Preparing for Mint to drop the KDE distro

[TeaSwigger]

It'd be like dissing an entire distribution just because you don't like its default web browser.

I agree. Several years ago I forever discarded opensuse - simply because I didn't (still don't) like their logo. But, that's kinda the point is it not? My quality of life has not diminished because I chose not to use opensuse. It's a personal "thing". There are so many choices that one is not compelled to "settle" for something one doesn't like... whatever the reason.

Somewhere out there will be a distro that really pops for each person. It may take some searching to find, or it may fall out of a tree right onto your head.

Speaking of 'little things' that bother one, one aesthetic thing that bugs me about the otherwise superb Cinnamon & MATE desktops: you can't make the 'taskbar(s)' any width you want. In KDE or xfce, you can have it take up any percent of the screen width you like and put it anywhere you like (over to one side for example). Fine on a mobile I suppose but on a large wide screen desktop taking the whole width feels 'wrong' to me and usually doesn't look right. Maybe it is, or maybe it's from being so used to 800x600 and 1024x768 screens and having a big widescreen now. *picture 'old man with cane' emoticon here

BTW: I did have other issues with Cinnamon. It's just that the Nemo problems were the show-stopper for me.

Too bad it gave you problems. A quirk I'm having lately is I sometimes can't rename a folder; if I switch views, it then works. Odd. Otherwise it has been fine. As mentioned by jaymot above, you can have a 'split view' in nemo. I use that a lot.

[tovian]

FYI in Nemo, View/Extra Pane (F3 shortcut key) runs it in split pane mode.

As I mentioned earlier, I can barely remember details from that far back. Perhaps I should apologize - acknowledge my "mea culpa"; perhaps it was something other than split-pane that Nemo lacked, or did not do very well (or did not do at all).

MY Bottom line: Mint-KDE works great for me (but is going away); Mint-Mate works for me (but I've heard rumors that it, too, is going away); Mint-xfce works for me (and is still a candidate); Cinnamon did not work well enough in my environment.

[KBD47]

MY Bottom line: Mint-KDE works great for me (but is going away); Mint-Mate works for me (but I've heard rumors that it, too, is going away); Mint-xfce works for me (and is still a candidate); Cinnamon did not work well enough in my environment.

Would be curious where you heard that about Mint MATE. That would be a shame.

[tovian]

Would be curious where you heard that about Mint MATE.

In another thread, or maybe way back in this thread, somebody wrote that they thought/heard that Mint would probably move to making Cinnamon its only distro. That may be pure speculation, but to consider it as a possibility you only have to look at business cases for supporting multiple DE's and look at what's happening to Mint-KDE right now.

[KBD47]

In another thread, or maybe way back in this thread, somebody wrote that they thought/heard that Mint would probably move to making Cinnamon its only distro. That may be pure speculation, but to consider it as a possibility you only have to look at business cases for supporting multiple DE's and look at what's happening to Mint-KDE right now.

That would be a big mistake. Not everyone loves Cinnamon, and it is a bit heavy on older hardware. I was surprised about them dropping MATE on LMDE.

[tacoz]

... then do the install of KDE onto Mint XFCE.

+1
And may I add... it works very nicely!
My only issue was with the kubuntu backports ppa; because Mint was 16.04 I was stuck with Xenial versions and it took a lot of effort to install 17.10 versions...
Eventually I settled on using a 17.10 mini iso with minimal Xfce and once that was configured, installed KDE...
and I would've stayed there if it wasn't for a chance encounter (a few months ago) with Neon
and as @TeaSwigger said, there are " KDE apps which I've not found a substitute I'm as satisfied with"
so now I have the added benefit of not having to update Xfce
as simple and as nice as having Xfce was... I really do prefer Plasma 5!

[o-l-d]

... then do the install of KDE onto Mint XFCE.

