Linux Mint Forums

george_angel wrote: Ehmmm... no. When you get in a car you know where the steering wheel, gas petal, handbrake, etc are. Now compare gnome 3 to e18 to KDE to whatever else is out there. If that was the change to your new car you would need a whole new driving licence course just to drive it home from the dealer..

XFCE, MATE, Cinnamon, KDE are all cars. Menu (your gas petal, handbrake...) are all quite the same, at the same place...
After that it's only a question of design and option. And no, definitely not, you don't need a new driving license to try them

e18 is a motobike or an aircraft. But most of the newcomers will not use it and will focus on the 4 previous DE.

pgmer6809 wrote:KDE is one of the major DE technologies in the Linux ecosystem.
It is also under active development; there is no telling when some distro such as Ubuntu or Debian might decide to use the QT libraries as the basis for one of their future releases.
By keeping a KDE version of Mint current, the Mint team is hedging their bets. If they had to base their main DE on QT libraries they would have some familiarity with them, and some assurance that the core of Mint is not completely incompatible with them.

pgmer6809

I agree with this reasoning completely !!!! Best Regards for all.-

Yes, +1 to what pgmer6809 said.

I have to agree with george_angel. In fact, I would go further and drop cinnamon as well. If you want to convert people from windows to linux, as I have done many times, mint mate is basically so similar, from a users point of view, to windows xp that the changeover is seamless. And yes george - put all your development resources into one area and maximize the benefit.

Well I'm still using the same Mint 17.1 KDE version since last posting in this thread almost 2 years ago. I have to say kudos to those responsible for the KDE version. It has been absolutely rock solid for me all this time. I still have a dual boot system with Win7 but months pass between having to go into that wretched POS OS only to be bombarded with a gazillion popups and hundreds of updates and prompts. I appreciate greatly all the dedication and hard work.

@xiph: why are you bumping a thread that's been dead for almost two years?

pjotr...why do you care. it's a valid comment.

xiph wrote:I have to agree with george_angel. In fact, I would go further and drop cinnamon as well. If you want to convert people from windows to linux, as I have done many times, mint mate is basically so similar, from a users point of view, to windows xp that the changeover is seamless. And yes george - put all your development resources into one area and maximize the benefit.

What have to do people who converted many years ago? Not use Cinnamom and XFCE because two educators of newbies here?

xiph wrote:In fact, I would go further and drop cinnamon as well.

Fore completeness' sake let us drop the Mate desktop as well.
It looks too much like ancient Mint Helena and is based on the dead old Gnome 2. Time to bury all this remainders from a long forgotten past.
Pleasant side effect:
This will give us 6 very clean text console monitors on our 24" screens. No more hassle with the crappy driver software for AMD or NVidia. Really clean and lean Linux Mint system. And no more need to ask any forum user, "Which desktop environment are you using?"

I beg that in this case the next one will come and asks how to remove console 2 to 6.

esp since I shouldn't be forced to learn how to use the console
-H

Using the text only console cannot be a real problem, because all of us must have passed primary school successfully in our early lives.
You remember primary school is where we learnt how to do basic calculations and how to read and write.
Reading and writing is all you need for handling the console.

the 3r's?
Yep... and I was just funnin' ya'
-H

hinto wrote: I was just funnin' ya'

Ouch! Don't verb that... you know that verbing weirds language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrPD55FVd4o
Well... I did grow up with this^
-H

Ok, seriously back to the topic of this thread "Drop KDE and Xfce editions of Linux Mint":
It is extremely unlikely that the Mint developers drop the Cinnamon desktop, because this is their baby, their alternative to the default Ubuntu desktop enviroment. Plus it is the most used desktop environment among Linux Mint users.
Currently it is also pretty unlikely that the Mint developers will have any plans of dropping the KDE or the xfce desktop.
I assume that as long as their workload permits them to continue offering a genuine Linux Mint KDE and a genuine Linux Mint xfce, they will do so.

xenopeek wrote:(...) what defines Linux Mint isn't Cinnamon and MATE but the default selection of applications, default configuration, easy installation, already installed codecs, the Mint tools, the community, and so on.

