Linux Mint 21.2 Promoted To Beta With Desktop Improvements, HEIF & AVIF Support

[Vistaus]

Danny3 dude, what the... ? Do you even know what you're talking about? Mint was supporting KDE and they dropped because it was too much work while not providing enough value as every other distros already support it. And Linux Mint also has a version based on Debian. All of this works super well I don't know which problems you had with game but I have none. Looks like you never followed the project.

Support is not the same as an entire edition. Sadly, there are very few distros that have KDE editions.

[Danny3]

Clem dropped KDE because it was to hard to polish.

And I think that's a bullshit reason he provided!
Because there are distros way less popular, with way less developers and donations than Linux Mint and they provide a KDE edition, sometimes even polished well enough.

[DavidBrown]

And I think that's a bullshit reason he provided!
Because there are distros way less popular, with way less developers and donations than Linux Mint and they provide a KDE edition, sometimes even polished well enough.

It's a matter of focus. No distribution - regardless of size, developer resources or money - can focus on everything. Mint decided long ago to focus on a small selection of GTK-based desktops. One (Cinnamon) is more modern, with fancier effects but more demanding in processor and graphics power. One (Mint) is middle of the road - does everything many people need but mostly keeps out of the way. One (Xfce) is less demanding and works well on smaller systems. All use GTK. That means the Mint team can re-use a substantial amount of their work across them all. They can write one software manager, and have it fit well with all the desktops. They can make one fork of a GTK or Gnome editor and use it on all their desktops. They can share themes and artistic designs.

KDE, on the other hand, uses a completely different toolkit - QT - that works in a totally different manner. Making a program that can use either GTK or QT would be an enormous task, and force you to limit yourself to a common denominator of features. So if Mint wanted to make a KDE version, they have two choices. They could duplicate all the software they write, making KDE versions as well as GTK versions, and duplicate all the theme work. That would be "polish". It would not double the work they did, but it would be perhaps 50% more work for the developers. Or they could say, "Here are the KDE packages available from our repositories, basically unchanged from upstream. It's your computer - install what you want. The Mint software manager and other Mint software will look a bit alien, with different colouring, fonts, shortcuts, etc., but if you are fine with that, great". And obviously the second route is where they went.

The only difference between Mint versions is the choice of desktop installed by default. After installation, you can install any desktop you want - KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, Enlightenment, plainer windows managers like twm - whatever takes your fancy. If you want to make a Mint version that has no full desktop and uses Ratpoison as the windows manager, you can do that - all you are doing is changing the default packages to install.

But no development team can focus on polish, improvements, software and support targeting everything. They make their choices, and let users decide which distro they want to use. The Linux Mint team are in the business of making Linux Mint as good as possible for people who choose to use Linux Mint - they are not spending significant resources on other desktops in an attempt to win a few converts.

[billyswong]

So they dropped their entire desktop environment Cinnamon in favor of a picture organizer and editor?

I don't think you read his post correctly.

Cinnamon does rebase various modules piece by piece to the upstream/pre-fork over time. It is you who misread what I quote/wrote.

Another example is a "Mutter rebase" in Mint 21 https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_vaness...n_whatsnew.php

Mutter Rebase
The biggest change in Cinnamon 5.4 is a major rebase of its window manager. Muffin is now based on Mutter 3.36 and its codebase is much closer to upstream than before.