Can I delete all the mate files from a terminal with sudo apt-get remove mate* and still run cinnamon on lmde without any problems? What do you say Johnny?
<update>
yes i can
Toshiba Laptop, AMD A6-3420M Quad-Core CPU, AMD Radeon 6520G On Chip HD GPU, 500 Gig HD, 6 gigs Ram Linux Mint Debian Wheezy, Liquorix Kernel 3.8.8, Catalyst 12.10- Beta 13.3 Ready to Buy/Configure a Raspberry Pi for Print/Scan/Media Server