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KDE Open Source Operating Systems Software Linux

Linux Mint Is Killing the KDE Edition (betanews.com) 141

BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: While both the Cinnamon and Mate versions of Linux Mint are decent choices for computer users, there was one version that was always utterly bizarre -- the KDE Edition. Don't get me wrong, KDE is a fine environment, but Kubuntu already exists. Having a version of Mint using KDE was redundant and confusing. Thankfully, today, the Linux Mint team announces it is finally killing the KDE edition. "In continuation with what's been done in the past, Linux Mint 18.3 will feature a KDE edition, but it will be the last release to do so. I would like to thank Kubuntu for the amazing work they have done. The quality of Plasma 5 in Xenial made backports a necessity. The rapid pace of development upstream from the KDE project made this very challenging, yet they managed to provide a stable flow of updates for us and we were able to ship good KDE editions thanks to that. I don't think this would have been possible without them," says Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint.

Lefebvre further says, "KDE is a fantastic environment but it's also a different world, one which evolves away from us and away from everything we focus on. Their apps, their ecosystem and the QT toolkit which is central there have very little in common with what we're working on. We're not just shipping releases and distributing upstream software. We're a product distribution and we see ourselves as a complete desktop operating system. We like to integrate solutions, develop whatâ(TM)s missing, adapt what's not fitting perfectly, and we do a great deal of that not only around our own Cinnamon desktop environment but also thanks to cross-DE frameworks we put in place to support similar environments, such as MATE and Xfce."

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Linux Mint Is Killing the KDE Edition

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    • >>Having a version of Mint using KDE was redundant and confusing.

      Right, because The Linux Community will absolutely not stand for any redundancy and confusion in our distros. Sure glad those chuckleheads at Mint got with the program. Man, what were they thinking...?

      • by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @07:28AM (#55435833) Homepage

        Yeah, I don't understand that sentence. Mint has Cinnamon and Mate.. how are they not "bizzare, redundant and confusing"? After all, doesn't Ubuntu have those too?

        It's amazing how much some of the community still can't get over how KDE is a better, healthier project than any of their GNOME babies.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          It's amazing how much some of the community still can't get over how a lot of us don't like KDE, despite your opinions of its awesomeness.

          • by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

            Have you even used KDE? I don't think so. If you did you'd see how it's superior to gnome. Gnome is more like a simple childs desktop. Not a professional environment. When I use a machine with Gnome, the first thing I do is upgrade it to kde. Get rid of that Gnome interface that seems to put you right into a straight jacket. I can't imagine why anyone likes it. When I show people that have never used Linux both setups, there is no question. They always chose KDE.

        • by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @08:12AM (#55436029)

          It's amazing how much some of the community still can't get over how KDE is a better, healthier project than any of their GNOME babies.

          And Captain Picard would totally kick Captain Kirk's ass.....

        • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @08:12AM (#55436031)

          KDE has been a bit disappointing, because I like their design sensibilities, but they tend to have more random glitches in various components. Specifically KWin is a fantastic window manager/compositor and I have little reason to complain there.

          Meanwhile Gnome has tendend to be less glitchy, but I hate their design, and they lack flexibility. They settle for being marginally better than Microsoft Windows.

          Meanwhile most other desktops fail to take advantage of compositing for producting fetures. Sure a lot of the compositing effects is shiny fluff, but it does provide useful views of data (which is one thing I like about KWin).

      • Qt is an infinitely better toolkit - always was, still is. For some reason those in the Linux desktop world have never got with the programme that says you need good development tools for a desktop. If you've been around long enough this has been rinsed and repeated endlessly for the past twenty years or so. But, it's Linux Mint, so no one will care.
    • Maybe the Linux "Desktop" came in a form that nobody recognized.

      While there are plenty who use an actual Linux Desktop, it is also a fact that Linux based systems vastly outnumber Windows to the point that Windows is really the strange incompatible orphan child. No wonder Microsoft's efforts to embrace open source and Linux in the last few years. The efforts to force everyone into Windows 10 subscription model is an admission that the monopoly desktop model is at an end.

      Chromebooks have outsold Wind
      • by lhowaf ( 3348065 )

        Chromebooks have outsold Windows laptops on Amazon for years and years now.

        Could you cite a source for those numbers? I searched but didn't find anything that shows Chromebooks anywhere close to matching Windows laptops. I did find a claim on ZDNet that said Chromebooks had surpassed Windows laptop sales but I ignored it because the accompanying chart showed the latter dominating the market. Business Insider [businessinsider.com] compares sales for 2014-2016.

