The Linux community had widely thought that having a version of Mint using KDE was redundant and confusing.

Now it seems that the Mint team has agreed to pull the plug. Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint spokesman said: "In continuation with what's been done in the past, Linux Mint 18.3 will feature a KDE edition, but it will be the last release to do so. I would like to thank Kubuntu for the amazing work they have done. The quality of Plasma 5 in Xenial made backports a necessity. The rapid pace of development upstream from the KDE project made this very challenging, yet they managed to provide a stable flow of updates for us and we were able to ship good KDE editions thanks to that. I don't think this would have been possible without them."

He added that KDE was a fantastic environment but a different world, one which evolves away from us and away from everything we focus on. Its apps, ecosystem and the QT toolkit which is central there have very little in common with what Mint was working on.

“We're not just shipping releases and distributing upstream software. We're a product distribution and we see ourselves as a complete desktop operating system. We like to integrate solutions, develop what is missing, adapt what's not fitting perfectly, and we do a great deal of that not only around our own Cinnamon desktop environment but also thanks to cross-DE frameworks we put in place to support similar environments, such as MATE and Xfce."