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.