I thought that was fairly common for distributions that include a specific desktop environment. Are there distributions that would behave better if you decide to install a different desktop environment?

I have a laptop that initially came with debian and gnome installed on it
when I got it ~11 yrs ago. As it is older, it has gone through several
debian upgrades. When I upgraded to Trixie, gnome seemed to be more resource intensive than practical for it. Switching to IceWM made
everything "behave better" (i.e. more responsive) in my eyes.
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Re: Kde Plasma Desktop Vs. Ci
By: MIKE POWELL to NIGHTFOX on Sun Feb 01 2026 09:00 am

I thought that was fairly common for distributions that include a specific
desktop environment. Are there distributions that would behave better if
you decide to install a different desktop environment?

I have a laptop that initially came with debian and gnome installed on it when I got it ~11 yrs ago. As it is older, it has gone through several debian upgrades. When I upgraded to Trixie, gnome seemed to be more resource intensive than practical for it. Switching to IceWM made everything "behave better" (i.e. more responsive) in my eyes.

When I said "behave better", I was referring to what The Wanderer and I had been discussing as far as desktop environment packages being officially supported by the distribution and not causing a problem if installed when upgrading, etc..

Nightfox

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I thought that was fairly common for distributions that include a specifi
desktop environment. Are there distributions that would behave better if
you decide to install a different desktop environment?

When I said "behave better", I was referring to what The Wanderer and I had been discussing as far as desktop environment packages being officially supported by the distribution and not causing a problem if installed when upgrading, etc..

So by "install" you mean outside of the distro's package system. I would suspect that the answer to your initial question then should either be
"no" or "not unless those who maintain the distro are missing out on something."

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Distros that are more terminal-centric are good candidates, like Arch, Gentoo Slackware, et al. While they come with a GUI, you're not obligated to run it by default.

I have a couple of boxes that run debian variants without a GUI. No obligations there, either. Most distros should be that way but not all
are. :(

Mike
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I remember it used to be that in Linux, you could set the 'runlevel' to determine whether it automatically started in the desktop environment or not think runlevel 3 was to start up at the console, and runlevel 5 was to start in the desktop environment; specifically, to launch XFree86 on startup). And remember being able to exit out of XFree86, and also running 'startx' to run XFree86 again. Is that not the case anymore?

If you are still using a distro that uses a flavor of init, like Devuan,
you can probably still do these things. If you are using a distro that
has migrated to systemd, I am not certain if that would work anymore or
not.

With most distros, you can use a CTRL-ALT-F# at the GUI logon manager main menu to get a console instead.

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Re: Kde Plasma Desktop Vs. Ci
By: MIKE POWELL to NIGHTFOX on Mon Feb 02 2026 08:57 am

I thought that was fairly common for distributions that include a specifi
desktop environment. Are there distributions that would behave better if
you decide to install a different desktop environment?

When I said "behave better", I was referring to what The Wanderer and I had
been discussing as far as desktop environment packages being officially
supported by the distribution and not causing a problem if installed when
upgrading, etc..

So by "install" you mean outside of the distro's package system. I would suspect that the answer to your initial question then should either be "no" or "not unless those who maintain the distro are missing out on something."

No, not outside the package system. It's available in the package system but not officially supported by the distribution's maintainers.

Nightfox

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Hey Nightfox!

On Mon, Feb 02 2026 18:46:14 -0600, you wrote:

No, not outside the package system. It's available in the package
system but not officially supported by the distribution's
maintainers.

I think each distro has their own "maintainers" that make the package install and work for said distro, and those people would, more than likely, support the package for the distro they are maintaining the package for. Any bugs related to that specific distro would be fixed by them, and any bugs related to the package itself, would be reported upstream to the original developers.

Regards,
Nick

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Re: Re: Kde Plasma Desktop Vs. Ci
By: Accession to Nightfox on Mon Feb 02 2026 08:05 pm

No, not outside the package system. It's available in the package system
but not officially supported by the distribution's maintainers.

I think each distro has their own "maintainers" that make the package install and work for said distro, and those people would, more than likely, support the package for the distro they are maintaining the package for. Any bugs related to that specific distro would be fixed by them, and any bugs related to the package itself, would be reported upstream to the original developers.

That was my thought as well. But I've seen people online recommend against installing a desktop environment that doesn't officially come with the distro.

I wonder if there may be issues for distros that are based on other distros. For instance, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, so it can use the same sources for software that's available for Ubuntu, but I suppose it's possible that the maintainers of Linux Mint might not necessarily account for all the issues that might arise from installing packages that they didn't include by default in the distro.

Nightfox

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Hey Nightfox!

On Tue, Feb 03 2026 16:35:09 -0600, you wrote:

That was my thought as well. But I've seen people online recommend
against installing a desktop environment that doesn't officially
come with the distro.

Why not? You can install any desktop environment on any Linux distro. You should stop believing everything you read online. ;)

So what if support might change from the actual distro devs directly to the desktop environment maintainers. You'd probably get better answers directly from the KDE/Gnome devs anyways.

