Installing cinnamon alongside Mate?

[Myrmidon83]

I've been running 64 bit MATE Mint 13 with no problems, well other than small compiz glitches that have been making me think of moving to cinnamon, I use it at work and love it. I only really use scale and expo with compiz (though who doesn't love wobbly windows?) and cinnamon has those covered and I can map them with easy stroke as I do to make everything happen from the mouse.

But anyway, I am still undecided and was going to install cinnamon alongside mate but I remember reading a few months back that this could cause some problems and I'm wondering if this is still the case?

Can anyone advise?

[viking777]

though who doesn't love wobbly windows?

I don't, but that's beside the point.

I only use Cinnamon, not Mate, but I haven't read about problems mixing the two myself. Are there any specific posts you have read on the forum about this? I was also under the impression that Cinnamon used some other graphic accelerator (clutter, mutter, flutter, something like that - shows how much attention I pay to graphics effects). Or maybe that is MInt 14 not 13. Personally I would just give it a go it is easy enough to remove the one you like least. Better still if it worries you have a look at QT4-fsarchiver or clonezilla, make a disk image and if anything goes wrong with your dual desktops just put the old image back again. It really is the only way to work with Linux (or any other distro for that matter).

[Myrmidon83]

Looking back I can't see any post in particular but I was sure there was some issue with having them both installed around mint 12 time.

Maybe you could clarify this for me, what happens with my installed programs if I install multiple DE's? I assume such installed apps are available across all DE's, ie dropbox, cairo dock etc? If they have auto start settings in one DE, does that mean they autostart in all DE's?

[abnvolk]

Hmmm, of course installed applications are available to all DEs, but the problem is different apps of different DEs with the same functionality show up in both. For example Gedit and Pluma, Caja and Nemo, MATE Terminal and GNOME Terminal... Because MATE is a GNOME 2 fork, these apps look and behave the same and duplicated ones become redundant.
I think startup applications need to be configured differently in each DE.

[Myrmidon83]

I played around with installing multiple DE's in virtualbox just to see how it all works. Forgot how much I liked E17.

Regarding duplicated apps, I assume I could just pick my favourites when clash free and uninstall the others?

[Catbuntu]

On a Cinnamon installation, you can easily install MATE using this command:

Code: Select all

 $ sudo apt-get install mint-meta-mate [/QUOTE]
If you see any duplicated apps, you can edit their .desktop files. For example, if you want XChat to be shown ony on Cinnamon, run:
[CODE] $ gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/nemo.desktop [/CODE]
And add this line:
[CODE] OnlyShowIn=GNOME

Note: Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that for Cinnamon it's GNOME, and for MATE it's just MATE.

You can alternatively edit the MATE and Cinnamon menus to not show some applications.