LMDE 3 - Personal impressions

[Lord Vltor]

About the LMDE v3.
I will write down my impressions based on its installation on a 2007's Dell Latitude D830 laptop, comparing it with the Linux Mint XFCE v 17.3 (mostly), 18.3 and 19.1.

INSTALLER
The installer is less user-friendly than the Linux Mint's one. Personally, the only two things that are superior are the map when you need to pick the timezone, and the final sum-up of the data.
Personally, I'd use the Mint's standard installer with those two tweaks.

GRUB
The GRUB looks... bad. Probably is the Debian's one, but the one from the regular Mint releases look better.

OS
Apparently, the PC runs FAR slower with LMDE than with Mint v17.3: longer startup time, longer shut down time.
The Cinnamon desktop looks terribly different from the XFCE's packed with Mint XFCE. Personally, I do prefer XFCE over other desktops because they look more Win-like and are even more lightweight. I'd ship the LMDE with the XFCE environment or, at least, I'd give the chance to pick a flavour (as different distros, or during the installation).

UPDATE MANAGER
The Update Manager: regular Mint still scores a +1 over LMDE, displaying the "level" of the update, and if it is a security feature or not. To be honest, I picked Mint over Ubuntu due to this feature.

OVERALL
Basically, I consider the overall look and system software stock of Mint v17.3 far superior to the ones the LMDE's comes with.

STANDARD SOFTWARE (SUGGESTION)
As softwares, I'd pack as follows (or, at least, I'd give the chance to pick during the installation):
- LibreOffice
- Audacious
- FuriusISOMount
- Brasero
- Ristretto
- GIMP
- OLive Editor
- GParted

XFCE FLAWS
The only things I find the XFCE is lacking are:
- the customization of the colours: where it is possible to pick a theme, is not possible to actively EDIT the single colours. A way to do that would be useful
- the Mint XFCE doesn't have any system sound, where apparently the LMDE has.WinOS way to set up system sounds on event is pretty decent, does anything like that for Linux exist? If yes, packing it in would be a nice add-on.

FINAL NOTES
Up to now, the most versatile, stable and compatible release has been Linux Mint XFCE v17.3 x64 (v17.1 for x32 systems). I would consider using them ("it", since I guess x32 is dead nowadays) as base to build up a magnificent LMDE.

[Bruce McL]

LMDE changing from Cinnamon to Xfce - If you want that, MX Linux is doing Xfce over Debian already. That is quite fast for me.

Overall speed - I’d say Cinnamon is more for quad-core machines and Xfce is more for dual core machines.

Xfce flaws - In Xfce 4.14, ICC display profiles do not work with Redshift, a utility that turns the screen colors less blue at night. In the Xfce forum, they say that this will be fixed in 4.16. I don’t want to wait. Cinnamon and most Gnome 3 based desktop environments can do ICC profiles along with “Night Light” right now.

[Lord Vltor]

Apparently yeah, re-readingmy post I am someway aiming for a Xfce Debian-Based release. Wasn't aware about the MX LInux project, will look and run it ASAP to see how it works and if I can customize it (if needed). After two years in Linux, I still don't know how to tweak the various parts of the OS too much, like ripping off something I don't like to replace it with something from another release I like - a bit because I miss the "how to", a bit because I often don't know the specific names of what I'm looking for.
I'd be so happy to be able to mix up a personal Linux version that I can use as "fresh installer", but I don't know if is possible to do such a thing and if yes, how. So for now I'm just limited to pick the closest distro to my tastes - which seems to be Mint Xfce.
But I'll give MX Linux a shot!

[Bruce McL]

I’m certainly not an expert, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the scene for a while. I think the Linux Mint people been doing a very good job for a long time. The various flavors are all put together well and serve different kinds of computers and different styles of working.

Other distros I try out tend to need more massaging and customizing before I am happy with the way they work.

Are you familiar with distrowatch? The search page there is a good way to look for an OS that has the bits and pieces you want.

https://distrowatch.com/search.php

The search results aren’t perfect, but they are a good place to start investigating from. You may find somebody has already made an OS with the combination of parts you want to try out.

I found Solus Budgie by searching there. It’s a bit quirky, but is my favorite lightweight OS. It uses a cut down version of the Gnome desktop with I’m not sure what underneath. Definitely not Ubuntu or Debian. It doesn’t even use grub. It's fast though.

[darknetmatrix]

Apparently yeah, re-readingmy post I am someway aiming for a Xfce Debian-Based release.

Have a look @ SolydXK, it has started as a spin-off from LMDE with xfce and kde desktop and it's debian-based.