From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Fri, 3/6/2026 6:07 AM, RonB wrote:

On 2026-03-05, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 3/5/2026 11:06 AM, Mike Easter wrote:

Axel wrote:

Why do you use XFCE in preference to Cinnamon?

I use Cinnamon as my everyday driver, but I also like for my 'dabbling' distro/s to be lighter weight, all the way down to WMs instead of DEs.

XFCE is on the lighter side; such as Gnome is certainly a heavyweight. Historically KDE has been 'all over the map' sometimes as low as XFCE and sometimes as high as they come.

I'm happy that T Pearson has continued to keep Trinity DE fork of old KDE alive along w/ his fork of old Qt for a nice lightweight DE.

And we only emphasize this notion of "light weight" as
a response to the capabilities of the computer.

With Grahams 4400+ for example, a dual core Athlon64 at 2.2GHz or so,
if the graphics acceleration worked, we might not have
to pamper the thing.

Where we get in trouble, is if the graphics driver reverts
to little better than a frame buffer (XY array of pixels,
no acceleration). The processor is then tasked with doing
all the graphics operations itself. This leaves little horsepower
for running Firefox internals.

Whereas, when your processor has a lot of cores, then it is OK
for some cores to do the graphics. My daily driver has 8 cores,
so it's not all that powerful, but if the worst behavior
I've seen is 4 cores railed while doing graphics, I have 4 cores
left for running Firefox :-) That's where the extra cores come
in handy. Relatively speaking, it does not matter whether
I run XFCE or I run Cinnamon then.

My laptop with the one core, where the one core is equal
to half of Grahams processor, the situation for it is
going to require a more economical distro (Puppy maybe
or the TinyCore I tested).

Paul

I've got Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 running on a Dell Latitude 3180, which was basically a "schoolroom laptop." It has a dual core Intel Celeron N3350 CPU, 8 GBs of RAM, Intel 500 GPU (HD Graphics, it says) and 128 GBs. I installed a new battery and get a maximum of about 14 hours of battery life. It works well on the Internet, can stream moves and YouTube and its rugged and cheap enough that you don't mind carrying it around with you. I'm impressed with it. And no fan. It hardly ever runs over 38-#C. I like low heat and low power
without a fan.

At any rate, I think Xfce vs Cinnamon (because is lighter) isn't necessarily that strong of an argument. Cinnamon seems light enough (maybe it works better if you have 8 GBs of RAM).

The ingredient in your soup is the Intel 500 GPU.

It is when old computers don't have a driver for the
GPU and the graphics are done with the CPU cores, that
the machine is sensitive to the details of graphics
operation types. That's when XFCE versus Cinnamon matters.

At one time, the Intel integrated GPUs did not have
any operation types that were worth using for acceleration.
There was an iGPU "certified for Vista" that really
wasn't Vista quality goods. But Intel eventually learned
how to do graphics with textures and shader acceleration.

I even have an ATI discrete video card, that is so weak, it
rates as "neutral" on acceleration. Whether you use that
video card or not, does not seem to matter. It has so much
CPU overhead, any acceleration it has is practically useless.
I replaced that with another "weak" card, a GT1030,
and you can "feel" a bit of acceleration from that, and
that would be as worthwhile as your Intel 500.

But if you go back far enough on Intel, there is only
IDCT, and OSes "stopped using that" long ago. Even though
when you don't have any features, using that is worthwhile.
Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform. That, and a scaler,
were at one time features. The provision of a scaler for
scaling pixmaps, that saved "a third of a Pentium 4" worth
of compute, and that used to help for playing videos. At
one time, before the video SIP was put in video cards,
playing a video would rail some core types. And then code
quality really mattered, and videos could range from
10% of the CPU (scaler present) to over 100% (dropped frames).

Paul
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Fri, 3/6/2026 5:08 AM, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

On 5 Mar 2026 20:01:40 GMT
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Thu, 5 Mar 2026 08:06:15 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:

Axel wrote:

Why do you use XFCE in preference to Cinnamon?

