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.
The developers of Linux Mint develop the Cinnamon desktop, they are close and/or share some members with the MATE desktop team, and so Linux Mint is pretty much that. There are several other good distros for KDE Plasma including KDE’s own distro, Neon, so they figured they weren’t really serving much of a purpose with it. Plus Plasma is qt, MATE and Cinnamon (and xfce AFAIK) are all GTK, so.
I did not know that there were common devs across Cinnamon and MATE.
I know that Mint wants to have app collaboration ( Xapps ) between Cinnamon, MATE, and XFCE. That makes more sense now.
These are then major GTK desktops that are not GNOME. GNOME apps are increasingly GNOME only so it makes sense for the rest of them to collaboration on a GTK experience that is not GNOME.