Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

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thiagomilagres
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Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by thiagomilagres »

Hello,

I have Mint with Cinnamon installed, but I would like to use pure Gnome from now on. After some search I installed gnome-session and gdm3, and now in the login screen I can choose Gnome, so this is working.

However, I'm not sure about the best practices regarding some details:

1) If I'm sure I won't go back to Cinnamon, is it better to delete Cinnamon with

Code: Select all

apt-get purge cinnamon
or should I maintain both? Searching online I've read that (a) it's often not a good idea to have more than one DE installed, but also read that (b) uninstalling Cinnamon could lead to problems, so I got a little confused

2) If the answer to 1) is that I should maintain the original DE, I suppose that instead of Cinnamon I should install Linux Mint with a lighter DE by default, and re-do the whole process of installing GNOME. Does that make sense?

Thank you
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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karlchen
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by karlchen »

Very briefly:
The most efficient way of running Linux Mint without Cinnamon, but with the Gnome desktop, is ...
not installing Linux Mint at all, but installing genuine Ubuntu instead. The main edition comes with the Gnome desktop.
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thiagomilagres
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by thiagomilagres »

Thanks for your response. I assumed that since Ubuntu uses their own modified version of Gnome, I would be in a similar situation as I am in Mint (i.e. I would also need to tweak things in order to use vanilla)
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spamegg
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by spamegg »

Thanks for your response. I assumed that since Ubuntu uses their own modified version of Gnome, I would be in a similar situation as I am in Mint (i.e. I would also need to tweak things in order to use vanilla)
Not at all, in Mint it would be far, far more difficult and system breaking. I'm not really sure what you mean by pure vanilla Gnome, you might want to look into some other distros. I think every distro which ships with Gnome modifies it a bit. The "purest" is probably Fedora.
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thiagomilagres
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by thiagomilagres »

spamegg wrote: ⤴Thu May 13, 2021 7:38 am The "purest" is probably Fedora.
Yes, Fedora is exactly what I would like in terms of DE (although I do not need it that up-to-date). However, since I'm a Linux beginner I would like to stay in the Debian-based universe for convenience, so I'm looking for how to replicate that kind of experience here. I wasn't aware that this would be dangerous/risky in Mint.
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JosephM
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by JosephM »

I wasn't aware that this would be dangerous/risky in Mint.
It isn't. Whoever told you that doesn't know what they are talking about. I have gnome shell installed on the Mint system I'm typing this from and it works fine. You will need to install gdm, which you already did, to get proper screen locking while running gnome. If you have Mint installed already, simply try it. What's the worst that could happen?

There is no real reason to remove Cinnamon. They work side by side just fine.

I would consider Ubuntu if you really want shell. If you run the non LTS releases it gives you access to newer, often improved versions. To get the vanilla version of Gnome in Ubuntu you simply have to install an additional session. I can't remember the exact package name but a search should find it pretty easily.
When I give opinions, they are my own. Not necessarily those of any other Linux Mint developer or the Linux Mint project as a whole.
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absque fenestris
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by absque fenestris »

Excuse me for saying this - but such requests seems like a birthday party with hyper-spoiled children: there are four beautiful cakes to choose from, but no! it has to be a fifth ... and of course delivered free and carriage paid to the table ... :mrgreen:

Please note: this is not a beginner's question and so far it has nothing to do with any of the desktops supplied and maintained by Mint.
Last edited by absque fenestris on Thu May 13, 2021 9:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by spamegg »

Here is a Debian GNOME Live image
BitTorrent:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cu ... bt-hybrid/
Direct download:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cu ... so-hybrid/
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thiagomilagres
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by thiagomilagres »

I thank JosephM and spamegg for helpful responses. It's still not totally clear to me whether or not this is a good idea, but the comments are helpful.

Honestly do not get absque fenestris's tone, since all I'm looking for is to use vanilla Gnome, not something terribly specific. It's not even a request, in fact. I actually did a bit of searching and made it work with Mint, but came here on the Beginner Questions to ask if what I did was Ok or if it was a bad practice, as I found mixed opinions online. Anyway..

Edit: comment above removed
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by spamegg »

@thiagomilagres
There have been a few posts here (in Beginner for example, and in some other subforums) where people took a Mint version and tried to put, for example, KDE on it and borked their system. So while it may be possible to switch your DE successfully, we have to err on the side of caution and recommend beginners NOT to do it. Imagine: if we told you to go ahead and do it, and your system got borked...

If you are adventurous and you don't have anything to lose (except time) there might be some tutorial out there to convert Mint to GNOME. Although I'd still say don't do it, because it really defeats the purpose of using Mint in the first place.
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thiagomilagres
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by thiagomilagres »

I see your point, it makes sense. I mistakenly thought it would be something very straightforward (compared to installing something like KDE) because Mint is built on top of Gnome, hence the post in this subforum, but I see this isn't necessarily the case.

Thank you once again
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absque fenestris
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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by absque fenestris »

thiagomilagres wrote: ⤴Thu May 13, 2021 10:29 am I see your point, it makes sense. I mistakenly thought it would be something very straightforward (compared to installing something like KDE) because Mint is built on top of Gnome, hence the post in this subforum, but I see this isn't necessarily the case.

Thank you once again
No comment - but i'm thinking about statements


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Re: Best practices to use pure, vanilla GNOME with Mint

Post by Reddog1 »

The other solution is to install your chosen distribution as a virtual machine, with Mint as the host. The requirement is that you have a reasonably powerful machine (quad core or better) and at least 8GB of ram (for most distros, some run just fine using 2GB--or even 1GB if all you have is 4GB installed in your machine, and some even work well with a core duo). You also need spare hard disk space for the VM's. The distribution you choose will be defined by the capabilities of your machine, so choose carefully if you choose to go the VM route. Right now, I'm running 3 versions of Windows, 1 Debian Linux and 1 FreeBSD (with GUI), all VM's on a Mint 20 box with 8GB of ram. Just because I can.....











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