Linux Mint Will Discontinue Its KDE Edition

[DanL]

If you ever listened to the now-discontinued system.au Linux podcast, they made more gentle but similar jokes. "Hey Dan, do you use Arch Linux? Oh wait, if you did, you would have brought it up every five minutes."

Yeah, I know it was on the crude side, and I went back and forth before posting it. I had the little angel sitting on my right shoulder giving me the stern look and shaking her head. And then the little devil on my left shoulder was all, "Do it! Do it! Muahahaha." I guess he won that round.

I have nothing against Arch Linux or 99.44% of the users. But each Linux distribution has its followers that have decided that tribal warfare is a good thing.

Yeah, I feel the same way, and I've used and learned from Arch, even if it ultimately didn't up being my distro of choice.

You need to recalibrate your sarcasm detector.

It's very possible. It's also possible you need to do a better job of getting the sarcasm across.

[grok]

Why should I care about Linux Mint?

No particular reason, if you're asking then you probably don't have to care.
Mate desktop is a first class citizen on it and so it is a good choice if you want something that runs well everywhere (quad core Atom laptop with soldered flash, 15 year old desktop with 1GB, or monster rig). Still good enough on HDD.
Its "Update Manager" is good to use, a tray icon application without nonsense that allows kernel updates too. Also has the "Software Sources" GUI for repos and ppa [to keep track of what software you installed from ppa I found out that only synaptic helps]. For disk partitions, uses gnome-disks (as an example of something they don't use in house software for)

Its appearance stays about the same over the years such that you can't even really tell if you're running 13, 17.x, 18.x or LMDE 2 but that's not such a bad thing.

Also Cinnamon is an easy choice if you need exactly 2x scaling for Hi DPI (3200x1800 and 4K or 5K monitors) while having a Gnome 2 / XFCE / Windows XP clone desktop out of the box. Perhaps Arch and KDE will do the same, you'll forgive me if KDE is alien to me or other people who only use the GTK2 and GTK3 desktops.

[starshipeleven]

I understand why you brought up the backports but (to me anyway) that's not enough of a reason to use Mint over Ubuntu LTS.

Your opinion is not relevant, you are not a Mint user.

I'm just stating that the "new backports on stable core" thing is a major feature most other distros don't offer, and that many people use Mint Mate or Mint XFCE for that reason, or other reasons not related to Cinnamon.

I know, as I used it before OpenSUSE because of that reason, and I also was in their forums helping out people.

[starshipeleven]

Not surprised. Cinnamon is basically a fork of GNOME 3 and uses forks of GNOME apps. Linux Mint tracks Ubuntu and GNOME. Now that GNOME is the standard Linux desktop now, KDE finds itself more isolated to hobbyist distros and it's own spin of Neon. Distros like Mint who used to spin both a GNOME or GNOME derivative like Cinnamon AND KDE are simplifying to just GNOME and GNOME based technologies now that all three major distros (Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu) have standardised on GNOME as their default DE. KDE has some good tech and is a nice alternative for folks looking more for a Windows feel or who like to twiddle endless knobs and settings. But the Linux world has spoken loud and clear. GNOME and derivative DE's based on GNOME are where it's at. KDE unfortunately shot itself in the foot with two disaserous releases ( 4 and 5 ) and while much improved lost the support of the big three ((RH, Suse and Ubuntu)

Typical Standard-Linux-Desktop-grade bullshit, mixing baseless statements with wishful thinking, and of course ignoring history and facts.

KDE didn't "lose support of the big three", it was never supported decently in the first place, if at all, due to historical reasons that have nothing to do with KDE 4 and 5.

[leipero]

How can you spot an Arch Linux user? They will tell you (and tell you that anyone using Arch isn't as 1337 as them).
Seriously, statements like "Arch is for real men" makes me think that Arch is for insecure men with really small dicks.

Sarcasm or not, Arch is not like most distributions, so comparing Mint, Ubuntu or any distribution that comes with preinstalled packages is not fair to both Arch and those distributions. Arch is pretty much what you need/make of it, that's why it attracts "power users" I guess.

People pointing out their distribution of choice in such manner is very similar to people pointing out their DE of choice in the same manner (GNOME vs KDE usually), I guess that is "vocal minority" of users who base themselves on some sort of "elitism" (completely natural for humans), and for this specific case the reasoning is "hard to install" and that is not true statement at all, it's actually very easy to install and configure, Gentoo is something people might be able to play "that card", but Gentoo also have it's use cases and reasons why it exists.

So those type of generalizations are not useful at all, there are valid reasons to run Mint, Arch or Gentoo or any other distribution.

[Jumbotron]

LOL...startroll....you're cute when you're indignant. LOL !!

[andyprough]

Typical Standard-Linux-Desktop-grade bullshit, mixing baseless statements with wishful thinking, and of course ignoring history and facts.

KDE didn't "lose support of the big three", it was never supported decently in the first place, if at all, due to historical reasons that have nothing to do with KDE 4 and 5.

As far as I recall, Suse has always been one of the biggest contributors to KDE and has always put out a highly customized KDE version.

[starshipeleven]

LOL...startroll....you're cute when you're indignant. LOL !!

Heh, personal attacks? What is this, the kindergarden?

[andre30correia]

There is no point in the KDE edition now that KDE Neon exists, Mint KDE just shipped with an out of date version of plasma with known bugs in that are fixed in the latest stable version (which is what neon had), i'm not saying new bugs are not introduced in newer KDE versions..

Same thing for Kubuntu LTS, no point to it at all now (there is KDE neon LTS also).

Interestingly however KDE/Plasma will be in Solus soon.

Kubuntu become good since the "enemy" of canonical was "fired".

[starshipeleven]

Oooh, Mint will also install flatpack by default now. Good, very good.