        • I can't cite a source for that. So I will concede that point.
          • by lhowaf ( 3348065 )
            Thanks - I was just curious because I hardly see any Chromebooks in my repair shop. Almost all Windows laptops and desktops (never a Linux machine, either).
      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Chromebooks have outsold Windows laptops on Amazon for years and years now.

        Cherry picking data much? ChromeOS has 0.84% [statcounter.com] market share on StatCounter's OS statistics.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re:As a KDE user. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ramze ( 640788 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @06:57AM (#55435723)

      Yeah, I never really got why they bothered with KDE. The great thing about Mint is Cinnamon (and Mate to a lesser degree). It's meant to be a clean, stable, customized OS... but that also means it's using older packages from Ubuntu. KDE tends to be more cutting edge (sometimes bleeding edge), and I don't know that the KDE version was as well polished or customized as the Cinnamon one.

      I tried to stay with Mint, but at one point, I needed a kernel it didn't offer for a feature I wanted... and then I couldn't get a newer version of VLC because the repositories had a much older one. Same for several other programs. Eventually, my system became unstable from all the modifications, so I just wiped it and went with Ubuntu with the Cinnamon DE.

      Mint already has too many flavors imho -- and ones based off of ubuntu and directly off of debian as well. It's a small team, and I'd love it if they'd just focus on the Cinnamon DE and make an official Cinnamon flavor of Ubuntu (with Wayland support, too!). But, I understand they have different goals. I just think they bit off more than they can chew with all these flavors.... especially with KDE.

      • Mint already has too many flavors imho -- and ones based off of ubuntu and directly off of debian as well. It's a small team, and I'd love it if they'd just focus on the Cinnamon DE and make an official Cinnamon flavor of Ubuntu (with Wayland support, too!). But, I understand they have different goals. I just think they bit off more than they can chew with all these flavors.... especially with KDE.

        Oh good it wasn't just me - I wanted to end up at KDE for Connect alone https://community.kde.org/KDEC... [kde.org]. It's just KDE is so configurable and me new that I'd mess it up so badly I had to remove it.

        I've landed on Cinnamon as my flavor of choice, Linux Mint is also my first, so not much experience with the others.

        • by WallyL ( 4154209 )

          I picked Cinnamon, on a Fedora spin titled Korora" [kororaproject.org] and fell in love with it. I still haven't gotten around to trying Linux Mint, but I've been meaning to.

        • I wanted to end up at KDE for Connect alone ...

          KDE Connect Indicator [github.com] lets you use KDE connect with other desktop environments. It works for me on my Raspberry Pi with ArchLinux-Arm and LXDE.

    • But it has to be cool because Elliot uses it [i.redd.it]. Unless he's running Kali off a USB, of course.

    • I tried Mint KDE and saw no advantage over Kubuntu.

  • Mint is focused on providing a desktop environment that keeps everything consistent in the UI, never making a change unless absolutely necessary so as to not throw off the user. In that sense, desktops like KDE seem more experimental, changing things as they innovate.

    I'm glad Mint is staying focused and consistent, that's why I stick with their distro. I want something for daily use for me and my family and it's been perfect.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26, 2017 @06:48AM (#55435671)

    I am writing this comment from Linux Mint KDE and I am wondering why the derisive tone for this distribution in The Fine Article linked. It was marginally better than pure Kubuntu and I was anticipating the next version. Sadly I'm more inclined to KDE than Mint so if they part ways I'll look for another KDE distro.

    Captcha: repelled - is there an AI in this? :-)

    • by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @07:33AM (#55435847) Homepage
      KDE Neon [kde.org] is your answer. The KDE team put it together on a stable LTR Ubuntu core, likely because they got tired of all the KDE haters who seem to run distros.
      • Very cool!

      • by pots ( 5047349 )
        You're right, that's exactly what I need. I started using Mint (switched from Open SUSE) because I wanted something Ubuntu based, but Neon apparently would have been a better choice.

        And It definitely is now. (What the hell, Mint?) Thanks.
    • Whatever technology platform you choose there will be a mountain of haters ready to troll you. Because they had made an intelligent choice on what preferred technology they want however can't understand that someone else may make an intelligent choice that is different. This choice makes them afraid of the validity of their choice, so they get angry.

    • Pretty sure you can still install KDE via the package manager (though I haven't checked).
  • KDE Neon (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @06:52AM (#55435697)

    Since Canonical nor Mint really gave KDE much love, there's little reason for KDE Mint or Kubuntu to exist when KDE now have their own Ubuntu spin.

