I've been primarily a Windows user for many years, though I've also used Linux for quite a while too, for work and sometimes at home. My favorite Linux distro lately has been Linux Mint, as it usually "just works". I've had my main PC at home set up to dual-boot Windows and Linux Mint for a few years, though I had mainly still been using Windows on it.

I recently started primarily using Linux on my main PC, as there are some things about Windows that have been bugging me: Some personalization chagnes reverting back to stock, and auto-rebooting overnight to install Windows updates if I leave the PC on (I'm pretty sure you can configure Windows to wait to install updates though).

I have a 4K monitor that I use on my main PC, and although Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment looks fairly good on it, I still thought it could look better. Also, Cinnamon's fractional scaling (although working) is still experimental. I use the factional scaling to scale things up a bit but not too big.

I did some research on what Linux desktop environments look best on a 4K monitor. I kept seeing KDE Plasma recommended, particularly with Wayland (which is a modern replacement for X11, which is designed to perform better and handle modern features better, such as fractional scaling).

Since I've been used to using Linux Mint lately, I gave KUbuntu a try (Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and KUbuntu is basically Ubuntu with KDE Plasma). I first installed KUbuntu 25.10 alongside Linux Mint to try them both; I ended up really liking how things look overall with KDE Plasma in KUbuntu, so I decided to fully replace my Linux Mint setup on my main desktop with KUbuntu. So far I'm enjoying it.

I've heard there are some reasons why people don't really like Snap in Ubuntu; I saw there's a way to disable Snap, which I've done, as well as enabled Flatpak in its software configuration, so that part is basically set up like Linux Mint. But I feel like it might not really matter much in the end.

As far as running Windows software, I still have my PC set to dual-boot with Windows, so I can still use Windows when needed for certain software. But I've also set up a Windows 11 virtual machine in the Linux setup, and I've installed Wine too, which is able to directly run some Windows software in Linux. There are also other options for making it easier to run Windows software, such as Bottles (which I haven't used much yet) and WinBoat (which looks like it runs a separate Windows instance like a VM but makes it a bit more seamless with Linux).

Some PC games I like to play even have native Linux ports; also, Steam has made it easy to run some Windows games in Linux.

Nightfox

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Nightfox wrote to All <=-

I did some research on what Linux desktop environments look best on a
4K monitor. I kept seeing KDE Plasma recommended, particularly with Wayland (which is a modern replacement for X11, which is designed to perform better and handle modern features better, such as fractional scaling).

Wayland has completely failed on all its goals. It doesn't perform better than X11 (but it doesn't perform worse either). It doesn't offer nearly as much as X11 so it's still not even close to feature-complete.

But the whole X11 topic has been the target of politics. The group in charge of X11 has a stated goal of killing it in favor of Wayland. No problem there. Bring Wayland up, debug it and we're good. But they don't have the technical knowledge to do so. So Wayland growth has been stagnant.

In the meantime, the main developer for X11 worked it to XLibre then applied all the updates that the X11 guys effectively blocked. So now we have a better X11, with all the features, completely compatible with X11 (as far as we know right now) and is mostly tried-and-tested code, unlike Wayland.

Right now, if anyone is trying to push you to Wayland, take a good look as to why first.


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Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Ci
By: Dr. What to Nightfox on Fri Jan 30 2026 07:18 am

Wayland has completely failed on all its goals. It doesn't perform better than X11 (but it doesn't perform worse either). It doesn't offer nearly as much as X11 so it's still not even close to feature-complete.

Right now, if anyone is trying to push you to Wayland, take a good look as to why first.

I wasn't familiar with Wayland at all until the past few days as I was looking into recent Linux distros and the desktop environments - so I didn't know there was this going on. However, so far in just a couple days of using KUbuntu, Wayland and KDE Plasma seems to be working fairly well so far.

Also, I don't think anyone was pushing me to Wayland. I had simply been doing some searching online for information on Wayland, KDE Plasma, and Cinnamon, and I saw multiple people saying in various forums that Wayland was designed to do some things better, it's the future, Cinnamon would eventually be ported to Wayland, etc..

Nightfox

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Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Cinnamon (KUbuntu vs. Linux Mint)
By: Nightfox to All on Thu Jan 29 2026 05:59 pm

I did some research on what Linux desktop environments look best on a 4K monitor. I kept seeing KDE Plasma recommended, particularly with Wayland

Since I've been used to using Linux Mint lately, I gave KUbuntu a try

Please don't take anything I mention below as criticism - I find some of this interesting as I was even having a conversation with my son just last night about how a distro is not a desktop environment, and the total misconceptions MacOS and Windows put on people about what an OS is, what a GUI is, etc.

So I fully recognize that perhaps you had some other unmentioned reason for switching distributions, but did you know that with Mint you had an install that fully supports KDE Plasma?

https://linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint/

In fact, there would be several different GUIs that you should have access to on any Linux distro. What you're seeing when firing up Kubuntu vs. Mint are just what they install and use as *default*.

But, like a preference in command shell (bash vs dash vs zsh vs... whatever), you can have more than one desktop environment or even simpler window manager setups installed on your system and choose at login time what you'd like to use for that session.

You can logout from a Plasma session and login to a Cinnamon session, for example.

So, if you weren't aware you could do this, then hopefully it's helpful for the future if you're wanting to try other environments out without having to install a distribution from scratch.

If you were aware, I hope you're enjoying the new experience! :-D

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Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Cinnamon (KUbuntu vs. Linux Mint)
By: The Wanderer to Nightfox on Fri Jan 30 2026 12:55 pm

So I fully recognize that perhaps you had some other unmentioned reason for switching distributions, but did you know that with Mint you had an install that fully supports KDE Plasma?

