I’m using Mint MATE. I’ve long been intrigued by Debian - a likely first step would be to try a Debian (non-Ubuntu)-based distro like Peppermint, LMDE, or MX. As an ‘intermediate’-level Linuxer, pure Debian seems a bit daunting.
Only thing is, I’m partial to MATE at the moment, and none of the options come with a MATE desktop by default. Still, this thread is tempting me to give it a go.
If you are already on Mint, have you considered trying
The only thing you would need to do is install the MATE desktop from the LinuxMint repositories associated with that, and you would be there already!
Ah, that sounds easier than I thought. Would there not be conflict with having two DEs at once, though? Like two file managers, duplicates of all kinds of other things? I’ve often seen recommendations against installing two desktops in the Mint forums, which put me off trying.
No. You would see the two choices offered on the login screen, with a drop-down from one of the icons.
That has more to do with disk-space usage than anything else. Also, you can choose to remove the Cinnamon, leaving only the MATE.
As long as you install a second Desktop, before removing the first one, you can be sure to always have a working DM.
But be sure to try the second DM before committing by deleting the first.
No conflict at all.
There will be some duplicates, which you will see on the menus, mostly. If you’re on XFCE you will be using Thunar, if you’re on MATE you’ll be using Caja, and so on.
Yeah, I’ve seen that too in the last few months I’ve been on Mint. Right now I’m not on Mint anymore, but from what I remember, don’t install any mint-mate meta package. That is what will screw things up. Take a look here Installation | MATEwiki
sudo apt install mate-desktop-environment
sudo apt install mate-desktop-environment-extras
and keep going from there. I install everything through Synaptic Package Manager, it’s easier to see dependencies and recommended packages in case something is missing.
I won’t get off my antiX or MX Linux distributions as two of my steady Debian-based distros, but have any of you experimented with any of the BSDs recently or ever?
FreeBSD was probably the most frequent one I used, but I haven’t done much with any of them in recent years. OpenBSD has been claimed to be the most secure, and one of the most secure OS, period. Haven’t used any of them recently though. Anyone tried one recently?
I tried both of them briefly when I was looking for a distro to be my home. Admittedly, I was fairly converted to Linux by then but, because of what I’d read about them, I really wanted to like them. But they just didn’t feel right.
Maybe that was just because of where I was at that point in time. But I’ve never had reason (yet) to revisit them again.
But now you’ve made me wonder again! 