So i recently switched to linux mint from Windows and its been great. I had been optimizing my mint cinnamon for all sorts of stuff catered to me but just didnt like the customization it had. i wanted more. i had always heard that KDE plasma was always the best go to for customization so, without knowing any better, i just downloaded it beside cinnamon. I've heard this is an issue for a number of reasons. From what I've seen, doing this just kinda adds duplicates of other apps right? leading to more storage used for nothing? I can see how this is more of a "dumb" idea rather than a "bad" one. Unless im missing something that could make this a really bad idea? please let me know if this was something rly bad that i should stop or something.

Ultimately, i spent so much time and effort making my Plasma look cool, earning how to use linux and configuring my apps to work that i really dont wanna have to restart and pick a better distro for my plasma. Id rather keep everything how it is but, if having plasma and cinnamon is such a bad idea then is there a way that i could somehow take my plasma and import it seamlessly onto a better distro (if need be)?

Is everything in plasma working the way you want? If yes you did nothing wrong and as long as you’re not limited on storage you can just ignore the duplicate apps, they aren’t going to hurt anything by being installed

I figured as much! It’s been working just fine and I’m rly doing fine on storage

Running anything other than Cinnamon, Xfce or Mate on Mint has little benefit over using the matching Ubuntu flavor.

If/when you decide to switch to Plasma full time, you’d be better off using Kubuntu (a minimal install in case you don’t like Snap) directly.

Make backups, even of your KDE dotfiles, and wait for the eventual breakage on version update for Mint. Afterwards, please migrate to Fedora Ultramarine KDE to keep your sanity.

Note that installing Plasma in Mint gets you Plasma 5.27, which is ancient, no longer receives any kind of updates, and should be avoided if possible. More modern distros, such as Fedora KDE, will give you a much better KDE experience.

is there a way that i could somehow take my plasma and import it seamlessly onto a better distro (if need be)?

You can copy the relevant files from your user directory (from ~/.config/ and ~/.local/) over to the new one. Doing so is slightly tricky because you'd want to place those files without being logged into Plasma, so that they don't get overwritten. A live USB session would probably be the easiest way to do that. You should probably give a few more details about your configuration, to know what needs to be copied, and if it's compatible with Plasma 6. Custom themes? Icon themes? Plasmoids? Panel configurations?

hope you took good notes, because you will likely be needing to recreate all of that at some point in the future.

but, hey as long as it's working for you then great... just remember if it doesn't seem to be doing what you want or if you ever want to duplicate your setup on another machine/install you will have an intractable quagmire of settings to wade thru.

also, i would advice you to inform anyone trying to help you that you did this so the know to walk away... it's hard enough to troubleshoot plasma issues with out this kind of complication.

You can save your KDE settings any time with Konsave.

As far as running KDE / Mint, I never had any problems.

DELETING Desktop Enviroment files can cause problems. You've already installed it, let it be.

If you like KDE and experence no problems just keep doing what you are doing BUT think about using Kubuntu as an OS.

I moved to Kubuntu and the only two things worth remarking about is that Kubuntu uses snaps and has gone over using Wayland.