While Cinnamon is great for many users, KDE Plasma provides a flexible and powerful alternative, particularly for those who desire a more dynamic and configurable desktop environment.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to successfully install KDE Plasma on your Linux Mint 22 system.
@JRepin Not quite sure why you’d use Mint if you wanted to run KDE. Most of the draw of Mint is the Cinnamon desktop. At that point you might as well run Kubuntu.
Because I prefer that Mint undoes Ubuntu’s shit decisions?
@ReversalHatchery I mean, that’s fair. But if your gripe is with Ubuntu there are plenty of other KDE-focused distro releases to go with (KDE Neon, Fedora KDE Spin, Kinoite, etc) that would probably accomplish this in a cleaner fashion. You’d also get Plasma 6 as opposed to Mint’s KDE 5.
Adding a Qt-based DE to Mint’s GTK-focused environment just seems a little messy and wasteful in storage. It’s fully possible and to each their own, but… why, when there are better ways to use KDE?
Opensuse!
Yast is one of the most fully featured package managers and tumbleweed is damn good and they lean fully into KDE.
I even run opensuse Kalpa (KDE immutable) and it is pretty rock solid outside of steam flatpak.
I don’t have experience with the others, but KDE Neon will shit itself if you upgrade it with it’s custom upgrade tool after leaving it unused, or just un-updated for months.
To answer the question, when I get this idea I never remember which other distros would be worth to try, but also it’s often for use in a resource constrained environment enough that I can’t afford anything that insists on snapshotting on every change.
Snaps.
Kubuntu comes with snap support but you can uninstall it and the default snaps, mark the snapd package as forbidden and that’s pretty much it.
But then you could ask the same question again. Why install (K)ubuntu if you’re gonna get rid of snaps anyway.
If you want Plasma with an Ubuntu-based OS without snaps, your best option is probably TuxedoOS (unlike Kubuntu they’re already on Plasma 6 too).
Ubuntu and Kubuntu are nice distros, the problem with Ubuntu is that Canonical makes snaps mandatory. But on Kubuntu you can make them optional.
But you don’t get access to the Mint repos
KDE Neon does not come with snapd installed.
Is that recent?
You can absolutely run Mint with KDE.