Hello everyone,
Beginner here. I installed Mint/Cinnamon and discovered later Plasma. I am very happy with it.
Is it better to start all over with another Linux to continue using the kde/plasma ‘family’?
Grz. Paul
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Well… Mint is not a very good fit, as it is not officially supported and, hence not very well implemented.
Take a look here:
to get some ideas.
Note that there are many more and some of the new offerings are really good!
You can easily install Plasma on Mint through the software center, but I would not recommend it because it’s an old version of Plasma (5.27) and it’s not a good idea to have 2 DE installed on the same system (it mess up the configuration). If you like the 6-month release cycle of Mint, Kubuntu (non LTS) is a decent choice. There are also other cool distros out there:
- Fedora KDE that ships new packages rapidly
- Debian with Plasma that has a release every 2 years
- Solus, that update every Friday (why not I guess)
- Fedora Kinoit that is an “unbreakable” but more limited variant of Fedora KDE
Of course there are plenty more. It’s a personal recommendation.
Thanks a lot for helping me out. Need to make some decisions.
Is there a way to keep my installed apps when I decide to implement a new distribution and kde/plasma?
Likely not. You will essentially have to reinstall everything when you change distribution.
I recommend noting down the apps you use and backing up all your data somewhere.
I’m sure theres some tricks for this but I do not know. But safest bet in my opinion is back everything up, select the new distribution, install it, test it out if it works for you and restore all the data from backups.
I used Mint for years, then decided to look at Manjaro (which had Cinnamon) and was interested enough - so I ran timeshift, and also back-in-time to backup my personal data/settings…
Then I figured out how to get a package-list of all packages installed and exported those to the backup folder too.
Clean installed Manjaro KDE Plasma, imported my configs - great distribution (stable for me now for 8 years).
There’s some adjusting - leaving Debian and going for Rolling, but the ease of getting software installed more than made up for it.
Clean install - it’s the only way with Plasma. Multiple desktops is, and always has been, a nightmare scenario in many cases.
I looked here Distributions with Plasma and KDE Applications - KDE Community but I am afraid that making a choice is difficult. I hesitate between Kubuntu and Fedora. Not shure what difference I should notice…
Is there a difference in day-to-day use?
and
Is the KDE suite (proper word in the Linux world?) complete in both?
I have used both, and both have had good support for KDE.
The main difference is, that Fedora is bit faster with updates. It has only one version and has pretty much daily updates.
Kubuntu has two versions, LTS and Latest. LTS is slow with updates. (Reminder that stable does not mean “doesnt crash” but means that things do not change. The bugs are stable too!).
Latest updates more regularly than LTS, but its a bit behind Fedora.
Both are excellent. As a dev, i prefer faster updates, so Fedora is my choice in the end. But I could live well with Kubuntu Latest.
LTS i only recommend for enterprise environments or servers, really.
I cant make the choice for you, but Fedora KDE and Kubuntu Latest are both good choices.
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Both are good choices. Personally I prefer Fedora, and it was my daily driver for years until I recently switched to KDE Linux, KDE’s in-development in-house next-gen OS (don’t use it yet, it’s still a work in progress).
Kubuntu will give you a slightly more conservative experience with slower updates. As a result, software that prefers being newer may work less well.
Edit: like @akselmo, I don’t recommend the LTS version of Kubuntu. It doesn’t provide a great experience for typical desktop usage. The non-LTS version is more suitable.
Fedora will give you more of a cutting-edge experience, with faster updates. As a result, software that doesn’t have good QA may work less well.
Pick your poison. 
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With respect to the KDE distributions list, please be aware that –
- The current openSUSE Leap 15.6 ships with KDE Plasma 5.
- The openSUSE Leap version 16.0 shipping with KDE Plasma 6, is scheduled for public availability at 12:00 UTC Wednesday the 1st of October 2025.
<openSUSE:Roadmap>
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I’m currently using openSUSE Leap for my Desktop machine –
Operating System: openSUSE Leap 15.6
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.11
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.115.0
Qt Version: 5.15.12
Kernel Version: 6.4.0-150600.23.60-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 8 × AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with Radeon Vega Graphics
Memory: 29.3 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Vega 11 Graphics
Manufacturer: ASUS
I’ve checked the Leap 16.0RC (Release Candidate) Beta Test package in an Oracle VirtualBox VM – KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland – everything looks OK – I’ll be upgrading shortly after the General Availability (GA) date.