I use Cinnamon as my everyday driver, but I also like for my 'dabbling'
distro/s to be lighter weight, all the way down to WMs instead of DEs.

My Linux Mint netbook was installed from the Cinnamon iso but I added i3
and spend most of my time in an i3 session. For that matter I have sway on >> the two boxes that use Wayland.

I'm happy that T Pearson has continued to keep Trinity DE fork of old
KDE alive along w/ his fork of old Qt for a nice lightweight DE.

I have Q4OS/Trinity on an old eeePC. It works on a very minimal netbook.
It isn't a daily driver but it is viable. The original Xandros is long
gone. It worked well but didn't support WPA2.

Must be a later eeePC than mine:
requirement from q4os website:

Trinity desktop - 500MHz CPU / 512MB RAM / 6GB disk

OK on the 1st 2, but IIRC my eeepc only has a 2G (maybe 4?) SSD
"harddrive"

so tinycore it is.

The weird part of the storage devices, is the chip count.

Apparently those NAND chips on the right, are about 2GB each.
Today, a chip not much larger than that, consisting of stacked
thin NAND dies, can be 2TB each. The downside of modern SSDs
is the write life -- the flash in this picture are supposed
to write 200,000 times per cell (SLC?). And the thing is unlikely
to have TRIM.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Ssd_eee.jpeg

And what are the odds, any modern device has the same connector
as whatever that thing is.

The machine might have an SD slot, but the SD standard it
supports might not be all that impressive.

If using Firefox, you'd want to set the config so the
cache space is in RAM rather than writing the storage device.
It might run faster that way.

Paul
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

Must be a later eeePC than mine:
requirement from q4os website:

Trinity desktop - 500MHz CPU / 512MB RAM / 6GB disk

OK on the 1st 2, but IIRC my eeepc only has a 2G (maybe 4?) SSD
"harddrive"

so tinycore it is.

You could run q4os as a live w/ persistence via Ventoy.

I haven't done that w/ q4os, but it sounds like an interesting
experiment for today.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

Mike Easter wrote:

You could run q4os as a live w/ persistence via Ventoy.

I haven't done that w/ q4os, but it sounds like an interesting
experiment for today.

Ha.

https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5235

-+ Q4OS Support
-+ q4os 5 Aquarius persistent

https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=28912#p28912

It is indeed possible to have persistence. And Ventoy will provide that and a lot more!
There is a bit of a learning curve involved at first. But it's straight forward enough.
Just take it a step at a time and be patient as you work through the process.

When I first started using Ventoy, I didn't 'get' its persistence idea,
and I didn't 'like' .json, but eventually I came around to understand.
--
Mike Easter
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

Mike Easter wrote:

https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=28912#p28912

Ventoy was 'designed' for USB and much of the docs and this forum
example /say/ USB; but everything USB also applies to SSD for Ventoy.

You can install Ventoy to USB drive, Removable HD, SD Card, SATA HDD, SSD, NVMe ...

The ventoy part is tiny.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On 2026-03-06, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On Fri, 3/6/2026 6:07 AM, RonB wrote:

On 2026-03-05, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 3/5/2026 11:06 AM, Mike Easter wrote:

Axel wrote:

Why do you use XFCE in preference to Cinnamon?

I use Cinnamon as my everyday driver, but I also like for my 'dabbling' distro/s to be lighter weight, all the way down to WMs instead of DEs.

XFCE is on the lighter side; such as Gnome is certainly a heavyweight. Historically KDE has been 'all over the map' sometimes as low as XFCE and sometimes as high as they come.

I'm happy that T Pearson has continued to keep Trinity DE fork of old KDE alive along w/ his fork of old Qt for a nice lightweight DE.

And we only emphasize this notion of "light weight" as
a response to the capabilities of the computer.

With Grahams 4400+ for example, a dual core Athlon64 at 2.2GHz or so,
if the graphics acceleration worked, we might not have
to pamper the thing.