If you were aware, I hope you're enjoying the new experience! :-D

Yes, I'm aware it's possible to install KDE in Mint (and I've installed additional DEs in other distros as well). And I did install KDE in Linux Mint to give that a try. What I found was that the version of KDE it installed from the repo didn't have all the same options that were available in KUbuntu 25.10; also, I saw a couple of the same issues I was seeing with Cinnamon on Mint. It seems to work better overall in KUbuntu.

Also, I've seen people say that although you technically can install KDE in Linux Mint, people generally don't really recommend doing so because KDE isn't officially supported by Linux Mint; and it's better to use a distribution where the DE you want to use is fully supported by the distro. It sounds like it's possible that there could be conflicts if both desktops are installed (though I doubt that's actually the case). Also, too, I wanted to keep Cinnamon since that's the supported DE in Mint, but that would mean using more drive space with 2 different DEs and multiple similar apps from both.

I would have preferred to continue using Mint, but due to the recommendations I'd heard (mentioned above), that's why I decided to switch to KUbuntu. I didn't have any other reason to switch; it was just driven by the DE I want to use.

Nightfox

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Nightfox wrote to All <=-

I did some research on what Linux desktop environments look best on a
4K monitor. I kept seeing KDE Plasma recommended, particularly with Wayland (which is a modern replacement for X11, which is designed to perform better and handle modern features better, such as fractional scaling).

KDE used to be all the rage, I thought -- I used it way back when with
SUSE Linux, around 2000. I should try it again, my recollection was
that the apps were better back then, but the alternative was prettier.


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Re: Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Cinnamon (KUbuntu vs. Linux Mint)
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Sat Jan 31 2026 08:35 am

I did some research on what Linux desktop environments look best on a 4K
monitor. I kept seeing KDE Plasma recommended, particularly with Wayland
(which is a modern replacement for X11, which is designed to perform
better and handle modern features better, such as fractional scaling).

KDE used to be all the rage, I thought -- I used it way back when with SUSE Linux, around 2000. I should try it again, my recollection was that the apps were better back then, but the alternative was prettier.

I think KDE was fairly popular, but I also remember Gnome being fairly popular years ago. I feel like the goal of KDE may have changed a bit over time - I remember reading years ago that they intended KDE to be similar to Windows, to help Windows users get used to Linux. Now I feel like it has diverged from Windows a bit, with configurability and features that Windows doesn't have. Also, its System Settings application reminds me a bit of the Mac OS X settings app, with a scrollable list of categories on the left side and the right pane being for the settings.

Nightfox

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Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Cinnamon (KUbuntu vs. Linux Mint)
By: Nightfox to The Wanderer on Fri Jan 30 2026 03:04 pm

Also, I've seen people say that although you technically can install KDE in Linux Mint, people generally don't really recommend doing so because KDE isn't officially supported by Linux Mint; and it's better to use a

Yes, I suppose if the distro doesn't treat certain packages as first-class citizens, the experience could be shoddy. That's unfortunate, but I guess expected. I'm not a huge fan of those distros that are only good at one thing, but... that's their perogative.

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Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Cinnamon (KUbuntu vs. Linux Mint)
By: The Wanderer to Nightfox on Sat Jan 31 2026 09:22 am

Also, I've seen people say that although you technically can install KDE
in Linux Mint, people generally don't really recommend doing so because
KDE isn't officially supported by Linux Mint; and it's better to use a

Yes, I suppose if the distro doesn't treat certain packages as first-class citizens, the experience could be shoddy. That's unfortunate, but I guess expected. I'm not a huge fan of those distros that are only good at one thing, but... that's their perogative.

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?

Nightfox

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Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Cinnamon (KUbuntu vs. Linux Mint)
By: Nightfox to The Wanderer on Sat Jan 31 2026 11:12:50

Are there distributions that would behave better if you decide to install a different desktop environment?

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.

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Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Cinnamon (KUbuntu vs. Linux Mint)
By: Mortar to Nightfox on Sun Feb 01 2026 01:22 am

Are there distributions that would behave better if you decide to install a
different desktop environment?

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 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 (I think runlevel 3 was to start up at the console, and runlevel 5 was to start up in the desktop environment; specifically, to launch XFree86 on startup). And I remember being able to exit out of XFree86, and also running 'startx' to run XFree86 again. Is that not the case anymore?

Nightfox

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Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Cinnamon (KUbuntu vs. Linux Mint)
By: Nightfox to The Wanderer on Sat Jan 31 2026 11:12 am

Yes, I suppose if the distro doesn't treat certain packages as
first-class citizens, the experience could be shoddy. That's unfortunate,

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 think Debian is, as far as I know, pretty solid with several environments. I use Gentoo on many systems, and it has several environments as first-class citizens.

There certainly should be others as well that aren't so focused on one environment.

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Re: KDE Plasma desktop vs. Cinnamon (KUbuntu vs. Linux Mint)
By: Nightfox to Mortar on Sun Feb 01 2026 08:21 am

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 (I think runlevel 3 was to start up at the console, and runlevel 5 was to start up in the desktop environment; specifically, to launch XFree86 on startup). And I remember being able to exit out of XFree86, and also running 'startx' to run XFree86 again. Is that not the case anymore?

It's certainly do-able, but via different means these days, as I don't know that it's really ever controlled out of init any longer. In Gentoo's OpenRC, you have an init script that fires up a gui login manager, such as sddm, which then can fire up a desktop environment of your choice. Under systemd there's a service that would be fired up. These items could certainly be enabled/disable on the system to enable or prevent a graphic environment from occurring.

I don't know what Wayland's "startx" equivalent is, to be honest. But I see on my system I have /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland - not something I've ever played around with yet, to be honest.

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