this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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That is a kinda sane order tho
Normally people just install Ubuntu or Linux Mint (because it has Linux in the name or something) and use modded GNOME or some weird niche desktop, thinking this is peak Linux experience.
(Needed to do Mint tech support over the holidays again... yeah it is strange)
I'd expect that most brand new users install Ubuntu or Linux Mint because of how often they are recommended.
Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with Canonical/Snaps removed and some added polish. The default DE is laid out like windows before 11 ("start" button in lower left) which seems to make sense for new users.
I'm a knowledgable enough user, being a developer on embedded linux products, and I also stuck with Mint long term. It's still a Linux system that I actually control. The fact that it was very user friendly and full featured it off the box doesn't take away from that. It just meant that it wasn't the learning experience you'd get with something like Arch.
KDE is better than Cinnamon, period. Apart from really old hardware (where Cinnamon is faster for some reason), KDE is way less restricting, way more modern and also very intuitive.
Cinnamon works, but is simply worse. Many powerful apps are KDE apps, while Cinnamon is GTK based, so you cannot even install them without loading an entire different graphics framework in RAM.
I get that a Debian->Ubuntu base is the most standard, and Ubuntu does weird stuff. But Mint also does weird stuff, like having a weird selection of apps, filtering flathub and more.
I don't have any issues with KDE, and I admire their work beyond the DE/UI. Kdenlive is my chosen video editor, for instance. I believe it's the flatpak version too, so it no doubt loads a bunch of stuff into ram.
I'm not sure what you mean by "restricting" with the DE since I have a terminal at my fingertips at all times. I assume you mean some design decisions or lack of some customization options that KDE has?
But the weird selection of apps has me lost. It comes with stuff installed that you might expect, like firefox and libre office. It uses mostly the Ubuntu repositories so you can apt or apt-get install most things you're looking for. And since it's linux you can add repositories and all that fun stuff.
I also don't know what you mean by filtering flathub.
I can list random things I noticed
I dont use Cinnamon lol, for reasons. Too many family members blindly used it and I hate it.
This is not what a DE is for. If you need a terminal, the DE is not good. I also heavily use the terminal but I am talking about a good general use desktop.
They diverge from GNOME for theming or whatever, and either have weird apps for things like PDF viewing preinstalled, or the people that used it preinstalled those.
As it is neither KDE nor GNOME, it kinda uses GNOME apps but not really. Simply a pretty bad situation. On KDE I use a bunch of GNOME apps and thanks to libadwaita they all look and works fine. That is actually an antifeature of KDE apps, but if you are on KDE they are fine XD
That always results in opinionated defaults. People seem to get along fine and I still have a vanilla LMDE VM I have not tried.
Then maybe look it up ;) it is easy to find. Deb packages have way more attack surface than flatpaks, making this even worse. People install spotify as an unrestricted deb package instead of in a sandbox for example. Fucking spotify.
It is a DE for people who literally know nothing about Linux. The GUI store needs sensible defaults and it doesnt really have those currently due to their controversial (and unsafe) decision to hide unverified flatpaks
I didn't want to deal with choosing so I just went with Linux Mint and the default choice (Cinnamon) but it seemed glitchy and I couldn't configure it the way I wanted, so switched to xfce. Haven't felt the need to try other stuff since.
Well you havent had a person needing modern display features then XD Gamers would immediately thing Linux sucks. Also XFCE is kinda really bad to use, it is okay but KDE is so much better
What is bad about it? What 'display features' are important here? My main problem with Cinnamon was lag spikes every second or so, though that was some years ago and might not be an issue now. Games seem to mostly work fine, except VR stuff still needs more troubleshooting, but I'm skeptical a different DE would fix those issues.
Basically all XOrg vs. Wayland issues
No idea about VR but I assume it works well on KDE or GNOME (depending on what you mean, people use Meta quest as an external display)
I don't have high resolution monitors so most of that isn't relevant to me but they are different dimensions and it seems to handle two of them fine.
VR issues are like, the headset speakers not being recognized, viewing the desktop from SteamVR shows a blank screen, and launching VR games does not actually cause the headset to switch to them, they just run in the background. Stuff like that. I guess it would be worth trying another DE just to see if it helps.