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Hey All, I've been seriously looking to replace my ubuntu 10.10 desktop with LMDE but I have a few questions.

1. Should I download and play with the live cd for LMDE Gnome or wait for KDE?

2. Someone told me that my home folder on my ubuntu pc is safe as long as I skip the format partitions and choose the / partition. Is this correct? It would save me a heck of a lot of time for backing up stuff that I don't really have space to back up right now.

Hi,
Here are my thoughts:

1. Should I download and play with the live cd for LMDE Gnome or wait for KDE?

It's always better to download a CD/DVD and try use it for sometime. Once comfortable use it. I have no idea when KDE wil be in?

2. Someone told me that my home folder on my ubuntu pc is safe as long as I skip the format partitions and choose the / partition. Is this correct? It would save me a heck of a lot of time for backing up stuff that I don't really have space to back up right now.

It's always a good practice to format the /Home partitions. If any of the configuration files has same name then it will mess up the install.

Hi markymark12

Welcome in the minty community.

I solved the problem as follows: after LMDE brought no updates since about September, I installed LM12 KDE. So I got again a good «work horse» (I also have still Kubuntu 10.10 as a backfall) and Sabayon as a test. And once, when LMDE KDE is released, I will install it on a third partition and hope to bring then this version up to become my work horse.

To mange this, I have practically no own data in the /home partitons, just what is here from the system. Each Distribution has its own /home and there is – on a separate hard disk – a few (NTFS) partitions where I store all my data. So Partition for Video (photos, films, snippets), for Audio, for Data, for Joint Data and for Backups. NTFS because then I have never problems with rights.

Into the Joint Data come the Mozilla profiles, all the fonts, the Gimp resources, the channel listings for Kaffeine etc. This guarantees, that I have on all plattforms the identical look. (I never understand why Debian puts for example fonts into three different folders: /home/user/.fonts, /usr/share/fonts and /usr/lib/share/fonts, same goes with Gimp and Mozilla.)

markymark12 wrote:1. Should I download and play with the live cd for LMDE Gnome or wait for KDE?

You can always install KDE on LMDE and use that as your desktop environment. There's a way to get KDE 4.7.4 but I don't recommend it for new users since it requires a lot of attention to make sure things don't break.

I will recommend not blowing away too much of GNOME once you get LMDE + KDE to where you like it since if you use Firefox it will use GNOME settings and I haven't found a way to tell it to use KDE apps like Dolphin. It's a pain in the rear to have to specifically open a download folder in Dolphin rather than simply using Firefox's Open in Folder feature but until we get KDE built on LMDE we'll have to work around things like this.

I'm with you on wanting KDE built on LMDE, and hopefully we'll see that on an upgrade in the next couple of releases but it will take a lot of work on our already overworked devs. if you think KDE is nice now that will make it even better. Who knows, we may be able to convert more GNOME users to the blue side when we don't have to jump through so many hoops to have the combination of the best distro and DE.