I heard of imposing operating systems (which I'm also against*), but never specific distros or DEs.

* at least for technical people who know what they're doing and wont spam the IT support

With KDE, you can go with Fedora if you like something "closer" to mint experience. I use it with Endeavor OS and I'm very happy

EndeavourOS

☺️such a joy

I've been enjoying CachyOS myself lately.

cinnamint is great. i think you may have already found what to put on the 'main pc'.

if you're at all interested in 'atomic' variants, kinoite is what is running a couple of kde desktops here.

I use Arch, but you can't go wrong with Plasma + Debian. Ubuntu has weird bugs which keeps me from recommending it. I wish Mint still had a Plasma edition. endeavouros is Arch with a user-friendly installer, so that's an option as well. CachyOS is great too. Mint is good but Cinnamon doesn't support HDR which keeps me from recommending it to anyone using an HDR display. Debian is probably best seeing as you are used to Mint.

I use SpiralLinux (basically Debian with some tweaks). I like it a lot! If you want to stay in the Debian/*buntu lineage, consider it.

Debian primarily, though I also have arch running on another box. But I basically only run Debian across the board. Almost all stable, with some Trixie and Sid for testing. I also won't touch Gnome unless I'm forced to, so keep in mind I'm opinionated and hold grudges when you see my recommendations.

I have a seemingly yearly tradition where I manage to convince myself to try out KDE then am usually back on GNOME after a week. I genuinely don't get the hate for GNOME. It looks clean, has great defaults (especially the keybinds) and mostly stays out of the way. I don't hate KDE, it's just not for me and that is okay.

I don't hate on gnome because people can use what they want but coming from windows the UX was so unintuitive i had to switch to a different session without a DE to get rid of gnome. I'm sure it's learnable and then depending on your preferences pretty great.

I also don't think plasma is messy though. To me there's nothing worse than a system hiding options out of the assumption that I don't need them (see also: windows over time, which is a big part of why I made the switch to linux in the first place).

People love to hate on GNOME but I think they're only doing that because they know it's so popular

You sound like Honey Boo Boo.

My take is GNOME is Mac-inspired, and KDE is Windows-inspired. I never liked MacOS. Therefore, GNOME does not appeal to me. KDE feels familiar, so naturally I used it after switching from Windows.

You mean GNOME? Ubuntu ships KDE too as Kubuntu.

X referred to a display server since long before Twitter was born.

I deleted it because the GNOME users were getting annoying.

I've generally found gnome users just use it

lol

Yeah, there is way less hate and mockery towards KDE. Now let's think why that might be

I find that Penis Stroker 2000 never has users bashing it when a new release comes out.

But every single new release of Scrotum Puncher 5000 that comes out, it's getting criticized. I'm sick of it!!

As insufferable as KDE users always shitting on gnome?

This 100%

New KDE releases don't have gnome fanboys bashing it

There is a lot less hate for KDE… Because KDE doesn’t break the user experience every time it updates. Gnome is the Apple of the Linux world. The entire dev team embodies the Apple attitude of “we know better than you, and you’re wrong for wanting to use anything except the default settings.”

You’re essentially getting the “iPhone user seeing all of the hate from android users every time iOS updates” experience. Because every time a new iPhone feature comes out, all of the android users go “lmao iOS didn’t have that feature until now? Android had it three years ago. Apple fucking sucks.”

At least for a time, many of the big distributions focused exclusively on Gnome, and for KDE users it was kind of frustrating as everything would be all wired up for Gnome, and either KDE wasn't packaged at all and you had to go third party, or it was a clearly second class citizen where the packagers just didn't bother to wire up equivalent features. You would look it up and see how KDE had the same capability implemented, but the packager just hadn't included some dependency or configured something to manifest it.

Now I feel like the distributions take Plasma more seriously and so it's easier to just ignore whatever Gnome is doing... Except for the occasional horrible UI presented by a Gnome app in your otherwise credible desktop. Since Gnome is both a DE and a UI framework, the UI framework gets to rear its head even if you largely ignore the DE.

Then of course you have the tiling window managers/compositors, but those projects tend to be less ambitious anyway, and what the audience wants is pretty much what they can get from packages, even if the packagers aren't quite as invested to know what can be done.

The funniest thing about this is that, according to a Gnome dev, they decided to not create APIs or anything and keep relying on extensions to monkey-patch code into the gnome-shell process to ensure "developer freedom".

It's completely mad. I uninstalled Gnome after it crashed on me multiple times, taking either my work or (once) my game process with it.

On KDE at least IF the shell crashes it doesn't cause all my programs to become unavailable too, I can save whatever I was doing. Its UI/UX is arguably a mess, but at least it god damn works reliably and doesn't come as barren wasteland with missing base features. I would love to love Gnome, but god damn it hell no.

Shouldn't that only apply if the other software depends on the new functionality in the updated gnome?

Yes the volunteer software authors should work to the beat of the drum of the baying and braying users who insist on using cutting edge software before its wider ecosystem has adapted to its novelties. A very good point.

And then they encounter the horrible mess that is the Hyprland discord and run back to KDE or GNOME. There’s hope with Cosmic yet.

The thing is in theory I love gnome for that. In practice keep that shit away from me

They don’t develop GNOME for you, they develop GNOME for them

They don’t earn more with more users

I've been running native Wayland exclusively for ages. I disabled XWayland by running gnome-shell with the --no-x11 flag.

What makes you think I wasn't?