I switched from Pop_OS! to KDE Neon because I wanted to try out the latest Plasma features. I was tired of GNOME's bloat and needing an extension/Tweaks for basic functionality.
Then KDE broke screen sharing, bricked my install once by breaking LUKS disk encryption, and then it booted to a black screen on updating to the latest LTS.......
So now I'm on Mint and all of my servers are on Debian because I want something that just works. Lol. No more distro hopping.
No idea. It could no longer unlock the LUKS encryption after rebooting from an upgrade. I had to work and just nuked it and started fresh. It happened on both my laptop and desktop after updating, so seems like a bad update.
im a mint user too and every few months i start distrohopping but always land back in mint. all other distros always have something that doesn't work or is just irritating. but mint feels like home.
If Mint ever supported KDE plasma 6.2 I'd consider switching back to Mint. I just can't stand how Cinnamon doesn't give a crap about multi display users and gives them a "There. Good enough. Fuck you." solution.
i read that mint used to have a kde option too but they discontinued that to reduce workload. didn't know multi monitor setups were a problem for cinnamon though. does it work at all or lacks controls or something? are xfce and mate equally bad?
It's good enough to work, but that's pretty much all you'll get. In many aspects each monitor isn't treated separately by the DE. For example you only have one task bar and each screen gets an exact copy of it. Any minimized window will appear on all the task bars on all your screens no matter what screen that window was from. Right there it's a big turnoff for me. I don't remember the details but just getting a different desktop background for each screen needed a workaround solution as well. They clearly didn't allocate any resources for the multiple display user experience. And now that I've gotten a taste of the insane customizability of KDE Plasma I don't think I'll be able to go back. 6.2 added a layer of polish to the experience that made it perfect for my uses. Which is a shame because Mint was pretty solid otherwise.
I haven't tried xfce and mate on a multi display setup so I don't know. But these seemed to be simpler, being made to be lightweight for less powerful setups so I wouldn't expect them to be as advanced as Plasma for that.
I can't be bothered to learn how to build and maintain a kernel though, hence why I stay away from Arch. My "dummy-friendly" distro of choice for KDE Plasma is OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It has been rock solid for a year now except for that one time a few weeks ago when NVidia dropped the ball and fucked up their driver update. It was fixed a few days later. My only other complaint is that I wish they didn't wait for NVidia to put the new 560 drivers in the production branch to trickle it down to us because for some reason that's what gets supported in tumbleweed. EVERYONE who needs those drivers are impatiently waiting for just that because pre-555 drivers don't play well with Wayland.
Fedora Plasma Spin is probably another solid choice but for some reason on my computer it just instantly bricked itself upon first update.