Revisited: Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" KDE

Main screen + KDE Main Menu

Long-time readers of the Linux distribution reviews on this blog know that I am a fan of Linux Mint, but I have had somewhat mixed experiences with KDE. When I've reviewed a new release of Linux Mint, I have occasionally reviewed its KDE edition in addition to its GNOME/MATE/Cinnamon and Xfce editions, generally finding that the KDE edition has too many minor bugs and not enough compelling features compared to the more mainstream editions. Apparently the Linux Mint developers feel similarly, as this is the last release of a KDE edition for Linux Mint; henceforth, they are only releasing MATE, Cinnamon, and Xfce editions for a tighter focus on GTK-based DEs and applications. With that in mind, I figured it was worth reviewing a KDE edition of Linux Mint one final time. I tested it on a live USB system made with the "dd" command. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

FOLLOW-UP: Linux and Breakfast Cereals

I wrote a post a couple months ago regarding Mr. Graham Morrison's assertion that the overabundance of choice in the open-source software community is its failing and Ms. Caitlyn Martin's counter-assertion using the example of breakfast cereals. In it, I mostly agree with Ms. Martin's statements, though I do question the use of breakfast cereals as an analogy because that industry has not ever been so thoroughly monopolized like the PC OS industry.
One of Mr. Morrison's gripes was the confusion in package management, with so many different front- and back-ends. While I still believe that the multitude of front-ends can only be good for users (as anyway most distributions' preferences in that regard are pretty clear), after having talked to a friend in college who is extremely familiar with Red Hat and Fedora, I'm rethinking my stance on the multitude of back-ends.
DEBs are fairly standard (they're just glorified compressed files), so as long as all the required dependencies are present, a DEB from KNOPPIX should work on Linux Mint as well. For RPMs, the situation is a bit more complicated, because RPMs themselves are a good deal more complicated than DEBs. As it turns out, there's a good deal of variation even within the different implementations of RPMs. For example, RHEL (and CentOS) and Fedora use the original kind of RPMs. Mandriva and SUSE have modified the RPM format to fit their needs, as has Scientific Linux (otherwise based on RHEL). Thus, an RPM on Mandriva won't work on SUSE or Fedora; the differences can be so large that it would be like trying to install an alien file format (e.g. DEB).
So my question is, why have all these differences sprung up? For example, the Skype site shows different RPMs for Fedora and openSUSE. (Then again, it shows different DEBs for Debian and Ubuntu as well.) Why can't the maintainers of these distributions pare away the differences as much as possible to maintain inter-distribution compatibility? Wouldn't this just make everyone's life easier?

Linux and Breakfast Cereals

I got the idea for this post from this article (Caitlyn Martin, O'Reilly Broadcast), which is a response to this op-ed piece (Graham Morrison, TechRadar).
I find it a little ridiculous that Mr. Morrison can seriously claim to not understand Linux package management after dealing with it for 12 years. But, then again, the article seems to support this as well. Follow the jump to read more about this.