[7][8][9][10][11][12][13] First announced in June 2016 by Kubuntu founder Jonathan Riddell following his departure from Canonical Ltd.,[14] it has been adopted by a steadily growing number of Linux users, regularly appearing in the Top 20 on DistroWatch.com's popularity tables.

[15] It is offered in stable and development variants; the User Edition is a stable release featuring the latest KDE packages that have passed their quality assurance, while the Testing, Unstable, and Developer Edition branches use the latest beta and unstable nightly releases of KDE packages (the last of which bundled with KDE development libraries and headers).

However, the primary difference between the two operating systems is that Kubuntu maintains stable releases and an LTS version of Ubuntu while KDE neon focuses on updating developer editions of KDE applications without maintaining stable releases of Ubuntu unless the root user actively chooses to upgrade their systems.

[37] As KDE neon is primarily a packaging of KDE software (and occasionally updated dependencies) on top of Ubuntu LTS, its versions are simply numbered off the Plasma release version.

However, some notable versions of KDE neon User Edition are listed below to show technical progression.