I wonder if there may be issues for distros that are based on other
distros. For instance, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, so it can use
the same sources for software that's available for Ubuntu, but I
suppose it's possible that the maintainers of Linux Mint might not necessarily account for all the issues that might arise from
installing packages that they didn't include by default in the
distro.

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint

Just an example.. and this isn't Microsoft. Nothing you do voids any warranty or TOS, lol. There is usually always support, just a different channel on IRC, or a different website with forums. ;)

Regards,
Nick

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Re: Re: Kde Plasma Desktop Vs. Ci
By: Accession to Nightfox on Tue Feb 03 2026 06:12 pm

That was my thought as well. But I've seen people online recommend against
installing a desktop environment that doesn't officially come with the
distro.

Why not? You can install any desktop environment on any Linux distro. You should stop believing everything you read online. ;)

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint

Yeah, I've actually installed KDE on Linux Mint, and it does work. I was just a little skeptical after seeing people recommend against doing so. Also, years ago, I had installed Cinnamon on Ubuntu..

Also, while it works, the version of KDE Plasma included in the repo for Linux Mint is a 5.x version, which is older than the one included in KUbuntu 25.10 (6.x). I also noticed a couple features in the display settings that weren't available, which are available in the 6.x version included with KUbuntu. I imagine it would probably be fine, but for now I decided to install KUbuntu as it has the newer version of KDE Plasma. And I think it looks & works fairly well.

I was mainly wondering about what would happen when I try to update to the next major version of the distro and if anything would break.. I haven't tried that with an alternate DE installed.

Nightfox

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MIKE POWELL wrote to MORTAR <=-

I have a couple of boxes that run debian variants without a GUI. No obligations there, either. Most distros should be that way but not all are. :(

I *really* like running Debian like that. I'm running an SAP environment at work, and we had two choices of distro - RHEL or SuSe. I'm trying the latter for the first time in 25 years.


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Nightfox wrote to Accession <=-

Why not? You can install any desktop environment on any Linux distro.

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint

Yeah, I've actually installed KDE on Linux Mint, and it does work. I
was just a little skeptical after seeing people recommend against doing so. Also, years ago, I had installed Cinnamon on Ubuntu..

It works, I think the only problem is bloat - with needing libraries for multiple desktop environments.



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Hey Nightfox!

On Tue, Feb 03 2026 19:33:52 -0600, you wrote:

Yeah, I've actually installed KDE on Linux Mint, and it does work.
I was just a little skeptical after seeing people recommend against
doing so. Also, years ago, I had installed Cinnamon on Ubuntu..

I don't know of the type of people that would recommend against something like that, and I don't want to know them. ;)

Also, while it works, the version of KDE Plasma included in the repo
for Linux Mint is a 5.x version, which is older than the one
included in KUbuntu 25.10 (6.x). I also noticed a couple features
in the display settings that weren't available, which are available
in the 6.x version included with KUbuntu. I imagine it would
probably be fine, but for now I decided to install KUbuntu as it has
the newer version of KDE Plasma. And I think it looks & works
fairly well.

Probably just a restriction of their repos, and the age of their packages. If Linux Mint leans more towards something like stable Debian repos, everything is going to be older. It all depends on which distro you choose to go with.

I was mainly wondering about what would happen when I try to update
to the next major version of the distro and if anything would
break.. I haven't tried that with an alternate DE installed.

I would imagine nothing major these days. So long as all dependencies the DE requires comes at the same time. I imagine just about every distro has some kind of a "howto" for separate DEs, including ones that don't come by default with said distro.

If anything, you can try it in a VM or on a PC or laptop you're just tinkering with anyways, first, so there's no chance of losing stuff you don't want to (in case something were to possibly happen).

Regards,
Nick

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Re: Re: Kde Plasma Desktop Vs. Ci
By: poindexter FORTRAN to MIKE POWELL on Wed Feb 04 2026 03:13 pm

I *really* like running Debian like that. I'm running an SAP
environment at work, and we had two choices of distro - RHEL or
SuSe. I'm trying the latter for the first time in 25 years.

that's really strange to see someone talk about an OS preference with sap.

i've worked with SAP and other ERP's for a very long time. it doesn't matter what OS you are running.


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On 04 Feb 2026, Accession said the following...

Probably just a restriction of their repos, and the age of their
packages. If Linux Mint leans more towards something like stable Debian repos, everything is going to be older. It all depends on which distro
you choose to go with.

i looked and the packages ARE the KUbuntu ones, not from/intended for Linux Mint at all, so nobody maintains anything KDE for Linux Mint. somehow i doubt anyone would have much luck convincing the KUbuntu package maintainers to fix something just for Linux Mint.

that's why everyone recommend against it. there are just better (and supported) options for something huge like KDE

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On 04 Feb 2026, poindexter FORTRAN said the following...

Yeah, I've actually installed KDE on Linux Mint, and it does work. I was just a little skeptical after seeing people recommend against doi so. Also, years ago, I had installed Cinnamon on Ubuntu..

It works, I think the only problem is bloat - with needing libraries for multiple desktop environments.

KDE is nasty IMO

if you just wanted to borrow something like their calculator, or the neat little task manager, you would need to install almost the entire desktop environment. for one little program.

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