Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Saturday, May 4, 2019 at 23:34


This tutorial introduces how to install KDE Plasma and GNOME desktop environments on Mint 19.1 "Tessa". As you may know, Mint since 2018 abandoned their KDE Edition (the last Mint KDE Edition is 18.3), and since the very beginning never released GNOME edition. Many of us perhaps prefer to have KDE or GNOME on their Mint system so this is tutorial you can use. I use Mint XFCE Edition 19.1 to practice this and I recommend you to start with this edition as well. Finally, happy installing and have a nice day!

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 (Mint 19.1 with GNOME 3 user interface)

GNOME

Simply install GNOME by running this command line:
$ sudo apt-get install vanilla-gnome-desktop

This needs at least 100MB of data on a freshly-installed Mint XFCE 19.1 system.

Select display manager:
You need to accept the gdm3 as your display manager. Simply use arrow key to select it and press Enter and let the installer finishes everything up.


Login:
  • Select your username
  • Click gear icon
  • Select GNOME on Xorg
  • Click Login button

Result:
And finally this is GNOME showing on Mint XFCE 19.1. At this moment, as 19.1 is actually using Ubuntu 18.04 repository, the GNOME version installed here is 3.28.

(Mint GNOME Edition in 2019)

KDE


Simply install KDE by this command line:
$ sudo apt-get install kde-standard kwin sddm sddm-theme-breeze plasma-nm

This needs around 300MB of data on a freshly-installed Mint XFCE 19.1.

Select display manager:
Select sddm as display manager of choice.


Restart:
Reboot your Mint computer.

Login:
  • Select Plasma from session choices.
  • Select your username.
  • Type your password 
  • Click Login button.

Result:
Here's how KDE Plasma looks on Mint 19.1. Just like explanation above, Plasma version installed here is 5.12.

 (Mint KDE Edition lives once again in 2019)

Happy working!


This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.