Where we get in trouble, is if the graphics driver reverts
to little better than a frame buffer (XY array of pixels,
no acceleration). The processor is then tasked with doing
all the graphics operations itself. This leaves little horsepower
for running Firefox internals.

Whereas, when your processor has a lot of cores, then it is OK
for some cores to do the graphics. My daily driver has 8 cores,
so it's not all that powerful, but if the worst behavior
I've seen is 4 cores railed while doing graphics, I have 4 cores
left for running Firefox :-) That's where the extra cores come
in handy. Relatively speaking, it does not matter whether
I run XFCE or I run Cinnamon then.

My laptop with the one core, where the one core is equal
to half of Grahams processor, the situation for it is
going to require a more economical distro (Puppy maybe
or the TinyCore I tested).

Paul

I've got Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 running on a Dell Latitude 3180, which was
basically a "schoolroom laptop." It has a dual core Intel Celeron N3350 CPU,
8 GBs of RAM, Intel 500 GPU (HD Graphics, it says) and 128 GBs. I installed >> a new battery and get a maximum of about 14 hours of battery life. It works >> well on the Internet, can stream moves and YouTube and its rugged and cheap >> enough that you don't mind carrying it around with you. I'm impressed with >> it. And no fan. It hardly ever runs over 38-#C. I like low heat and low power
without a fan.

At any rate, I think Xfce vs Cinnamon (because is lighter) isn't necessarily
that strong of an argument. Cinnamon seems light enough (maybe it works
better if you have 8 GBs of RAM).

The ingredient in your soup is the Intel 500 GPU.

It is when old computers don't have a driver for the
GPU and the graphics are done with the CPU cores, that
the machine is sensitive to the details of graphics
operation types. That's when XFCE versus Cinnamon matters.

At one time, the Intel integrated GPUs did not have
any operation types that were worth using for acceleration.
There was an iGPU "certified for Vista" that really
wasn't Vista quality goods. But Intel eventually learned
how to do graphics with textures and shader acceleration.

I even have an ATI discrete video card, that is so weak, it
rates as "neutral" on acceleration. Whether you use that
video card or not, does not seem to matter. It has so much
CPU overhead, any acceleration it has is practically useless.
I replaced that with another "weak" card, a GT1030,
and you can "feel" a bit of acceleration from that, and
that would be as worthwhile as your Intel 500.

But if you go back far enough on Intel, there is only
IDCT, and OSes "stopped using that" long ago. Even though
when you don't have any features, using that is worthwhile.
Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform. That, and a scaler,
were at one time features. The provision of a scaler for
scaling pixmaps, that saved "a third of a Pentium 4" worth
of compute, and that used to help for playing videos. At
one time, before the video SIP was put in video cards,
playing a video would rail some core types. And then code
quality really mattered, and videos could range from
10% of the CPU (scaler present) to over 100% (dropped frames).

Paul

Thanks for all the info. I've had good luck with my off-lease business
laptops and PCs (mostly Dell. All of them, except for one of my very oldest, use Intel GPUs. Makes life easy with Linux (since I only play very simple games, like Aisleriot Solitaire or KMahjongg.
--
Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 09:21:23 -0800
Mike Easter <MikeE@ster.invalid> wrote:

Mike Easter wrote:

https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=28912#p28912

Ventoy was 'designed' for USB and much of the docs and this forum
example /say/ USB; but everything USB also applies to SSD for Ventoy.

You can install Ventoy to USB drive, Removable HD, SD Card, SATA HDD, SSD, NVMe ...

The ventoy part is tiny.

What's wrong with grub?
--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

Mike Easter

Ventoy was 'designed' for USB and much of the docs and this forum
example /say/ USB; but everything USB also applies to SSD for Ventoy.

You can install Ventoy to USB drive, Removable HD, SD Card, SATA HDD, SSD, NVMe ...

The ventoy part is tiny.

What's wrong with grub?

