For those who don’t know what I mean:

target hardware for LMDE is an 8 year old nuked mac notebook with an intel chip.

I’ve always used xfce because it’s easy on the hardware and I don’t care that much about looks, but functionality.

I’ve never used cinnamon and I don’t know if it’s going to slow the notebook much.

Neither do I know if I can install LMDE and then change the DE to xfce.

Is LMDE being updated like the other mints? LMDE is version 6, whereas the other DE are version 21.3

  • poki@discuss.online
    2·
    5 months ago

    Out of curiosity, what’s the issue with installing a different DE?

    There doesn’t necessarily have to be an issue. Heck, this simple operation (i.e. installing an additional DE on an existing system) works pretty fine on Arch/Debian etc.

    However, as Linux Mint (and its family/brand of related distros) are designed/setup/opinionated in a certain way with a specific scope/vision, just installing Xfce on top of Linux Mint (proper/regular) doesn’t just give you Linux Mint Xfce Edition; you can try this out for yourself if you’d want to. Instead, you get something that looks more akin to Ubuntu with Xfce installed and some Linux Mint tools. Similarly, installing Xfce on top of LMDE doesn’t give you a proper LMDE Xfce edition. Which, to be fair, isn’t the worst thing out there and I’m pretty sure that someone out there will be pretty happy with it. But, one might also argue (as I certainly am) that, instead of that amalgamation (read: FrankenDebian), one would simply be better off with the Linux Mint Xfce Edition for which the ISO can be acquired directly from the Linux Mint team.