KDE Neon is a distribution developed to showcase the real potential of Plasma Desktop. It is built on top of solid Ubuntu base and brings latest and greatest applications from KDE world. It helps users to experience latest features from Plasma desktop environment and other related applications without worrying about the stability of the underlying operating system. Also, the Plasma developers can show the real Plasma to the end users by avoiding unnecessary customization shipped by various distribution developers.

A preview of KDE Neon 5.10 User Edition. You can find Neon 5.12 screenshots on original post

The dedoimedo portal has published a review on KDE Neon 5.12, a release featuring Plasma 5.12 LTS. There are numerous distributions featuring KDE Plasma Desktop. However, the review suggests KDE Neon is an ideal choice for people who fancy about Plasma Desktop and likes to experience the latest updates from Plasma World.

In this review, various aspects of the distributions are being examined. The over all visual appearance is consistent, elegant and looks like a well-planned distribution. The defaults font configuration is not good enough and users are expected to enable anti-aliasing to have a better look. Despite being a lean distribution, Neon provides VLC in default installation it supports most of the multimedia files. The windows and android phones can be easily connected to the system, however, there is an issue with iPhones.

The default installation of Neon ships only a few applications like Firefox, Okular, VLC, GwenView..etc. The Discover package manager is not mature it. It misses a lot of expected features and better to stick with apt if you are okey with it.

KDE Neon has an impressive resource usage graph. On idle state, it takes around 400 MB of RAM and 1-2% of CPU. This is the impact of the optimizations and improvements on Plasma 5.x release. This resource is even less than some so-called lightweight distributions.

In conclusion, the reviewer puts a remark that KDE Neon 5.12 is better than many other distributions featuring Plasma Desktop. However, it lacks hardware support to the decision to stick with a stable and long-term supported Ubuntu base. It does a fair balancing between stability and latest Plasma releases.

It can do better, and we have the most splendid Kubuntu 17.04 as the golden benchmark from now on until the end of times, we few, we happy few, we band of geeks, for he who tests with me together, shall be my code brother, may his git ne'er be so vile, and the persons of all genders now in bed shall feel themselves accursed, and hold their VR sets cheap ... I think you get the idea. I got carried away. Let's summarize. KDE neon 5.12, fresh, cool, sleek, needs more apps, better package management, better overall peripheral support. But there's a lot of potential and hope, and I think we will see cool things in Plasma this year. 7.5/10. Worth checking.

You can read complete KDE Neon 5.12 review in dedoimedo portal.