Well it's finally happened. Running KDE on mint has been pretty damn good... I've had no crashes and games just seem to work..

But it's been irking me that the menus are full of mint config and apps plus also the k config and apps... It's probably only a matter of time before two config programs clash and I borked my system. I got a new hard disk for Christmas for the laptop, And when I migrated over I decided to switch to Kubuntu to from mint...

Both kubuntu and mint are based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian... But while mint is almost a standalone product, Kubuntu sits on the knees of Ubuntu quite heavily.

They call it a "flavour", Which means that when Ubuntu is updated, all of the flavours are as well.. with Kubuntu simply being the vanilla Ubuntu release with KDE set as the default desktop.

That means good things and bad things. On the good side, it means that I get more cutting edge updates. I think most of the problems I was having with mint was that it was sticking with older versions of programs and drivers. Often the solution to some of my problems was to force update to a new release. The bad side is that you do end up getting pulled into the Canonical way of doing things, such as snap store.

So the first thing I did was to pull out snap. Vanilla Ubuntu comes with the snap store and a bunch of framework packages which make other snap packages work. The only useful snap package that seem to be installed was Firefox. Removing all of snap was pretty easy.. you just use "snap list" to list all of their default framework stuff, and then "snap remove" each one until you're just left with snapd, and then remove that. Easy peasy.

But Ubuntu is set up to require stuff from snap, so when you try and put Firefox back it bitches that you don't have snap installed so you have to put a little bit of config into apt to tell it to stop using snap And to prefer the default packages, especially for Firefox.

Firefox seems to be a little bit special, because the Ubuntu default package library contains only a stub package for Firefox which redirects you off to snap. I can see why people are getting annoyed with canonical about this. So you have to add the Mozilla deb source until apt to use that instead. That's quite the faff, and not something I would recommend for a novice to do!

Luckily, many people have encountered this problem before and there is a Handy guide in how to do it. The guide works perfectly, and I got Firefox from Mozilla directly immediately afterwards.

But this is only a problem if you really want to get rid of snap. I have no axe to grind against canonical for snap, but I just felt that there was no space for yet another app store. We already have APT stuffed full of goodness, and there's also flatpak which is widely used, plus we have things like AppImage for anyone that doesn't want to use an app store... So what's the point in having yet another one controlled by a single company?

I can't seem to find a compelling reason to keep snap installed... With flat pack, hiding things in its own bottles for security, finding where an app is installed is already a bit of a hunt, so adding a third option just feels like extra work to me... So I switched it off.

In summary, Getting Kubuntu installed was a piece of cake. I used the live USB image to copy all my stuff over from the old hard drive to the new hard drive, and then installed kubuntu over the top of mint. It only took a couple of minutes and was almost completely painless.

The only problem I encountered was that the desktop kept freezing after I booted into it.... I've done some research and I found that people have had similar problems with this latest 25.10 release of Ubuntu... Some seemed to point towards graphics drivers, so rather than stay on the Nouveau drivers, which I was intending to do because Nouveau seems to be pretty good these days, I switched to the Nvidia 580 drivers which are the latest right now...

I had an awful lot of config in my home folder from mint which I didn't want to pollute the new install. So rather than just mount the home drive, I renamed my old home folder and created a new one, copying in all my old steam files. Sure enough. As soon as I installed steam it saw saw installation in ~/.local and the soft links in ~/.steam, And immediately imported all my settings and games. I didn't even have to enter my password again. Genius! That saved me hours of reinstalling!

As soon as it rebooted it's been solid and frame rates are amazing in games. I'm getting another 3 or 4% improvement over the top of when I was using KDE with mint.. which was about a 10 to 20% improvement when I was using vanilla mint.. so all in all this laptop seems to be running a good 15 to 20% faster for games, which is really pleasing.

I'm going to see how it goes. I'm not to migrating the kids over from mint to Kubuntu yet. Their laptops seem a lot more stable than mine, and they have no problems with vanilla mint.