This is the most reasonable comment I have read here. Thanks @xenopeek
A good distribution does not primarily define itself through a desktop environment but in how it goes beyond it, that is, how it is implemented and how easily it can be configured and tweaked, and to what extent it works out of the box. In short, what kind of user experience it creates (including the community behind it). There is nothing wrong with offering several desktop environments/editions if resources allow to do that. In fact, I believe, part of Linux Mints success is related to that flexibility or choice. But there is a reasonable concern this thread has started with: that offering less choices would free up resources to be more innovative.

After consideration for about thirty three seconds I have concluded that the Cinnamon and Mate editions of Mint should be dropped in favour of KDE and XFCE.

There's logic behind this…

Cinnamon is fast becoming a clone of KDE but is remains far less mature than it's 'parent.' So Mint should get in line with KDE and stop re-inventing the wheel.
XFCE likewise in relation to Mate. Mint are replicating work being done by a core team that is not focused on a distro in its own right. Mint should drop Cinnamon and Mate as it is drain on the Mint teams who should be working on the core.
My preferred DE is KDE and so that overrides everyone else's preferences, so there.
If you drop XFCE or KDE they bounce while other DE's break.

Oh, and the Mint teams clearly cannot organise their own work properly. If they did things my way we would be on Mint 36 by now and not Beta 18.



[For the record - yes, the above is satire.]

More seriously, I appreciate the fact that Mint stepped in and salvaged the mobile device train wreck Gnome 3 became!

I'm sorry but there is a lot of nonsense in this thread. For one I'm not sure why people think they know what is best for Mint developers, or open source developers in general to work on. People seem to lose sight of who those developers are. For Mint specifically you do realize that all the devs are people no different from the rest of you. We have families, full time jobs, school, etc. We do this in our free time, by our own choice, because we enjoy it. No one dictates what we work on. It's not a job where where get paid a salary and some boss tells us what we have to do. If that was the case many devs would likely move on because they already have one of those. Yes, we try to base the things we work on user feedback. Most things come from ideas from the users. They get discussed among the devs as to whether or not they are practical or fit into the particular project. Followed by how to go about implementing and presenting said thing to the user. Then if someone wants to work on it or take on the challenge they do. Particular devs tend to gravitate towards working on things that interest them and ultimately sort of "take over" that area. In the end you hope that users enjoy or find usefulness out of the work you put in.

pgmer6809 wrote:KDE is one of the major DE technologies in the Linux ecosystem.
It is also under active development; there is no telling when some distro such as Ubuntu or Debian might decide to use the QT libraries as the basis for one of their future releases.
By keeping a KDE version of Mint current, the Mint team is hedging their bets. If they had to base their main DE on QT libraries they would have some familiarity with them, and some assurance that the core of Mint is not completely incompatible with them.

pgmer6809

This has nothing to do with anything. Qt and GLib/Gtk are just the the set of libraries for the different desktop environments. These libraries are just another layer in between that provide convenient interfaces to the important stuff underneath. You can't, for example, port Cinnamon to Qt. That would essentially mean starting over from scratch.

JosephM wrote:I'm sorry but there is a lot of nonsense in this thread.

What? You're sayin that my perfectly reasoned argument was nonsense?

For one I'm not sure why people think they know what is best for Mint developers, or open source developers in general to work on. People seem to lose sight of who those developers are. For Mint specifically you do realize that all the devs are people no different from the rest of you. We have families, full time jobs, school, etc. We do this in our free time, by our own choice, because we enjoy it. No one dictates what we work on. It's not a job where where get paid a salary and some boss tells us what we have to do.

"We?" I assume you are one of the Mint developers then?
I thought Clem said the Mint developers were paid... No?

If that was the case many devs would likely move on because they already have one of those. Yes, we try to base the things we work on user feedback. Most things come from ideas from the users. They get discussed among the devs as to whether or not they are practical or fit into the particular project. Followed by how to go about implementing and presenting said thing to the user. Then if someone wants to work on it or take on the challenge they do. Particular devs tend to gravitate towards working on things that interest them and ultimately sort of "take over" that area. In the end you hope that users enjoy or find usefulness out of the work you put in.

And on that front I thank you. We don't normally converse directly with developers here. But I thought you guys WERE paid in some fashion for Mint development.

Anyway, I concur regarding nonsense hence my satirical post!