Ventoy has a grub2 mode if necessary. It is a very clever tool.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_grub2boot.html
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 00:18:18 +1100, Axel wrote:

-aI have cinnamon running on a laptop with just 4 Gb ram. works fine.

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/acer-aspire-timeline-1830t-3721

Mint Cinnamon does fine. I replaced the HDD with a SSD which drastically improved startup time and operating temperature. I use it for Arduino development. With the arduino cli, minicom, Vim, and Firefox to look up
stuff it doesn't go into swap.

I'd earlier installed the MATE version and added Xfce to that. I didn't
see a lot of difference between the DEs and didn't care for Mint's Xfce configuration. The current Cinnamon install also has i3 which works well
for my purposes.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:52:57 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

On 2026-03-05, Mike Easter <MikeE@ster.invalid> wrote:

Axel wrote:

Why do you use XFCE in preference to Cinnamon?

I use Cinnamon as my everyday driver, but I also like for my 'dabbling'
distro/s to be lighter weight, all the way down to WMs instead of DEs.

XFCE is on the lighter side; such as Gnome is certainly a heavyweight.
Historically KDE has been 'all over the map' sometimes as low as XFCE
and sometimes as high as they come.

I'm happy that T Pearson has continued to keep Trinity DE fork of old
KDE alive along w/ his fork of old Qt for a nice lightweight DE.

And Mate is somewhere between Xfce and Cinnamon. Basically Gnome 2-like.

While GNOME2 is better than GNOME3 I never liked it that much. I did
install the MATE iso but later went with Cinnamon. I didn't see much difference in RAM usage.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:48:20 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I've got Xfce, Mate and Cinnamon installed on this computer. But I
almost always use Cinnamon (unless I'm testing something). It's easy to install Cinnamon and then choose which you want to use at login. One command...

sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

sudo apt install i3

I get 5 choices at login. Cinnamon (Default), Cinnamon (Software
Rendering), Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental), i3, and i3 ( with debug
log).

I tried the Wayland version once. It didn't last long. I never tried the software rendering version.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:08:02 +0000, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

Must be a later eeePC than mine:
requirement from q4os website:

Trinity desktop - 500MHz CPU / 512MB RAM / 6GB disk

OK on the 1st 2, but IIRC my eeepc only has a 2G (maybe 4?) SSD
"harddrive"

so tinycore it is.

4G Surf with a 4 GB drive. It's tight. iirc it took me several attempts to slice down what got installed enough to go.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 11:14:25 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:

Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

Mike Easter

Ventoy was 'designed' for USB and much of the docs and this forum
example /say/ USB; but everything USB also applies to SSD for Ventoy.

You can install Ventoy to USB drive, Removable HD, SD Card, SATA HDD,
SSD, NVMe ...

The ventoy part is tiny.

What's wrong with grub?

Ventoy has a grub2 mode if necessary. It is a very clever tool.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_grub2boot.html

That it is. I'll admit getting directed to the SourceForge clickbait site
left me hesitant but I finally figured out which click got me the right download.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 18:18:38 +0000, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

What's wrong with grub?

Different tools for different uses.

Ventoy doesnrCOt require you to install OSes into partitions. Instead,
you just copy any number of OS image files onto a single partition
where Ventoy will find them and let you choose which one to boot.

Great for distro-hoppers, not so good for running a rCLdaily-driverrCY OS.

<https://www.ventoy.net/>
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On 2026-03-06, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:52:57 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

On 2026-03-05, Mike Easter <MikeE@ster.invalid> wrote:

Axel wrote:

Why do you use XFCE in preference to Cinnamon?

I use Cinnamon as my everyday driver, but I also like for my 'dabbling'
distro/s to be lighter weight, all the way down to WMs instead of DEs.

XFCE is on the lighter side; such as Gnome is certainly a heavyweight.
Historically KDE has been 'all over the map' sometimes as low as XFCE
and sometimes as high as they come.

I'm happy that T Pearson has continued to keep Trinity DE fork of old
KDE alive along w/ his fork of old Qt for a nice lightweight DE.

