Installing KDE Plasma
Transform your desktop with the smooth, svelte, sumptuous experience that is KDE Plasma and go complete next-gen with the Wayland too!
There’s no official Linux Mint KDE edition these days, but that doesn’t mean Mint users should miss out on the wonderful experience that is KDE Plasma. It’s modern, but still has a traditional applications menu. It’s incredibly polished, but is nowhere near the resource hog it used to be.
Oh, and its
Dolphin
file manager is a joy to work with, especially if you’re finding
Nemo
a little too simplistic (like that attempt at Pixar humour – Ed). Be that as it may, installing a new desktop environment comes with consequences, and it’s good to be aware of these before you blame us for ruining your system.
Firstly, there’s the disk space hit. The smallest KDE Plasma metapackage provides a minimal desktop, but according to the screenshot it pulls in some 850MB of dependencies in 446 packages. If you go for the full-fat edition, with all the applications from the KDE ecosystem, that will cost you close to 3GB. Next is the duplication of core utilities such as text editors, media players and screenshot tools. These all start to crowd your application menus, and if you use, say, KDE’s Dolphin file manager in Cinnamon, it looks a bit odd.