Linux Mint Forums

Hi all!
On my notebook I'm currently using Cinnamon on Arch linux and I fell totally in love with it.
Just the update policy of arch makes it a bit difficult to always have a usable system so I thought I'd give LMDE a try.

Since I'm a little bit spoiled in terms of minimalistic OS's I had the Idea to start with a smal cli installation of debian testing and turning it into a mint by changing the sources.list and starting to build my Cinnamon Desktop from there without anything I don't need.

Now my question: Is this even possible? How would I go about it?

From my understanding LMDE and Debian testing have the same core packages, so it should be possible, right?

Thanks for your time!

Oh and by the way, thank you Mint for creating Cinnamon, for me it's the first usable DE!

Ok, everything went pretty much as intended. Ij have a working lmde cli.
The thing is, if I'm trying to install cinnamon, apt is trying to pull some 1,100+ MB. And that is without xserver, as that is already installed...
Why would cinnamon have things like gnome-shell and gdm3 as a dependency??
That totally defeats the purpose of my little project. Is there a way I can install cinnamon without a ton of c*** in lmde?

if you're using apt-get, turn off your recommended package installation.
edit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99synaptic into

Thank you for your answer!
It's been a while since I used a debian based distro. Anyway, --no-install-recommends was the way to go, thank you again!
Now let's see if I can get cinnamon to work

Since I'm a little bit spoiled in terms of minimalistic OS's

My Mint 16 (Xfce-based)+fluxbox system is slightly lighter than was my Arch+fluxbox, and is lighter than Arch-based Manjaro+fluxbox. And Mint16 has fewer problems than either (essentially none).

My Mint LMDE install was relatively bloated, took twice as long to boot and used almost 5X the memory after boot.

we've tried to install mint's cinnamon on debian testing but no one succeed. if you want to get a minimalistic system with newest cinnamon IMO the best way is install LMDE and trim it down and remove all the unused package. first of all, uninstall all unnecessary package (i.e: thunderbird, mint tools, etc). after that run 'sudo aptitude purge $(deborphan --guess-all)' several times until nothing removed to clean unused packages and libs.

My Mint LMDE install was relatively bloated, took twice as long to boot and used almost 5X the memory after boot.

something might wrong with your LMDE installation. the longer boot time might be caused by sysvinit (easily fixed by using systemd) but the high memory usage means that there's something wrong with your system.