And Mate is somewhere between Xfce and Cinnamon. Basically Gnome 2-like.

While GNOME2 is better than GNOME3 I never liked it that much. I did
install the MATE iso but later went with Cinnamon. I didn't see much difference in RAM usage.

I moved to Gnome 2 when KDE moved from (I think) 3 to 4 (or maybe it was 2
to 3). Whichever it was, there were a lot issues with the new KDE version at the time.

Since I've been using Mate (then Cinnamon) for about 17 or 18 years now,
it's pretty much where I'm staying. (Though I experiment with KDE from time
to time.)
--
Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On 2026-03-06, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:48:20 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I've got Xfce, Mate and Cinnamon installed on this computer. But I
almost always use Cinnamon (unless I'm testing something). It's easy to
install Cinnamon and then choose which you want to use at login. One
command...

sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

sudo apt install i3

I get 5 choices at login. Cinnamon (Default), Cinnamon (Software
Rendering), Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental), i3, and i3 ( with debug log).

I tried the Wayland version once. It didn't last long. I never tried the software rendering version.

I don't even know what the software rendering version does. Apparently not anything I need.

As for i3, I don't like tiling (as mentioned before) but I can see where it would be nice for programmers (also mentioned before).
--
Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 02:46:49 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

As for i3, I don't like tiling (as mentioned before) but I can see where
it would be nice for programmers (also mentioned before).

Apropos of nothing other than tiling the guy behind Hyprland posts on X
any really dislikes these guys and their dwm.

https://suckless.org/

It caught my attention because during one meeting the director of
engineering said 'Our motto should be "We suck less"'. There is more truth
in that than a lot of companies would ever admit.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On 6 Mar 2026 20:01:52 GMT, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:48:20 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I've got Xfce, Mate and Cinnamon installed on this computer. But I
almost always use Cinnamon (unless I'm testing something). It's easy to
install Cinnamon and then choose which you want to use at login. One
command...

sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

sudo apt install i3

I get 5 choices at login. Cinnamon (Default), Cinnamon (Software
Rendering), Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental), i3, and i3 ( with debug
log).

On one of the discussion group web pages I read apropos this topic,
somebody posted something like "having multiple alternative desktop environments on one machine is a recipe for crashes that are very
difficult to diagnose ... only half-witted newbies do it."

Is there any truth in that or is just the sort of thing that snotty Linux nerds sneer to each other? I don't mind trying different DEs but I can't afford to have serious bugs on my work computer, not any more than
necessary anyway.

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Handsome Jack wrote:

I don't mind trying different DEs but I can't
afford to have serious bugs on my work computer, not any more than
necessary anyway.

For trying different DEs, I prefer to boot them live or live w/
persistence. Ventoy. Personally I like to see how the dev of the
release has set up the DE (or WM) rather than tweak it myself.

I realize that by not being 'into' such UI tweaking, I'm missing some
strong linux features over that of other OSes. One of these days I may
do more of that.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 3/7/2026 5:37 AM, Handsome Jack wrote:

On 6 Mar 2026 20:01:52 GMT, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:48:20 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I've got Xfce, Mate and Cinnamon installed on this computer. But I
almost always use Cinnamon (unless I'm testing something). It's easy to
install Cinnamon and then choose which you want to use at login. One
command...

sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

sudo apt install i3

I get 5 choices at login. Cinnamon (Default), Cinnamon (Software
Rendering), Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental), i3, and i3 ( with debug
log).

On one of the discussion group web pages I read apropos this topic,
somebody posted something like "having multiple alternative desktop environments on one machine is a recipe for crashes that are very
difficult to diagnose ... only half-witted newbies do it."

Is there any truth in that or is just the sort of thing that snotty Linux nerds sneer to each other? I don't mind trying different DEs but I can't afford to have serious bugs on my work computer, not any more than
necessary anyway.

