LMDE Cinnamon conversion to LMDE XFCE

[joemartin]

If I wanted to replace Cinnamon completely, remove it and run XFCE LMDE and keep all mint tools how would I go about this?

Thanks.

[cwsnyder]

With Software Manager, Synaptic, or in a terminal with aptitude or apt-get and the proper options, install xfce4 first, then remove cinnamon with the same tools after you have made sure that you have logged off, chosen Xfce as your session and made sure that Thunar, xfburn, Abiword, Gnumeric and the other Xfce specific applications are all installed before you remove the cinnamon package.

If you don't check on the proper installation and operation of Xfce before removing Cinnamon, then I hope you are comfortable working for a while from the command line to fix everything up.

As for all of the 'Mint Goodies', you may want to install mate-desktop before installing xfce4 to ensure the version of the goodies matches better than the Cinnamon desktop (incompatible versions of GTK). Again, check your work, and keep a copy of a Live installation medium to help recover from mistakes and keep them from being disasters.

[Monsta]

As for all of the 'Mint Goodies', you may want to install mate-desktop before installing xfce4 to ensure the version of the goodies matches better than the Cinnamon desktop (incompatible versions of GTK).

I don't remember any "incompatible versions of GTK" in the repositories. Can you elaborate on this?

[cwsnyder]

If I remember, Xfce 4 uses a mix of GTK2 and GTK3 libraries, Mate is almost entirely if not entirely GTK2, while Cinnamon was based originally on GNOME 3 with almost all GTK3 libraries. That was the difference between Mate and Cinnamon, if you were reading the news at the time Mate/Cinnamon were developed.

Since Xfce is NOT SUPPORTED by the Mint development team at this time, that is the reason I steered to a MATE base prior to conversion to Xfce. It isn't as bad as trying to convert from Cinnamon to KDE, but there are similarities.

[Monsta]

And where are the incompatibilities?

[cwsnyder]

@Monsta: Mostly, since Xfce is not supported on LMDE, the correct libraries may not be installed, or versions may have changed. 'Mysterious' problems where something goes wrong are left up to the users to trouble-shoot.

Actually, the various threads on the forum telling how to 'Mintify' Debian would be a better resource, starting with Debian Xfce, rather than converting from LMDE Cinnamon to Xfce.

I prefer Xfce myself, but keeping Xfce going and updated properly on LMDE got to be too much of a chore for me, so for now, my LMDE installation is MATE.

[grizzler]

You might want to check out SolydX. That's what I installed on my new machine and while I originally thought it would be just a stop gap until the next LMDE update had sorted out MATE's broken packages, I now think I'll stick with SolydX indefinitely. It's essentially what LMDE Xfce should have been.