Hi everyone, Shadowbane is back with a very interesting Linux problem. I made the mistake of watching Jupiter Broadcasting live broadcast on December 7, 2019, a few days ago, now I want to replace my Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon desktop environment with KDE Plasma desktop environment. The reason I want to replace my desktop environment is I now see how plain Jane Cinnamon’s desktop environment is. What I mean by the words plain Jane is the fact the Cinnamon desktop environment doesn’t have a lot of customization options KDE Plasma does. Now that I have explained the problem, I will enlighten this community on how I tried to solve my goal to replace Linux Mint’s Cinnamon desktop with KDE Plazma.
I have found the best approach to making changes to a computer is to create a virtual machine as close to the computer ( you want to make changes to) as you can. By following this approach the computer is protected and you can easily try a different approach.
Are you going to remove the Cinnamon desktop altogether, or keep both and log in to KDE Plasma ? Before you start, Make sure you have a LiveUSB, and your data is backed up. Incase you power down and log back in to a terminal…
The easiest way would be to install kubuntu or run it live. Next best bet is the kubuntu repos and try to apt install plasma… This will probably leave some things broken.
My advice is to grab a copy of Manjaro or fedora as it’s easier to go between desktops, but you do you boo.
I think when you want to run the kde plasma desktop,
ontop of a Ubuntu base.
Then you could verywell just use Kubuntu instead of Mint.
because that will likely be least hassle.
If there were more official support for kde on mint then I would say go for it but people don’t realize how much difference there is between mint and Ubuntu or even just running qt vs gtk.
Well yeah Mint actually had an official kde spin.
But they have dropped it since the 18.x releases,
which is kinda unfortunate.
i can only speak from personal experience,
but i tried installing kde plasma ontop of a distro with,
a Gnome based DE like Cinnamon on Mint.
And for me it never really worked out well.
Just because all the core differences between both desktops in general.
I cannot really recommend it, atleast not to new linux users in general.
But the way to get the kde desktop installed on mint,
i believe it can be done just from the repo´s.
Probably the best advice. If you get Fedora, Get the “Fedora Everything.iso” that way you customize the minimal install all the way.
i think the team let it go so they could focus on the Cinnamon specific distro. When I was on Mint during the 16.x days, I completely borked my install by uninstalling Cinnamon. Lol Fun times trying to rescue my desktop.
Yeah could be.
Another thought might be due to the development,
on their own custom Xapps which are gtk based.
Because those apps are just forks from existing gnome apps.
Thinking back on it… I was on Linux Mint for 3 weeks and knew it wasn’t for me because I felt limited by customization. Mint is like the gateway drug of Linux. Then you find out there’s so much out there to try till you find your niche !
Sorry I wasn’t able to get back to everyone until now. I think the reason so far my approach to replacing the Cinnamon desktop environment with KDE Plasma isn’t working is threefold.
Virtualbox isn’t installed correctly on my host machine.
Virtualbox guest addon’s isn’t installed correctly on my guest machine.
There is no way just following the guide isn’t going to create a broke Linux distribution.
To answer your question @Hammerhead_Corvette, I was going to replace the Cinnamon desktop altogether and have KDE Plasma as the desktop environment.
The reason I started this topic, I thought there might be a way I could create my own Linux distribution using Linux Mint as a base and use KDE Plasma as the desktop environment.
Well, If you strip out Cinnamon off of Linux Mint, you basically end up with a Debian/Ubuntu machine with no DE. There is no fundamental difference between Debian/Ubuntu/Mint other than the DE. Think about it, under the DE:
They all use the same package management tool (apt/apt-get)
aside from Repo maintnance and cadence, the are typically the same.
These Distros share commonality with how packages are released as in cadence. “LTS” type.
If you want to build a distro of your own with the apt/apt-get system and the LTS cycle, you can do that ! But Mint is too tied to it’s DE to do it successfully. Debian or Ubuntu would be the way to go. Do a minimal install and build from there !
