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

  • @KISSmyOSFeddit
    6•6 months ago

    There isn’t an ISO for Linux Mint with Xfce.
    What I would try:

    • Boot the normal ISO
    • open a terminal instead of starting the installation
    • enter sudo live-installer-expert-mode

    It should boot the Debian expert installer, which lets you choose what DE you want to install. I haven’t tested this on LMDE, though.

    Otherwise, install LMDE normally. Then do sudo apt install xfce4 and sudo apt purge cinnamon* muffin* nemo*.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•6 months ago

      Then do sudo apt install xfce4 and sudo apt purge cinnamon* muffin* nemo*.

      It’s been a while since I installed xfce4 on anything, but if things haven’t changed I think the metapackage doesn’t include xfce4-goodies and some other packages, so if you’re missing something it’s likely that you just need to ‘apt install xfce4-whatever’. Additionally you can keep cinnamon around as long as you like as a kind of a backup, just change lightdm (or whatever login manager LMDE uses) to use xfce4 as default. And then there’s even lighter WM’s than XFCE, like LXDE, which is also easy to install via apt and try out if that works for you.