Switch on your pattern-matcher and see what you think <snicker> :-)
And I'm not saying this because I know the answer. As a searcher,
I am familiar with the boundless terrain, even if I cannot guide
you through it.

https://eylenburg.github.io/de_comparison.htm

Nerds sneer, because they're sick of having to memorize shit
like this, and regurgitate on demand.

This is the land of the full matrix, the sparse matrix,
the partitioned matrix. In theory, if every piece of software
you touched, followed "standards", it would be a full matrix
and we would laugh at how silly your question was. Well,
we're not laughing particularly.

Only occasionally, in a discussion thread, will a tree herder
emit a set of "rules of comfort" for this stuff. Which would be
a selection of a pattern noted in the above table.

Notice how XFCE,MATE,Cinnamon go with LightDM and X11
(where the X11 could be XWayland, for as long as that
compatibility option exists and is not snatched away).

Such tables do not "guarantee a bad time", but if you mix
the wrong things, maybe a dpkg-reconfigure just doesn't
do the right things and some manual configuration file
editing is necessary. And since this affects your ability
to use the GUI or use your screens as you'd hoped to, you
might need a second computer to dial out and search or
use LLM-AI to dig yourself out of the mess.

A "hint" is when your distro "has three DE but not five DE".
This means the tree-herder has done their best to try to
make "any combination of the three" work. Perhaps getting
the "other one" to install, requires switching from
XWayland to Wayland for example. The login prompt, if you
"click in the right sequence", a gear wheel appears in the
lower right corner, and your options like LXQT with X11
or LXQT with Wayland appear, and you select the one you
want and go off on a crash hunt.

Maybe you would be offered these boundless choices
while using Debian. A downstream distro may select
a subset of things, to bring a measure of control and
stability.

Part of the reason for this, is let's zoom out to 60000 feet
and look at the map. The map has "areas". If DEs come from
several different "areas", you can be assured there will be "trouble".

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg

It's a bit like walking. In the city, there are nice sidewalks,
all the trees and brush have been removed. You think you're
a god when you walk down the street. Then one day, your dad
says, "hey, we're going fishing" and later in the day,
you're on your hands and knees in the thickest most dense
brush you've ever seen in your life, you don't have a
machete to chop your way out in a moment of panic, and
you're dragging your fishing rod behind you while you
emulate how a rabbit travels these paths (head down).

To traverse absolutely every place in life, requires reading up
on the challenges, carrying the right tools... and
being ready for anything. Such as it is June, and
there is a five foot pile of snow blocking your
rabbit-path that heads to the river. And because it
is a rabbit-path, there are always "forks" and
ways to still get where you're going in the
brush by "taking the other fork".

Then when you get there, there is a mixture of
muskeg and solid ground. One step you hit
solid ground, the next step... your leg sinks all
the way up to your hips (I was impressed I hit
something solid!). And now you begin to understand
why you put on the hip waders this morning :-)
I didn't even bother to ask at 3AM, why we needed
hip waders. I figured we'd be standing in a river,
fly fishing or something. That didn't happen again,
as now that my pattern-matching was switched on,
I could spot those before stepping into one...

Summary: By all means, try out absolutely everything.
Just be prepared to shovel your way out.
Make a backup sufficient to undo one
of your sessions of "walk-about". Certain
topics assume you will be killed and will need
to respawn at the beginning of the level.

Even the tutorial articles on this topic, aren't
tutorial enough for "dead reckoning". If the
architecture diagram does not include absolutely
everything (login manager), then that's really
disingenuous material, to lead a person right
next to muskeg and make them step in it.

The tree-herders learn by doing, just like you do.
A set of three DE is "a matrix big enough to keep
me testing until July". We don't do twelve DEs
because "I'll be testing until my pension comes in".

And the table in the top link, is not complete.
There are more components that could be included
in the table, but then, someone has to test them
to comment on them. This is what happens when you
spin too many components and add them to a matrix.
Nobody has time to test for the interactions enough
to guarantee a good time.

