KDE Neon Has Changed It's Naming Schema To Be More Intuitive

KDE Neon has recently announced a changed in it's naming of the three main editions available to download for x84 architectures, as well the addition of a new, fourth edition. This is due to the Dev team getting some feedback over the years that the naming system they had previously used was a bit confusing to some users.

"We’ve renamed our editions a bit as the current names were causing confusion. This affects the URLs used for repos and filenames used for installable ISOs and Docker images."

What's changed?

Here's the breakdown of the naming changes:

• User Edition remains unchanged

"the main event, built from released tars of KDE software, continuously updated as soon as releases are made assuming all the QA tests pass (which sometimes they don’t and so it gets held back until we fix them). Use this if unsure."

• Dev Stable Edition is now known as Testing Edition 

"built from the beta Git branches of KDE apps (often the same as unstable), no automated QA, will contain bugs and breakage, useful for testing beta software."

• Dev Unstable Edition is now known as Unstable Edition

"built from unstable master Git branches of KDE apps, no automated QA, will contain bugs and muchos breakage, useful for testing features in development software" 

What's new?

Additionally a fourth edition, named Developer Edition, has been added to further aid developers.  This is accomplished by taking Dev Unstable and adding in the typical build requirements.

"An ISO with the unstable edition plus development headers pre-installed. Useful to not have to install all of Qt and KDE dev headers."

Other editions

Other editions available include Docker images, an ARM64 build specifically for the Pinebook, a User LTS edition, and a Korean edition.

Personally, I agree the changes make sense and offer a bit more insight into who the targeted audiences are for each edition vs. the old names. While not monumental by any means, any help we can give to new users and budding developers is certainly a welcome touch.

The original announcement from the Neon team can be found here.