LMDE3 with Xfce

[ajgreeny]

I have just installed LMDE3 as a virtual install in VBox 6.0 and not surprisingly the default cinnamon DE runs a bit too slowly and has several graphics glitches due probably to being a virtual install. However, in spite of thos difficulties with cinnamon I do find this new (to me) OS superb, and fast now that I have made the changes detailed below.

I have long been a big fan of Xfce, with Xubuntu 18.04 being my main installed OS; I believe Xfce offers the best combination of configurability with speed and low resource use of any of the DEs.

I therefore removed all the "cinnamon" named packages using synaptic, together with several others that were obviously related to cinnamon, eg nemo, and replaced them with the Xfce4 DE from the standard repos and what a huge difference that made to the virtual OS; immediately it ran fast and smoothly with none of the problems I had with cinnamon. I do accept that I know Xfce much better than cinnamon so can probably use it a lot more easily, but it does seem to prove to me that LMDE3 with the Xfce DE would be an extremely useful option to have available for download, so I wonder if anyone knows if it is ever likely to be made available for download in a ready-made form, saving the palaver I went through to remove cinnamon and install Xfce.

[ajgringo619]

It would be nice, but installing XFCE is really easy. I had the same problems with Cinnamon, both in VirtualBox and QEMU; XFCE, on the other hand, runs great.

[ajgreeny]

Thanks to you both for your comments, particularly LuvNix, with whom, incidentally, I totally agree.

I was not intending to demand that an Xfce version of LMDE be made available but simply asking if it was ever likely.

I am also aware that cinnamon, being a Mint development (as far as I'm aware?) would probably be the default DE, and having used Linux exclusively now for nearly 14 years, I am quite capable of spinning my own version of any distro I wish.

I have often done that with the minimal install CD version of Ubuntu; it is merely lack of time to put my own version together that pushes me to the LTS versions of Xubuntu out of the box. And very good they are too, as are the Xfce versions of LM in my opinion.

I am sure by now you will all realise that I find it hard to move away from the Xfce DE; it just fits my work system better than anything else I have ever tried and I can do whatever I want without having to think too hard about what I'm doing.

[lewyssmith]

Just a comment.
I have just come back to LMDE (now 3) from its first edition, which was my preferred of several Linux's - but not upgradeable. I forget which desktop it had, but I think it was Xfce or Mate. I was surprised to find Cinnamon now.
On my everyday system, I live with 6 desktops: Cinnamon, Gnome, LXDE, Mate, Plasma, Xfce because I help with a distribution which offers them all out-of-the-box, and I need to be able to test each one. (And it is nice to have a change from time to time). Having modest hardware, I am sensitive to relative speed. Plasma is the worst, followed by Gnome & Cinnamon (slow), with LXDE, Mate & Xfce being fastest. The surprise is Mate, which has a bigger software overhead than Cinnamon, but is really rapid. The distribution I help withr added Xfce to its single desktop offerings (Plasma & Gnome), and it went down well.

[turtlebay]

May I make a small comment? I have being trying LMDE 3 as a Live system but have to say that being lumbered with the Cinnamon DE, makes it an unwieldy system which is quite slow on my Dell 1545 laptop. It's highly unlikely that I will switch to it although I am a big fan of Debian as an every day system. If you are seeking a distro with the Xfce DE and based on Debian, may I suggest you have a look at MX Linux instead. AntiX also uses Debian and is even faster, also being equipped with Xfce.

I do realise the Mint team's point of making LMDE, so they can switch to it if Ubuntu lets them down.

[ajgreeny]

Just a quick "for-information" addendum to this year-old thread of mine about LMDE3 using Xfce instead of cinnamon.

This has been running for some time now in VBox with no problems, and simply as an experiment and to satisfy my own curiosity I have today upgraded the debian base repos from stretch to buster, simply to see whether or not it will still work with these updated debian packages.

I first took a snapshot of the LMDE3 VM prior to this upgrade just in case but so far the buster version is running with no problems though, of course, many may still show up as I use the system.
Has anyone already tried this with a more standard LMDE3 installation, ie, one without the added xfce4 non-standard DE?

I will keep this thread updated if or when problems arise.