Now you know why the Firefox graphics person was
angry, when told to support Wayland, XWayland,
and X11. That's three times as much work, and more
test benches to write to prove it works. When that
capability came out, I tested it :-) And I could do that,
because one distro had all the materials to do it. Today,
that distro backed off on that capability, so I have
to look elsewhere to test all three still work.

I don't think the comment about half-witted newbies is
fair. You can expect to have some amount of fun trying
these out. But it may be simpler to switch distros if
you were attempting to compare twelve of them.

Paul
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

Paul wrote:

As a searcher, I am familiar with the boundless terrain, even if I
cannot guide you through it.

That sure sounds like (problematic) fragmentation to me.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 10:37:55 -0000 (UTC), Handsome Jack wrote:

On 6 Mar 2026 20:01:52 GMT, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:48:20 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I've got Xfce, Mate and Cinnamon installed on this computer. But I
almost always use Cinnamon (unless I'm testing something). It's easy
to install Cinnamon and then choose which you want to use at login.
One command...

sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

sudo apt install i3

I get 5 choices at login. Cinnamon (Default), Cinnamon (Software
Rendering), Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental), i3, and i3 ( with debug
log).

On one of the discussion group web pages I read apropos this topic,
somebody posted something like "having multiple alternative desktop environments on one machine is a recipe for crashes that are very
difficult to diagnose ... only half-witted newbies do it."

Is there any truth in that or is just the sort of thing that snotty
Linux nerds sneer to each other? I don't mind trying different DEs but I can't afford to have serious bugs on my work computer, not any more than necessary anyway.

I had one machine where I had installed a distro with the default GNOME. I think it was when GNOME3 appeared . I didn't like it and installed KDE.
For the most part it worked. Updates were a little iffy and the system was delicate but it wasn't a complete disaster. However it wasn't something
I'd want to do again.

Exceptions: I installed the Mint/MATE iso and later loaded the Xfce
desktop. I didn't have any crashes but I didn't use it too much before
doing a fresh install of Mint/Cinnamon.

I installed i3 on the Cinnamon netbook and sawy on the Fedora and Arch
boxes. They're very similar, i3 being X11 and sway Wayland. Both are minimalist tiling WMs. I did encounter a problem on the Cinnamon box when
I launched Cinnamon GUIs from i3. It got into a weird state and I
rebooted.

I think most of the problems come from mixing and matching. I do use
Konsole on the Ubuntu box with no problems but I only installed it with
apt, and not the whole KDE DE.

Short answer: it's not all gloom and doom but do expect some weirdness.




--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 08:41:50 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:

Handsome Jack wrote:

I don't mind trying different DEs but I can't afford to have serious
bugs on my work computer, not any more than necessary anyway.

For trying different DEs, I prefer to boot them live or live w/
persistence. Ventoy. Personally I like to see how the dev of the
release has set up the DE (or WM) rather than tweak it myself.

I realize that by not being 'into' such UI tweaking, I'm missing some
strong linux features over that of other OSes. One of these days I may
do more of that.

I do very little tweaking and that left me surprised by some of the configurations done by a distro. GNOME isn't my favorite but I've learned
to live with Ubuntu's version. I installed GNOME Leap 16 in a VM. I think
that is vanilla GNOME. No way and I wasn't about to beat it into
submission so I reinstalled the KDE version.

Mint's Xfce is quite a bit different to Debian's too.

I've got KDE on the EndeavourOS and Fedora boxes, plus the Leap VM.
Despite KDE being one of the most configurable DEs those three are about
the same.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 11:52:03 -0500, Paul wrote:

The tree-herders learn by doing, just like you do.
A set of three DE is "a matrix big enough to keep me testing
until July". We don't do twelve DEs because "I'll be testing
until my pension comes in".

Mint is a good example. Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce are the three flavors,
not counting LMDE. The login offers Cinnamon/Wayland (Experimental) and
they make no bones about the experimental part. I tried it and it didn't
last long.

Even with three choices the developers floated out using a more flexible release cycle since 'we release every six months regardless' doesn't give
them enough time to work out all the kinks.

