The Mint 19 only comes with XFCE

But a quick websearch reveals KDE can be installed on Mint 19

Are there any risks associated with installing KDE on a distro that does not have KDE by default?

Thanks

IMO, if you want KDE and something based on Ubuntu, why not just run Kubuntu instead of Mint?

But as to the actual question, no it won't hurt anything, it just won't integrate with the Mint changes as well as they're customized DE's do.

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If its in the Mint repos, it should work on Mint.

You can install Ubuntu's KDE packages on Linux Mint to get KDE - it's not in Mint's repo's.

No, the only risk is that it will install KDE, no other risks
(not saying installing KDE is a "risk" though, a lot of people run it with no problems - myself included)

There is no reason not to install an additional desktop environment if you want to try it out, particularly it's in the distro's repos. At one time, persons would be concerned about having extra libraries on their machines, but hard drives have gotten so big that that is a non-issue.

Slackware comes out of the box with two desktop environment and four window managers. Debian now offers the capability of selecting multiple DE's at time on install. I commonly have more than one DE/WM on machines and have never run into any issues related to that.

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actually you have mate and cinnamon available as well. now as for xfce according to a lot of users of it kde plays nicely with it. i myself revisited linux and tested cinnamon after reading a dozen or so reviews. after a couple of months i added plasma cause i've always been partial to it. the only issue i ran into is with cinnamon you either need to stay in the cinnamon desktop or plasma, cause they do mess with each other, but as long as you stay in one or the other desktop it stays stable and solid. i only switch intially to kde neon cause i was always in plasma so i could justify having two desktop environments installed, and then kubuntu cause for my needs it is superior to neon.

FYI:

i suggest you install kde-full via synaptic then plasma. this will work on 90.0, 19.1, and 19.2 mint.

https://linuxhint.com/install_kde_linux_mint_19/

Because many reasons. Why WOULD you use anything Ubuntu when you could use Mint instead?

I don't see why people need to make a big fuzz about this. This was available 20 years ago, you could install and run multiple desktops without any issues, and boot into any of them by choice or selection.

I'm not sure why things should have degraded to the point that this is anything special.

OP can compile any desktop he wants from source and use that, should not under normal circumstances cause any issues. Some setup to make it work smoothly is maybe needed.

Not really. At some points in the past there were a few minor issues with running both gnome and kde due to the network manager, but this has been an exception. What you are asking was not a problem in 2003 and should not be a problem today.

What you SHOULD focus on is rather how to make your KDE installation ideal and how to ideally configure it. If you use a pre-configured KDE from the Ubuntu repository, it might have some weird Ubuntu configurations that could possibly create issues (on a non Ubuntu system). If you compile KDE from source, you need to put in an effort, and it will not come with any special configurations.

I'm having a hard time believing Mint stopped shipping with KDE as an option in their distribution and even more shockingly is not offering KDE in their package manager as a post-installation option. That just seems very weird. Most non-kde distroes offer KDE in their package manager if they have one.

the mint base IS ubuntu.


not true in all cases. when i installed plasma on mint cinnamon when i'd go into cinnamon after being in plasma there alway a few things i had to fix cause plasma and cinnamon do handle them differently.

I'm aware of that, but that hardly means he want to switch his distro just to use KDE. A far easier way would be to just install KDE.

Remember which forum this is. If I hadn't started with Slackware (by accident, I might add), I might have had the same question when I was new to Linux.

I've even heard experienced users who should know better and who have Linux podcasts express qualms about having multiple DE's on a system (and, yes, I sent them an email).

I'm sure "big fuzz" wasn't aimed at the original question but at the "helpful" discussion that ensued afterwards, in OP's absence.

Anyways, I hope OP understand what he can to and what kind of advantages and drawbacks the different ways of doing it might have. It's quite disappointing to see Mint having cut their KDE edition. Anyways, it's been awhile since I used Mint, but they must surely have it in mind to make a sane environment for their distro to install Ubuntu software on, so installing KDE should have to work.

KDE is not exactly without complexity and dependencies, but I would think any possible issues should be fixable in a relatively easy way.

Having tried both Ubuntu and Mint, I think it's a poor suggestion to change distro. I found the differences rather big. I quite liked Mint (KDE edition).

again not everything is easily fixable or fixable at all in a dual desktop system. telling peeps that they won't run across issues that either take a while to fix or won't run across issues that are unfixable is extremely irresponsible.