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.
I’m new to the world of Linux as a main OS, and I ran Mint for a while, wanted to try KDE Plasma, installed and ran it on mint for a while and blew away mint for a distro with KDE Plasma once I knew it’s what I wanted.
To say I had jank is an understatement.
How do you mean? And did switching distros fix it?
Also, out of curiosity, what did you go with and how do you like it?
I’m currently running KDE on Mint (Cinnamon is nice but limited and had some issues for me), but I’ve considered trying something else…
If you want something KDE with the stability of Ubuntu and no snaps, I’d consider Fedora-based. There’s Fedora’s community spin of KDE and if you want to try an atomic update distro, Kinoite.
There’s also Nobara, a distro done by Glorious Eggroll, the main developer behind Proton gaming. It’s a distro that’s highly optimized for games and video editing, as well as Wine usage for Windows programs, and has the codecs and non-free repos installed by default. I’ve been really impressed with its capability and being up to date without sacrificing stability.
I’d be a little concerned about going with a single-maintainer distro, though I’m willing to at least check it out.
As for Fedora, I’ve never been a fan, but a lot of that comes from dealing with Fedora Core 5 (way back in the before times when it was still Fedora Core and not just Fedora, which is why the builds are always still labeled with “fc”), and that release was a hot mess
Also that it’s so closely tied to RedHat and how I feel about how they’ve been acting lately, but I understand RedHat doesn’t actually have a controlling hand in that? Anyway, I’m probably being unfair with that
And though I’ve thrown it on a laptop to mess around with, it’s not one I use much and felt like every time I’d take it out to mess with it I’d have to start with a major upgrade, the pace of their releases feels fast to me… But probably not as big of a deal if I’m actively using the machine
Hmm… Yeah, I think I’ll give that a try, carve out some space on my drives to toss it in there
Thanks for the reply! (I had a feeling Fedora might be your response as it does get a lot of hype for its KDE implementation, but a gal can hope for a different option to come up, right?)
Fair enough on the single maintainer thing, though everything he’s doing in that is pretty much just pre-building what you would have to do with a vanilla Fedora install like add GPU optimizations, RPMFusion repos and then uses the standard repos for any installs, maybe with some switches for unstable or testing versions of certain packages like KDE, or at least what Fedora would call unstable.
I was really put off by Redhat as well for my years working with RHEL and the pain in the ass factor of licensing, etc. Fedora is pretty much arms length though.
I think you’ll like it, it’s very low maintenance IME. Another one you might look at is OpenSUSE, though I frickin’ hate their installer, but it’s not much worse than Redhat’s. At least Fedora cleans that up a fair bit.
Not to put down Nobara, they do good work, but Bazzite is way better at doing the same stuff. It’s essentially a gaming spin of Kinoite. Aurora is the same but without the gamer-y parts. Bazzite’s what I’m running on my desktop, as well as my Legion Go, and I love how little it gets in the way.
I switched to Tuxedo. It solved some weird stability issues I had, which were mostly monitor resolution and layout issues.