Switched to Mint KDE... what a relief!

[TheEighthDwarf]

After a couple years of Ubuntu (I left around 8.10), another of vanilla Mint, and two more of LMDE, I've switched to Mint KDE. Boy am I happy!

I'd always flirted with KDE, and I've always used certain KDE apps over their Gnome counterparts (Kate, Krusader and Dolphin being the 3 I can't work without), but I guess familiarity kept me using Gnome.

I fled Ubuntu due to the Unity clusterf*ck, and used Gnome 2 on LMDE very happily for a long time. But then the Gnome 3 clusterfück happened. When Gnome 2 support was discontinued I switched to Mate, but it was just not ready for prime time. I also tried Cinnamon, but it also needs work, and I really don't like its esthetics and mechanics in any case.

Having had many versions of Gnome 2, Mate and Cinnamon on the same box had left me with tons of cruft, but the last straw was a dependency hell a Mint upgrade brought about. I couldn't update my system without also removing half of it... you know the story.

So finally, I switched to Mint KDE and I couldn't be happier. KDE is a whole nother planet, buzzing along with industrious serenity, compared to the chaotic cacophony that is the world of Gnome and its derivatives.

So a big thanks to the Mint KDE team!!

[Catbuntu]

I'm happy you find the best DE and distro for you!
I also love Mint KDE, but I'm actually dual-booting Mint Cinnamon and Kubuntu, because of Kubuntu 12.10 has KDE 4.9 and I wanted to test it, also it hasn't all those odd Akonadi errors, but I have no doubt I'll switch to Mint 14 KDE when it comes!
About MATE and Cinnamon, you should give them a try again, even on a Virtual Machine. I feel Cinnamon much more polished than GNOME Shell (I also like it, but...) and MATE is rock solid and stable as GNOME 2 was (RIP). I'm virtualizing LMDE with MATE and even on VirtualBox with 1GB RAM it's fast! I compared it with another virtual machine with Debian Squeeze (and GNOME 2 of course) and they were practicaly the same, just you have to customize a bit MATE for being like GNOME 2... But I think it's a great alternative, because GNOME 2 is discontinued, even Mint's frozen version.
I hope you have nice time with KDE!

[cwwgateway]

I can definitely understand your frustration with some of the newer desktops. MATE is supposedly Gnome 2 (and it really is), but I still love using Gnome 2 (Fuduntu, Mint 9, and SolusOS), whereas I don't particularly care for MATE. I changed to Cinnamon and Xfce. Xfce I run on older machines because I find it is almost everything Gnome 2 was (I have almost the exact same setup) and its very fast on Debian. Cinnamon is newer and is very customizable compared to Unity/Gnome Shell. I like KDE, but it isn't quite it for me (in the same way that MATE doesn't really replace Gnome 2). KDE is a great desktop though, and Mint has a great KDE release. I'd encourage you to keep trying other things in virtual box so that if you find something you really like you can at least try it. That's how I discovered E17 - snow linux has a great E17 version that I am considering installing on an older machine.

[Adelante]

Yes, LM 13 KDE was a terrific release and so was LM 13 Xfce. I like them both a lot. I actually liked Cinnamon, too, when I used it for several weeks, but I prefer the others. It's wonderful there is so much to choose from.

[claudecat]

It will come as no surprise to anyone that has read my posts here or elsewhere that I love KDE, so I agree wholeheartedly with the OP. However, I am an inveterate distro-tester and as such always have distros with other DE's to play with at my disposal (my grub screen contains ~ 30 choices). I like Bodhi and its e17, Mint's cinnamon and MATE, Manjaro's xfce, CentOS and Fuduntu's gnome2, etc etc. It's all great stuff, but KDE (on just about any distro) beats 'em all for flexibility and quality of native apps. It's not just a DE, it's a gigantic assortment of (mostly) useful, top of the line software. K3b, kate, dolphin, etc are only the tip of the iceberg. KDE's games are great, and if you want to learn Japanese, study the periodic table, learn algebra or programming, there's a KDE app for you. Installing the entire KDE SC (kde-full) is an eye-opener for sure!