Mint 14 KDE Edition

[exploder]

I was not trying to be distro specific in my original post. There were just some things about the Mint KDE edition that really caught my eye.

I was really nice seeing so many positive comments about KDE. With so many choices available these days it really takes some time to find what you really want and what features you can have. I have used Kubuntu in the past as well as Mepis and PCLinuxOS. Kubuntu and Mint 14 KDE just seemed to have the best default fonts and I really liked how the maintainer of the Mint KDE edition went with the original folder icons that I like.

KDE 4.9.4 has been a very good experience for me. Regardless of what particular distribution you are running KDE on I also notice that I do not see many people having very many problems with it. Kwin really works well with the ATI drivers on my laptop and I tried a lot of different desktop environments to find something that worked really well with it's hardware.

I am really looking forward to the next KDE release and have been keeping an eye on the 13.04 section of the Kubuntu forums to see how things are going. It looks like indexing is being concentrated on in KDE 4.10.0 and it has been a concern to many for a while now. It looks like 4.10.0 is going to see some improvement in memory use as a result. People have said that KDE is a resource hog but I honestly am not seeing this to be true. KDE uses about the same memory footprint as Unity and for a full featured desktop environment this seems acceptable to me.

I look forward to other peoples comments on KDE, this turned out to be a very nice discussion. With so many things changing with desktop environments, it's nice to see that the KDE developers are doing a good job at giving us the things we really want and making things easy to configure. I find that I really like having that element of control over my desktop back and KDE has been rock solid.

[montag dp]

I'm running KDE 4.9 on my work computer and Cinnamon on my laptop. I like them both a lot. KDE is extremely customizable and looks great. Cinnamon runs a bit lighter and I like how the menu and search functions work better (fewer key presses required). It's good to have at least two very good and well supported choices available.

If Canonical were to focus on making a separate release with KDE, for example, I wonder how many Ubuntu users would switch.

[memilanuk]

I'd moved away from KDE years ago... can't recall exactly why. I do remember preferring it over the early abomination known as GNOME

When I started getting back into Linux a bit, it seemed like most of the 'main stream' distros other than openSuSE defaulted to some form of GNOME, for better or worse, so I just got used to GNOME.

With all the hullabaloo and fragmentation going on in the GNOME world - Unity, Gnome 3, Gnome Shell, Mate, Cinnamon (these last two I actually kind of like) - I started taking a long look at openSuSE w/ KDE again. Actually, I planned on using XFCE, but YaST + XFCE doesn't play nice, so I ended up in KDE4.

I must say... its taken some work to wrap my head around some of the differences (and I'm still working on that) but it *is* growing on me

Might have to give the Mint 14 KDE version a whirl...


Edited to add:

I knew there was something else I wanted to ask... do the other KDE distros like Mint 14 KDE and Kubuntu use 'apper'? It seems to be a point of contention in the openSuSE community as it interferes with the 'native' package manager tools (zypper & YaST) and most seem to recommend removing apper right off the bat to save time/troubles.

[offgridguy]

KDE is definitely customizable, it also requires a steep learning curve for a
newcomer {me}.

[claudecat]

I made the switch to KDE for daily use when gnome-shell/Unity eclipsed gnome 2 a few years back and have seen nothing but constant improvement in that time. 4.6.5 was usable and complete, and each version since has been noticeably better than the last.

I haven't checked out Mint 14's KDE yet, but Kubuntu 12.10 is very nice - though it needs some massaging to tune it to my needs (firefox, vlc, codecs, etc).

Nobody has mentioned what I consider the 2 best platforms for KDE - Arch and Gentoo. I have the equivalent of kde-full installed on both, and both are lighter on resources than any other I've tried (basically all of 'em). Gentoo in particular idles at around 200mb RAM even with desktop effects enabled - pretty amazing imho.

I know that folks here are 'buntu-centric, but it's worth the extra effort to check out the more esoteric options out there.

[offgridguy]

I made the switch to KDE for daily use when gnome-shell/Unity eclipsed gnome 2 a few years back and have seen nothing but constant improvement in that time. 4.6.5 was usable and complete, and each version since has been noticeably better than the last.

I haven't checked out Mint 14's KDE yet, but Kubuntu 12.10 is very nice - though it needs some massaging to tune it to my needs (firefox, vlc, codecs, etc).

Nobody has mentioned what I consider the 2 best platforms for KDE - Arch and Gentoo. I have the equivalent of kde-full installed on both, and both are lighter on resources than any other I've tried (basically all of 'em). Gentoo in particular idles at around 200mb RAM even with desktop effects enabled - pretty amazing imho.

I know that folks here are 'buntu-centric, but it's worth the extra effort to check out the more esoteric options out there.

Interesting thought, i do have a version of Sabayon/KDE ready to try.
As far as "buntu-centric" it is the ubuntu forum after all.

[claudecat]

Sabayon, won't be as light as Gentoo because it, like almost all distros, uses packages compiled for general use, negating the advantages of Gentoo's "compile everything to your liking" way of doing things. It's a genuine pain to install (plan on a few days of reading/trial and error/compile time) but rather easy to maintain after that.

Not that Sabayon is bad - it's just not that comparable to raw Gentoo in resource usage or perceived speed.

[offgridguy]

Sabayon, won't be as light as Gentoo because it, like almost all distros, uses packages compiled for general use, negating the advantages of Gentoo's "compile everything to your liking" way of doing things. It's a genuine pain to install (plan on a few days of reading/trial and error/compile time) but rather easy to maintain after that.

Not that Sabayon is bad - it's just not that comparable to raw Gentoo in resource usage or perceived speed.

Sounds like Gentoo has similarities to Arch ?

[claudecat]

Sounds like Gentoo has similarities to Arch ?

Similar only in their initial difficulty to install. Gentoo installs packages by compiling the source code, while Arch uses binary packages (though packages from the AUR are compiled from source).

That said, Arch is by far the easier of the 2 to install, and if you use something like Archbang or Bridge (not technically pure Arch, but almost exactly the same) it's almost as easy as any other distro.

[offgridguy]

Similar only in their initial difficulty to install. Gentoo installs packages by compiling the source code, while Arch uses binary packages (though packages from the AUR are compiled from source).

That said, Arch is by far the easier of the 2 to install, and if you use something like Archbang or Bridge (not technically pure Arch, but almost exactly the same) it's almost as easy as any other distro.

Thanks for the info.