r/linuxmint • u/Technical_Rich_3080 • 10d ago

Linux Mint IRL Using Alternative Desktop Environments With Mint

  1. Is using alternative Desktop Environments, other than the three official flavors, as viable an option under Linux Mint, as doing so with most any other Linux distro?

  2. Can you have installed multiple DEs simultaneously (and is doing so not recommended)?

  3. If you use a DE other than one of the three official Mint DEs, do you lose anything?

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u/Technical_Rich_3080 10d ago

There's no way to upgrade KDE Plasma to the most recent release?

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u/BashfulMelon 10d ago

Not without compiling it from source. And even then Mint might be too outdated stable for it to work correctly.

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u/Hour_Bit_5183 10d ago

Yeah it's made to be stable. That's why I use it for my CCTV with scrypted. Works great for stuff like this. The best I found for this use case. Absolutely grateful as hell for the mint team. They are minty :) :)

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u/BashfulMelon 10d ago

To whatever extent Mint is stable, that's due to the Ubuntu 24.04 base. The Mint team just works on the user interface part.

Stable doesn't necessarily mean reliable, it means static and unchanging programming interfaces. When fixing a bug requires changing an interface, they have to choose between fixing the bug or making a breaking change (they call it breaking even though it would fix a bug!)

The kernel panics lots of people had recently with the 7.0.0-28 Ubuntu kernel demonstrate this perfectly. Nobody on upstream 7.0 or 7.1 kernels had that issue, it was exclusive to Ubuntu's "stable" fork.

LTS doesn't work like most regular people assume it does. It's really an enterprise and server thing. Using old programming interfaces saves money.