  • by a9db0 ( 31053 )

    Now I have to go find another distro to move to. I have multiple computers with multiple users, all running Mint/KDE. I thought I'd finally found a easy to use, Debian based distro with KDE. I tried Kubuntu a couple of times, and it was very clearly a second class citizen, even to the point where it almost imploded in Oct 2015. Unless it has improved very dramatically in both quality, focus, and stability it's not a viable alternative.

    Sigh. Fine. Back to the drawing board.
    Dammit.

    • Re: Dammit (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26, 2017 @07:25AM (#55435821)

      As another mentioned, have a look at KDE Neon.

      I have using KDE as my main driver for the last 10+ years. What makes KDE neon great is that you get a barebones installation of KDE (think I even had to install kcal).

      This give you a bloat free edition of KDE where you can choose what you want rather than be forced to carry stuff that you are never going to need or want.

      Neon is based on Ubuntu LTS so you get all of that goodness too, a stable solid OS where you can be productive without being stuck in the dark.

    • Re:Dammit (Score:5, Informative)

      by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @07:34AM (#55435859) Homepage
      KDE Neon [kde.org] is your new friend. Built by KDE on a LTR Ubuntu core.
      • KDE Neon is your new friend. Built by KDE on a LTR Ubuntu core.

        Running Ubuntu LTS means having to go to extra effort to run the latest versions of packages. That's not a feature. If you want to run KDE on Ubuntu, why not just install Kubuntu? If KDE is so awesomely powerful, why can't you just reset the config and use it stock, thus effectively undoing whatever Ubuntu has allegedly done to ruin it?

  • KDE vs GNOMElets (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @07:46AM (#55435927) Homepage

    I love the geeks who complain about KDE's stability or being bloated.. as if you run a real time system and painfully notice every nanosecond. KDE is a well built, well designed desktop that has been on Linux from the very beginnings. If it weren't for some licensing issues in the early years of Linux, GNOME would never have gotten started.

    The fact is, if you have a wonky KDE desktop, it's because the people who maintain your distro are biased towards GNOME and half-ass their KDE builds. If KDE is so bloated and terrible, why is it that it has never been forked (other than Trinity, which is just a continuation of KDE 3), yet there's what, 3? 4? GNOME forks going, most of which were sparked by GNOME being such a clusterf*** to build.

    ONE KDE environment is "bizarre and confusing" but 4 GNOME environments are not? Biased much dude?

    • as if you run a real time system and painfully notice every nanosecond

      If we did then KDE wouldn't be the only thing being complained about. You don't need sub nanosecond performance to shed the "bloat" label, but really let's try and get within 6 orders of magnitude of that first.

      If KDE is so bloated and terrible, why is it that it has never been forked

      The answer lies in the question. Just ask the X.org team if they had a time-machine would they have forked or just gone straight to rip and replace. A lot of people got a lot of grey hairs doing this.

      yet there's what, 3? 4? GNOME forks going, most of which were sparked by GNOME being such a clusterf*** to build.

      Err no. Most of the GNOME forks got going when GNOME turned from "good desktop" into "unmitigated fuc

    • by juanfgs ( 922455 )

      Altough I use GNOME I think Gnome is more "bizarre" nowadays than KDE since they departed from the traditional desktop metaphore, but most new users I've showed the interface somehow get things done on Gnome.

      I don't know however if it's packager fault but I always found KDE software less reliable than Gnome's (tried it on Debian, Slackware, and Fedora), specially after KDE4. Even with the controversy, most of what Gnome software offers to users work, for example Evolution. Last time I tried KDE (I think it

    • To be honest, I've always been in the Gnome camp, but it's not for a particularly good reason. I realized recently, after giving KDE another try, that it's mostly that there's something weird about the look and feel of KDE.

      I can't quite put my finger on what it is. There might be something about the design, or the individual elements, that just don't seem to fit together. Maybe the way everything is so customizable that it doesn't feel like all the different elements were designed together to look and w

      • To be honest, I've always been in the Gnome camp, but it's not for a particularly good reason. I realized recently, after giving KDE another try, that it's mostly that there's something weird about the look and feel of KDE.
        I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

        I have two observations about KDE, but I haven't run it in a few years so they might both be outdated. The thing I've often said is that it seemed like a widget factory exploded. Prefs pages were just a maze of controls and options with no perceptible organization. Maybe that's been fixed? The other problem, ironically, was too much whitespace. Controls were just unnecessarily large, wasting screen real estate where it matters most. This is why most Amiga apps look weird, too, but at least there, there's an

      • Great comment, at least in the sense that it resonates with me.

        I want to like KDE, because when you get under the hood the Qt framework and many related components are truly well designed, mature software.

