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Linux Mint Is Killing the KDE Edition (betanews.com)
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."
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."
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.
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).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'd rather watch Kirk tangle with a sticky situation, but I'd prefer Picard's solution
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"