+1
And may I add... it works very nicely!
My only issue was with the kubuntu backports ppa; because Mint was 16.04 I was stuck with Xenial versions and it took a lot of effort to install 17.10 versions...
Eventually I settled on using a 17.10 mini iso with minimal Xfce and once that was configured, installed KDE...
and I would've stayed there if it wasn't for a chance encounter (a few months ago) with Neon
and as @TeaSwigger said, there are " KDE apps which I've not found a substitute I'm as satisfied with"
so now I have the added benefit of not having to update Xfce
as simple and as nice as having Xfce was... I really do prefer Plasma 5!

Or you could just add the Neon repos instead of Kubuntu's and have the latest Plasma 5 because the devs at Neon haven't released an update to Bionic base yet but it is in the works. I added the "user edition" repos but if one wanted to they could add the LTS repos.

[exploder]

Just throwing my opinion into the mix here but I think Kubuntu 18.04 is the way to go if you want to continue with KDE and the plasma desktop. I like many different desktop environments and I have not ran KDE on a day to day basis for years but Kubuntu 18.04 has completely changed my opinion. The LTS base is great to start with and will continue to get better over time, add to that plasma 5.12 is an LTS release and it's a really solid, stable release.

I have had Kubuntu installed on two of my machines for a few weeks or so now and not had any problem of any kind. Plasma 5.12 is really great as far as system resources goes too, both PCs use less than half the memory they did with Gnome. I have read that plasma 5.13 will be even better and offer some nice refinements. Kubuntu could be updated from the backports repo and I guess I will decide that when the time comes.

I have never tried KDE NEON so I really can not comment on it other than I see quite a few KDE enthusiasts running it. I played it safe and went with the LTS because I have not ran a KDE distro since Kubuntu 7.04! Like I said, just my two cents.

[KBD47]

I wanted to test Kubuntu since the 18.04 release so I put it on a desktop with 4gb of ram and on a laptop with 3gb of ram. I can't believe how fast and lightweight it is. It seems no heavier to run than Xfce, and it looks awesome. The only issue I have with it is that it takes a few seconds to connect to wifi. This is the best KDE has looked and ran in a long time.

[exploder]

KDB47, I agree completely! I have seen comparisons on YouTube, KDE is nearly as light as xfce now and has far more features. The nice modern look plasma 5.12 has is hard to beat too!

[KBD47]

KDB47, I agree completely! I have seen comparisons on YouTube, KDE is nearly as light as xfce now and has far more features. The nice modern look plasma 5.12 has is hard to beat too!

Exploder, I had just about given up on KDE as it seemed heavy and bloated in years past. I'm not sure what got into those guys, but they have outdone themselves with this new Plasma desktop. It looks clean and sharp. I would not hesitate recommending it to new Linux users, where in the past I would have pointed them to something else.

[tovian]

I am posting this reply from my kubuntu testbed:

It's a fairly puny machine...
Kernel: 4.13.0-21-generic x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.10.5
Distro: Ubuntu 17.10
CPU: Dual core Intel Core2 Duo E4400 (-MCP-) cache: 2048 KB
clock speeds: max: 2000 MHz 1: 1200 MHz 2: 1200 MHz
Mem: 3252 (3GB)

kubuntu has been working beautifully since I started playing with it (a couple of months ago).

If Mint-KDE stopped working today this is what I would land on. My biggest personal concern is that if I ever change DE's again I want it to be totally because I want to - not because it's being forced on me. I'm still thinking that ubuntu/Canonical will have both the resources and commitment to continue support for a "KDE-distro" for the long term.

@exploder - I give a lot of weight to the recommendation of a DEVELOPER. Thank you for your comments.

[tdockery97]

@exploder:

Back on Kubuntu 18.04 myself. It seems to be getting even more stable as time goes by. And you are right about it being "light". I checked Ksysguard while watching a video and it was only using 690MB resources. I'm starting to think it is a keeper.

[exploder]

@ tdockery97

Yes, I came home from work tonight and updates were there for plasma 5.12.5! I am really impressed with this release and hope this trend continues!

[simonsaysthis]

Being a Plasma fan, I have just installed Kubuntu 18.04 and tweaked to my liking. I am literally blown away at how far its come over the last 2 years. So far this has been the most positive Linux experience of 2018 - by far. Great fonts, low on resources, no issues with Nvidia, Bluetooth works. I think Kubuntu is seriously underrated.