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I’m probably biased as a debhead (is that even a word?), but I recommend debian or maybe kubuntu if you want stability over the next two years. Stability does NOT mean bug free for debian or kubuntu, but rather it won’t suddenly change without warning.
If you absolutely must have the latest version, then fedora is nice and if you’re willing to get your hands dirty: Arch Linux.
All of you, thank you very much. I chose Fedora/Plasma and did the installation on a 17y old HP/Compaq 8510w workstation. Not the quickest anymore, but it worked. After installation I got in an update Kde6. Nice excercise in total.
And what a fine community this. Thanks again
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Also a Fedora user here. I like that it’s close to a rolling release without being an actual rolling release. Don’t forget to join the Fedora forums for Fedora specific questions you might have. Myself (easily spotted by the same profile avatar), and a quite a few others on here can be found over there too.
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Hey nice! And don’t be afraid of trying other things if it’s not a fit for you. There’s A LOT to explore in Linux world due to the openness of it.
But in my opinion, Fedora KDE is a perfect fit for most.
Hope you have a good time with your chosen OS!
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Gents, follow-up question…
I bought a new laptop with win11. Installed Fedora/Plasma alongside. All went very well. Happy with it. But…
When booting, the Grub appears with very small characters.
Is it possible to have a more ‘eye-friendly’ boot menu?
You can apply grub themes by installing them into the grub theme folder, rebuilding the config and rebooting.
The small text size will be related to your laptops display and it’s resolution. There are two methods for fixing this… you can either adjust the grub resolution, or you can adjust the grub text size.
I have a HiDPi screen (2880x1800) so my grub and tty text is extremely small, but not so small I can’t tell what it is. So I don’t bother making the changes. I don’t like messing with grub if I don’t have to, and I’m not in grub or a tty often enough to justify the change.
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More or less the same issue here with this screen:
> xdpyinfo | grep 'screen #' -A 2
screen #0:
dimensions: 3840x2160 pixels (698x393 millimeters)
resolution: 140x140 dots per inch
>
What I do is, to use the “FONT” parameter of ‘/etc/vconsole.conf’ – OK, I’m on openSUSE and therefore –
> cat /etc/vconsole.conf
KEYMAP=de-nodeadkeys
FONT=suse12x22.psfu
FONT_MAP=
FONT_UNIMAP=
XKBLAYOUT=de
XKBMODEL=cymotionlinux
XKBOPTIONS=terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
XKBVARIANT=nodeadkeys
>
But, somewhere in ‘/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/’ you should be able to find an acceptable Console Font for your system:
> ls /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/*12*psf*
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/cp1250.psfu.gz /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat5--12.psfu.gz
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/Goha-12.psfu.gz /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat5-12.psfu.gz
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/GohaClassic-12.psfu.gz /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat9-12.psf.gz
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/iso01-12x22.psfu.gz /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat9u-12.psfu.gz
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/iso02-12x22.psfu.gz /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat9v-12.psfu.gz
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat0-12.psfu.gz /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat9w-12.psfu.gz
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat1-12.psfu.gz /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/LatGrkCyr-12x22.psfu.gz
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat2-12.psfu.gz /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/sun12x22.psfu.gz
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat4-12.psfu.gz /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/suse12x22.psfu.gz
/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat4a-12.psfu.gz
>
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I’m using KDE neon for the latest stuff (screenshot-tool, mainly 
) and it works ok. But it seems it’s not a very popular choice?
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bja mentioned themes. One I’ve been using for a few years is Dark Matter GRUB Theme on the KDE store (can’t post the link as I just registered and the board won’t allow me for now). Look for VandalByte/darkmatter-grub-theme on GitHub.
The main layout stays the same, but can be themed for tens of distributions: the color and logo changes accordingly. It’s really nice looking and I configure GRUB to show at bootup even though I’m not dual-booting Windows anymore. 
(By default, the menu is hidden when only one OS is installed.)
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