The one thing I don’t like about Cinnamon is that it doesn’t play nicely with flatpak theming at all. KDE seems to apply themes over flatpaks with no problem no matter the distribution. If the Mint team built into Cinnamon desktop these theming capabilities, I’d use it over KDE all the time happily.

I know it won’t be the same response, but using the AUR with Pamac on EndeavourOS has been a good experience for me. It doesn’t let me break the system since it’s all graphical and I haven’t had any issues with suspect packages or anything like that. And enabling Flatpak/Snap I can install those programs I might not trust, like the Miru streaming app.

It is just the default KDE panel set to 34 and enabled the floating panel option, moved the date and time to the center with two spacers around it and changed it to have the date always next to the time. I also added a global menu to the right of the start button and the pager and then put margin separators on each side of the spacers. I haven’t ventured into using anything fancy like Polybar yet…