Can't this be done independent of Timeshift? Or does the app make life easier?

@brent Your question about sync: Yes, it can be done without the need of Timeshift. I actually use scripts to manage my rsync backups. Timeshift could be thought of as a basic GUI for rsync and btrfs tools.

After playing around some more, I noticed responsiveness what up there on par. One negative I have though is I wasn't able to locate some apps through the software store but the store seems more catered to QT apps which is understandable.

@WetGeek Have you tried out Neptune at all? If so, what are you thoughts on it?

brent I pass on Plasma-only distros like I do on Gnome-only, Openbox-only etc.

I'll take a look at Neptune, because its one DE happens to be the one I prefer, by a wide margn. If a distro offered 4 DEs, or 10 of them, and one was KDE Plasma, thta's the one I woulld choose to install.

And by "install," I'm not talking about my daily driver laptop. That's one of the big advantages of VMs.

codewizard1975 Have you tried out Neptune at all? If so, what are you thoughts on it?

No, not yet. I just now saw the post, and haven't had a chance yet. My first response, after reading your thoughtful comments, was that I needn't bother with it, but I'm still curious. I may change my mind and take a look anyway.

WetGeek I'll take a look at Neptune, because its one DE happens to be the one I prefer

You love Plasma. I do not. So it works out for both

codewizard1975 I use Restic in addition to Grsync. Had no idea Rsync was capable of 'whole enchilada' snapshot for later restoration...thanks for the info.

brent You love Plasma. I do not.

If its only DE were Budgie, would you be more interested in taking a look at it?

WetGeek Oh no, not necessarily as an only. Budgie as one of a distro's DEs, yes, I like the variety and trying new DEs but not all DEs. Openbox I have a love/hate. That crazy desktop the Bodhi people invented and named--love that one too. I would pass on any Cinnamon-themed etc. Seriously, I think my next #2 linux (I'm obviously taking a year to decide) will be the plain Mate.

brent you seem to be a GTK kinda guy . I prefer the Qt based environments like Plasma and LXQt, but there is appeal to the GTK desktops. Gnome and I still have a hate/at-least-it-works relationship, but I enjoy others like Budgie, Cinnamon, Pantheon, and to a lesser extent Mate. If I were to go back to a GTK environment, my first choice would be Pantheon probably because of the OSX vibes. Basic Gnome would be a last resort.

codewizard1975 Final thoughts are, its a Debian distro rebranded with only a mostly vanilla KDE, no Snap or Flatpack forced on you, and would be great for people wanting stability.

I would agree with just about everything. However, a distro having only a Plasma DE isn't a showstopper for me. That said, I thought the installation took a long time, as did launching the distro. It loads and enables 53 unit files on startup (compared with Solus' 3 or 4), which is consistent with its Debian roots. Compared with Solus, it takes considerable time to start up and shut down.

As @codewizard1975 pointed out, it's loaded with software that many folks would not find useful. As also noted, I appreciated its ability to resize according to the available client area within the VM's window. Not every distro does that, but those that do win extra points from me.

The first or second thing I usually do when evaluating a distro is to scan through the system settings and modify those where I disagree with the defaults. With Neptune, there were almost none that I disagreed with. It's almost as if I had been the one to decide on the defaults.

Since I'm pretty fluent in apt, I had no problem doing an update, and installing what I consider to be necessary applications, like micro, for instance, and nfs-common. Vivaldi-stable wasn't in its repo, but that's not a surprise. It would be easy to install it based on its .DEB file, if I were going to subject Neptune to a lengthy examination.

Right away, however, I soon found a showstopper for me. And I emphasise the qualifier, for me. Based on Dolphin's ability to access my Documents share via smb, I was able to modify /etc/fstab to include my NAT shares, and afterwards to mount them all, as confirmed in the terminal. However, Dolphin--despite listing those shares--was unable to enter any and display its contents. This has happened with a few other distros too, so I wasn't surprised, but it dramatically limited my interest in Neptune.

That aside, it's certainly an attractive distro, with many aspects of it well done. And many users who have different requirements than I do would probably find it quite suitable. Especially if they've never seen Solus! As I tend to do with distros that I examine, I'll show its comparative size within a 32GB virtual disk drive:

As you can see, with just two small utilities installed, and no applications configured, it's already larger than my Solus Plasma that's been fully configured as a competent daily-driver.

Brucehankins I never really thought about it like Ford/Chevy but I suppose you are right. When I do test a distro I like to use LXQT and LXDT if they got it....they don't really remind me of Plasma as I know it...so never made the connection. I guess if I saw all the K-packages I would've figured it out and fled.
Also, I have no idea what XFCE is and I have tried really hard to love it, but never enjoyed any implementation of it in any distro.
We all like what we like--grateful for the variety.

brent Freedom above all.

brent xfce is the DE that shall not be named, lol. I've never really liked it either, it just feels to much like W95 to me. Try out MXLinux in a VM with their standard XFCE. It's the only one I've tried with that DE that I've been able to stomach. BTW, xfce also built on GTK, but it isn't directly tied to Gnome.

brent I never really thought about it like Ford/Chevy but I suppose you are right.

Indeed so. And there's nothing at all wrong with being a Budgie fan. It was my first love when I discovered Solus, and remained so for a long time. And Solus' first attempts with Plasma were underwhelming.

But as time went on, Solus' implementation of Plasma improved dramatically, and there were enough advantages (in my opinion) over Budgie for me to adopt it for most of my computers. I didn't realize until recently that despite its configurability, it's significantly lighter than Budgie.

I'm sure that Budgie similarly has features and attributes that cause you to favor it, and I hearlily support your choice. In fact, I still use Budgie on two of my computers. It hasn't been worth my time to change those yet, and it may never be. So far, Budgie has been fine for their purposes.

tomscharbach A+++ 46 sec not enough. George throwing hands up in the air yelling "My father's ---"