in case anyone else was curious about the overlap with KDE neon:
> Differences from KDE neon/Prior art
> KDE neon was KDE's first version of a self-made OS.
> It fulfills the "distributed by KDE" requirement, but fails on the reliability angle due to the Ubuntu LTS base that ironically becomes unstable because it needs to be tinkered with to get Plasma to build on it, breaking the LTS promise.
> It is built on fairly old technology and requires a lot of packaging busywork — both of which are non-goals of KDE Linux. [0]
This is what drove me from Ubuntu to Arch (specifically I'm on EndeavourOS) I had a piece of software that needed me to install a version of the C standard library that was not available on Ubuntu in any way without messing with the core OS. So I said, screw it, let me finally try Arch, but let me find the least intrusive installer based Distro. I have not looked back since.
KDE is a combination of multiple different parts of which Plasma is one (and also the name of the overall organization that produces the whole thing). Plasma is the main component, its main contribution to KDE is the various user facing components like the desktop, the launcher bar, etc.
> Differences from KDE neon/Prior art
> KDE neon was KDE's first version of a self-made OS.
> It fulfills the "distributed by KDE" requirement, but fails on the reliability angle due to the Ubuntu LTS base that ironically becomes unstable because it needs to be tinkered with to get Plasma to build on it, breaking the LTS promise.
> It is built on fairly old technology and requires a lot of packaging busywork — both of which are non-goals of KDE Linux. [0]
[0]: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux#Differences_from_KDE_neo...