Thank you OP for that, but… why should we prefer this over uBlue’s work on streamlining this process?

These changes are undocumented and must be discovered and explored organically, while the default behavior is well documented.

This, indeed, is concerning. Thank you for mentioning this!

Kickstart.nvim ads only a few packages that are very popular and provides a base upon which you can customize as needed.

Hmm…, allow me to ask the following: How much effort would it take to get Kickstart.nvim from scratch to where any of the opinionated distros are in terms of functionality?

i’d like to try gnome or kde plasma

I’m surprised to see that no one has mentioned the following yet:

"KDE Edition

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.

KDE is a fantastic environment but it’s also a different world, one which evolves away from us and away from everything we focus on. Their apps, their ecosystem and the QT toolkit which is central there have very little in common with what we’re 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’s 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.

When we work on tools like Xed, Blueberry, Mintlocale, the Slick Greeter, we’re developing features which benefit these 3 desktops, but unfortunately not KDE.

Users of the KDE edition represent a portion of our user base. I know from their feedback that they really enjoy it. They will be able to install KDE on top of Linux Mint 19 of course and I’m sure the Kubuntu PPA will continue to be available. They will be able to port Mint software to Kubuntu itself also, or they might want to trade a bit of stability away and move to to a bleeding edge distribution such as Arch to follow upstream KDE more closely.

Our own mission isn’t to diversify as much as possible in an effort to attract a bigger chunk of the Linux market, and it’s with a bit of sadness that we’re letting this edition go. We focus on things we do well and we love doing to get better and better at doing them. KDE is amazing but it’s not what we want to focus on.

With Linux Mint 18.3, we’ll release one more KDE edition. I wanted this announcement to come before the release. It will hurt its popularity of course, but I wanted to give users time, either to react right now or to take their time, upgrade and adapt to this later on. I’m sure this edition will be missed and I hope its users understand our decision."

From this Linux Mint blog post*.

Note that this doesn’t mean that you can’t use KDE Plasma (or GNOME for that matter). Though you have to be aware that you’ll be on your own whenever something breaks. And if you have to ask how to change Desktop Environment in the first place, then I think that you might not be ready yet for such a ride. Instead, consider using a distro that actually does offer GNOME and/or KDE Plasma editions of its distro; the likes of Fedora, openSUSE and Pop!_OS come to mind.

It seems to offer a leaner approach. If you’ve used any of the ones mentioned in the OP, would you consider offering a more elaborate comparison between them?

Aight, I actually don’t know a lot about it, but I guess something that looks like an answer is better than none. So without further a due.

First of all, Nitrux is quite unique, so I won’t be able to do it justice regardless. However, I’d say that it being an ‘immutable’ distro with OpenRC and focusing on AppImage (over Flatpak/Snap) is the primary one. It’s important to note that Nitrux’ model doesn’t allow you to install .deb packages natively at all. So in that regard, it’s one of the less flexible among its ‘immutable’ siblings. It does offer great support for Distrobox, so you can install your debs, rpms and from the AUR etc if you so desire within a container instead; you can even install other desktop environments with this. Waydroid works. AppArmor is configured. KDE Plasma looks fantastic on Nitrux, but they offer even more spice through their Maui Shell.