        But on the visuals side, there's something off. It's not in the tech, it's in the visual polish and consistency, color pallet, icon set, styling. Yes, I know it's customizable but so far, the out of the distro kde-styling seems off to me personally once you open a few different apps and settings panels and

    • My thing Is I just prefer Nautilus over Dolphin .. I realize you can install Nautilus in KDE .. but it just a little weird. There's alot about GNOME I do NOT like. Hence I use Fedora Cinnamon spin. The problem with GNOME is they keep wanting to have a ui that for something other than desktops... Everyone wants it as a desktop. I don't lay awake at night hoping for tablet running GNOME. I do wish GNOME would be more desktop friendly. I actually ran Elementary OS for a bit, however they really dumbed that di

    • by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:13AM (#55436975)

      Biased much dude?

      Relax. The Linux Mint developers are chained to GNOME, which they mention in the article. They have inadequate resources to maintain two major desktops that require diametrically opposed skill sets, so they chose to drop the desktop for which they have inadequate skills and resources to maintain.

      It's not a big deal, as there are several desktop distributions that either favor or at least maintain a KDE desktop.

      I am glad, though, that I didn't waste time test-driving Mint. My preference to date has been Kubuntu, even though it has a few minor wrinkles. I try using GNOME from time to time, but it is as absolutely terrible for my workflow as KDE is absolutely awesome for it.

      • they chose to drop the desktop for which they have inadequate skills and resources to maintain.

        That's better than trying and doing a half-assed job. Bonus point for honesty.

      • by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        I did test-drive Mint, with Cinnamon desktop. It's nice enough, runs slick, doesn't load nearly as much needless shit as most (which makes a huge difference in performance). But I found it too limiting, and after the 2nd time it self-nuked GRUB (apparently triggered by merely looking at the function to change the video resolution) I gave it up.

        Me, I've always greatly preferred KDE to Gnome, and even more now that Gnome has become a giant cellphone. At present my two keeper installs (out of ~200 distros trie

  • by cen1 ( 2915315 )
    Who used Mint for KDE anyway? Those 5 people will surely be pissed off.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I'm using 18.2 on my desktop, and 17.3 on the lower-powered laptop I use every day.
      I used to use Kubuntu until they switched to Plasma 5, which was not ready yet. I haven't seen a very recent version so don't know if it's ready now.
      I'm not really pissed off, just bemused. KDE has always (even in the horrible 4.0 days) been better for me than any of the desktops Mint seems to really like. I'll find a replacement distro, but I've gotten used to Mint doing things better than Kubuntu.
      Still, there's no hurry. Th

  • why does another distro having a KDE desktop option have anything to do with another

    its linux, the whole fucking thing is redudant, which is why there's umpteen billion distro's based on ubuntu in the first place, which is one of the umpteen billion distro's based on debian

    is it not the whole linux mentality to have unlimited choice while in reality its all the same crap?

    • by swb ( 14022 )

      I think the point is so that enthusiasts can satisfy their Asperger's instincts on trivial details.

  • by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @08:55AM (#55436289) Homepage
    I was a KDE lover back in the early 2000's. Until KDE 4. I had no choice but to switch to a desktop that actually worked, even if not as nice as KDE. Now, more than a decade later, I sometimes think of trying KDE again. Looking back fondly to KDE 3. How integrated everything seemed. But I just can't get over the inertia to even give it a try.

    Now one of my favorite distros, Mint, that was the one that might have let me dip my toes into the waters of KDE, is abandoning KDE. Oh, well. It was nice knowing KDE. Like Apple back in its heyday (I mean the 1980's and early 90's) it was great. But things change.
    • My early Linux experiences were with Suse 8.1 with KDE 3, and I found it to be very usable (as well as looking nice). Ran tolerably on a PIII 800 with 768MB RAM.
      • What I was not fond of, however, was trying to get Ti ACX100 chipset drivers working; no success with ndiswrapper, had to compile the drivers from source. I feel I am a better person for having gotten through said trial.
      • I started with SuSE 5.3 in about summer 1999. As Apple completely abandoned me with OS X, I began my migration from Mac classic to Linux. I had some AMD Athlon processor and 256 MB RAM at the time. It was my first PC and I was very unfamiliar with PC hardware -- being a Mac (classic) guy at the time.
    • by N7DR ( 536428 )

      I was a KDE lover back in the early 2000's. Until KDE 4. ... Looking back fondly to KDE 3. How integrated everything seemed. But I just can't get over the inertia to even give it a try.

