Clem Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, has authored a new blog post detailing plans about the project’s future. He said the Linux Mint 19 will only be available in Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce flavours and that the KDE spin will be discontinued. Mint 18.3 will still be available with KDE out of the box.
In his post, Lefebvre said:
“Users of the KDE edition represent a portion of our user base. I know from their feedback that they really enjoy it. They will be able to install KDE on top of Linux Mint 19 of course and I’m sure the Kubuntu PPA will continue to be available. They will be able to port Mint software to kubuntu itself also, or they might want to trade a bit of stability away and move to a bleeding edge distribution such as Arch to follow upstream KDE more closely.”
The decision to drop the spin was made for several reasons. First of all, Lefebvre says that the KDE ecosystem and the QT toolkit - which is central to KDE - has very little in common with what Mint is working on. Second of all, the project wants to include its own Xapps in its distributions, but never released them on KDE for various reasons. This last point is another contributing factor to the decision to abandon the custom KDE spin.
Lefebvre explained that the Linux Mint project doesn’t care about diversifying in order to attract a bigger chunk of the Linux market, instead it wants to focus on the things it does well, namely the Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce desktops along with its Xapps.
Hopefully for those that will continue to with Linux Mint, they’ll get an even better experience now that the developers have more time on their hands to craft better software.
Source: Linux Mint