Linux Mint KDE is out, LMDE 3 is in

In a blog post written Oct 25, the Linux Mint team has announced that Linux Mint will be ending the KDE flavor after 18.3 is released.

“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.”

Linux Mint most famously is used with Cinnamon, their own in-house developed desktop environment, and also many users tend to enjoy MATE as well. However, because these environments are both forks of GNOME code, there is less focus on KDE.

In the blog post the team 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 what’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. When we work on tools like Xed, Blueberry, Mintlocale, the Slick Greeter, we’re developing features which benefit these 3 desktops, but unfortunately not KDE.”

The post went on to explain how Linux Mint users will still be able to install KDE into future versions of Linux Mint, and using things like the Kubuntu PPA will still be possible, just that the Linux Mint ream will no longer be releasing KDE ISO’s in the future.

However, LMDE, or the Debian Edition of Linux Mint, was spoken about briefly, “It is important for Linux Mint to continue to support LMDE as a fallback option in case Ubuntu ever disappeared and as a development target for the many projects and technologies we work on to guarantee compatibility outside of Linux Mint. It’s a lot of work to support two separate distributions of course (I can’t think of any other project doing that in fact) and LMDE which started as an experiment has obviously a much smaller audience than Linux Mint itself. For these reasons, LMDE is usually very important but not very urgent.”

A complete release date has not been given yet, but it does say on the blog post that a release will come in the first quarter of 2018, and feature Cinnamon 3.8 as its single flavour.

Now you: What are your thoughts about the decision to stop with LMKDE?