[GreyGeek]

Regardless of the distro there are always folks who have problems with it. Most problems stem from user mistakes, inexperience and/or hardware incompatibility. (Disclaimer: I am a retired admin at KubuntuForums who has used KDE since SuSE made KDE 1.0 Alpha its DE in its 5.3 release in September of 1998. For the last three years I've been running KDE Neon User Edition on top of Btrfs as the root file system. I will never use a distro which doesn't offer Btrfs as a RFS.).

Mint is an excellent distro and most people, especially Linux novices, cannot go wrong choosing it. It's ease of use contributes, no doubt, to its continued high page ranking at DistroWatch. Many new users coming from Windows were drawn to KDE because it could be configured to look & feel like XP, NT, W2K, Win7 and Win8. No sane person wants to configure KDE5 to look and feel like Win10. Now, users are drawn to KDE5 because of its beauty and power.

I tried Mint for a while, as I do many distros, to see what Mate and its other DE offerings were capable of. I also recently put Kubuntu 18.04 on my metal for a few days to see how it behaved. (Using Btrfs snapshots I can easily and quickly restore my Neon installation even after wiping the HD and giving it entirely to another distro. One Btrfs user, oshunluver, can boot from any one of six different distros using one grub menu on a single HD running Btrfs.) Having used Linux as my primary OS for 20 years you won't be surprised that I found both Mint and Kubuntu 18.04 to be stellar in their performance. Kubuntu 18.04's performance is due almost entirely to the KDE Plasma desktop. Running my NVidia GT 650M chip using the 390 driver on Kubuntu 18.04 gave Minecraft 600+ fps performance. Neon, on the Ubuntu 16.04 platform, running the NVidia 384 driver, gives between 400-500 fps. Btrfs is its usual faultless self on both Kubuntu and Neon. KDE Plasma 5.12.XX is a VERY powerful and VERY configurable DE. It can leave the novice bewildered and confused when attempting to add or reconfigure its settings. Experienced Linux users, however, will have few problems adapting to KDE5 Plasma's capabilities. And, if all the user does is browse the Internet, email and watch online videos it makes little difference which Linux distro they use.

[exploder]

I stumbled across Kubuntu 18.04 over hardware issues I had with Linux up until the 4.15 kernel came about. I had to run Windows 10 up until that point... I used development builds of Ubuntu 18.04 and liked it other than its resource use and it just looked dated after looking at Windows 10. I started reading about how good Kubuntu 18.04 was, watched some videos and had to try it for myself.

In the past I had problems with KDE but I could not find anything wrong with 5.12 and it looks amazing! Now I have great resource usage, lots of great features, zero problems and its all rolled up in a very elegant looking package. My hardware needs are satisfied, everything works perfect and the support life is right where I would like to be. The backports give my the option to upgrade plasma if I want to.

[tdockery97]

I do still plan on installing KDE onto Mint when the public beta of Mint 19 XFCE is released. Hopefully that will provide the stability of Mint along with the excellence and low resource usage of Kubuntu 18.04.

[KBD47]

I do still plan on installing KDE onto Mint when the public beta of Mint 19 XFCE is released. Hopefully that will provide the stability of Mint along with the excellence and low resource usage of Kubuntu 18.04.

I think I'm going to try it too just out of curiosity on a test machine to see how it works out. But I think most users are probably better off just running Kubuntu 18.04, especially if they just want something that works well out of the box. It is too bad that Mint dropped KDE just it has become awesome, but I know they must focus resources where most needed.

[tovian]

I'm still so much of a newbie I have to ask questions that most folks have answered long ago. I listed the specs for my kubuntu testbed above if anyone needs to check. I installed that system several months ago, but it is already fairly outdated. Is there a good way to update what I have to the latest, or should I just step on it with a new iso? Since I have quite a few modifications to Plasma already I'd kinda hate to lose 'em - but there's absolutely nothing on that machine I can't live without.