      I have similar feelings, although I stuck with KDE4, even though some of its bugs infuriated me more often than was good for my blood pressure. Then debian stable switched to Plasma 5 recently, and after a few days I simply had to find an alternative. I have an old KDE3 machine, and every time I used it, it was like a breath of fresh air, so I switched to Trinity on my main desktop machine. I don't think I'll be switching to anything else for a long time. I do use a lot of the more recent versions of *appli

      • by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        Personally, I don't CARE that the Trinity apps tend to be a generation or two behind... generally I can't tell Trinity's version from the same app on the straight KDE box, and the only one that annoys me by being really ancient is Dolphin. (The latest version runs, but looks weird.)

        Then again, my main box is still WinXP, so I'm evidently not all that stuck on latest and greatest. :)

    • Now one of my favorite distros, Mint, that was the one that might have let me dip my toes into the waters of KDE, is abandoning KDE. Oh, well. It was nice knowing KDE. Like Apple back in its heyday (I mean the 1980's and early 90's) it was great. But things change.

      What's Mint's reason to exist now that Ubuntu is abandoning Unity, and both Ubuntu and Mint include systemd by default? It seems like everything Mint needs to do for us today would be provided by a Cinnamon PPA.

      If you want to play with KDE again, install Kubuntu in a VM and try it out. It won't cost you anything.

      • That's not a bad idea. And I have plenty of capacity available to play with VMs. That said, committing to it on physical hardware is a major commitment.
    • Looking back fondly to KDE 3. How integrated everything seemed.

      We're going to have to agree to disagree on this. I started using both GNOME and KDE when they were both at version 1. For usability, I found that KDE absolutely disgraced GNOME. I have never used a version of either desktop that changed that relationship.

      As good as KDE 3 was, it had some major deficiencies that would now be considered show-stoppers. When KDE 4's first end-user version (not the development version that so many people mistook for end-user suitability) was released, it was a bit rough aro

      • by sl3xd ( 111641 )

        When KDE 4's first end-user version (not the development version that so many people mistook for end-user suitability) was released, it was a bit rough around the edges, but it already functioned and performed better than KDE 3 in most ways. A few minor KDE 4 releases later, and KDE 3 became quite painful to use by comparison.

        I couldn't agree more. The real fault with KDE4 was that few took the KDE team seriously when they said that the first few "releases" of KDE4 were developer previews.

        Users ignored the warnings because they wanted the shiny.

      • by Teun ( 17872 )
        So what is/was so terrible about Dolphin?

        Sure, in the early releases it was not complete but that's many years ago.
        Konqueror and Dolphin are for large parts running on the same modules anyway, you change a configuration in one, the same happens in the other.

        Konqueror has not been removed and there still is Krusader or even mc...
        However I look at it, Dolphin is in usability and reconfigurability miles ahead of Nautilus.
    • by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      Or, why my primary distro right now is PCLinuxOS with Trinity desktop -- all the love of KDE3 without the patina of antiquity.

  • by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @09:05AM (#55436369) Homepage Journal

    I'd like to see mint go with TDE as an option.

    I won't use KDE4/5 or Gnome but I still use TDE.

    When I finally gave up Mandriva, I went with Ubuntu because TDE was an option.

    LK

  • by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Thursday October 26, 2017 @09:25AM (#55436561)

    Like every modern laptop. Need a magnifying glass to get anything done on Chromebook Pro for example. With KDE, I can just change a setting and it works great.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    They should have killed of Gnome 3 linux mint

  • because desktops like KDE, Deepin, and others that take queues from current UIX developments, try very hard to be modern desktops for modern users, while older desktops try very very hard to be strictly a Linux desktop, for Linux users. That's not how you market your product for the masses and build Linux adoption.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    17.3 was the last Mint version where they integrated KDE right. Everything after just sucked bad.

  • I like/prefer KDE as my main desktop environment compared to most of the others out there and I liked Linux Mint as an alternative to Ubuntu which is why after many years of using Slackware I started to use Linux Mint KDE edition. Looks like I will be saying goodbye to Linux Mint now with this decision.

  • Hi Guys and Girls,

    I've been a Linux Mint KDE user for years and loved it (Since Linux Mint 7). However, due to to the issues I experienced with the early Linux Mint 18 KDE releases and Plasma 5 bugs, I decided to give Maui Linux a try.

    Maui Linux:

    - Ubuntu 16.04 Base
    - Based on KDE NEON
    - Rolling upgrade of KDE Plasma ONLY (Currently on 5.10.2 @ October 2017)
    - Linux Mint tools integrated

    https://mauilinux.org/ [mauilinux.org]

    I've not looked back and would highly recommend the switch.

    Zubin

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