--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

rbowman wrote:

GNOME isn't my favorite but I've learned
to live with Ubuntu's version.

As a general rule, Gnome is the DE I most love to hate.

Sometimes I live boot something else partial to Gnome other than Ub,
whose Gnome I hate the most, like Fedora. I'm VERY glad that RedHat
decided to 'open the door' to 'sharing' the idea of the default DE to
KDE as well as Gnome.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

Mike Easter wrote:

Gnome is the DE I most love to hate.

OTOH, I am very pleased w/ a LOT of the dev in the gnome ecosystem,
which has given rise to tons of 'stuff' used by the entire community.

However, some have a problem w/ the 'infrastructure' gtk, which evolves 'roughly' and causes some dev/s to divert themselves over to Qt's.

Some say that gnome project 'hierarchy' is hard to live in if you are
under its umbrella. But I suppose that might be said of any hierarchy.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 13:18:28 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:

Sometimes I live boot something else partial to Gnome other than Ub,
whose Gnome I hate the most, like Fedora. I'm VERY glad that RedHat
decided to 'open the door' to 'sharing' the idea of the default DE to
KDE as well as Gnome.

At least Ubuntu has a toolbar, which I think is the 'dash to dock'
extension. When I first installed Fedora KDE was still a spin rather than
a full citizen alongside Fedora Desktop. I'm on 43 now, waiting for 44.

Ubuntu wasn't my first choice; I was trying for Kubuntu and had problems
with the iso so I used Ubuntu's. The stuff I use is on the toolbar, panel,
or whatever you call it so I seldom have to go pawing through the 'Show
Apps' thing.

I've never seen the Fedora GNOME but if it's anything like the Leap
version I wouldn't be running Fedora if that was all that was available. Sorting through GNOME extensions trying to find something that works isn't
my idea of a good time.

--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 14:47:41 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:

However, some have a problem w/ the 'infrastructure' gtk, which evolves 'roughly' and causes some dev/s to divert themselves over to Qt's.

I prefer Qt to Gtk. The GUIs I do for my own amusement are PySide6, which
is PyQt without the Riverside license baggage. Qt licensing was sort of a
mess when the trolls owned it and still has strange bits.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 12:51:50 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 11:52:03 -0500, Paul wrote:

As a searcher, I am familiar with the boundless terrain, even if I
cannot guide you through it.

That sure sounds like (problematic) fragmentation to me.

rCLFragmentationrCY implies a bunch of broken shards with some kind of
lack of unity among them.

That would describe the proprietary market, fragmented between
Microsoft and Apple. It would describe the BSD world, fragmented
between roughly similar but subtly incompatible variants that cannot
even share filesystems, let alone kernels.

It does not describe the Linux world. Remember, the Linux world
invented rCLdistro-hoppingrCY, which is something you can only practise in
a non-fragmented world.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 08:41:50 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:

I realize that by not being 'into' such UI tweaking, I'm missing
some strong linux features over that of other OSes. One of these
days I may do more of that.

Sounds like you are pursuing a breadth-first search over the Linux DE landscape, rather than depth-first.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 11:52:03 -0500, Paul wrote:

On Sat, 3/7/2026 5:37 AM, Handsome Jack wrote:

On one of the discussion group web pages I read apropos this topic,
somebody posted something like "having multiple alternative desktop
environments on one machine is a recipe for crashes that are very
difficult to diagnose ... only half-witted newbies do it."

Is there any truth in that or is just the sort of thing that snotty
Linux nerds sneer to each other? I don't mind trying different DEs but
I can't afford to have serious bugs on my work computer, not any more
than necessary anyway.

Switch on your pattern-matcher and see what you think <snicker> :-) And
I'm not saying this because I know the answer. As a searcher,
I am familiar with the boundless terrain, even if I cannot guide you
through it.

https://eylenburg.github.io/de_comparison.htm

Nerds sneer, because they're sick of having to memorize shit like this,
and regurgitate on demand.

This is the land of the full matrix, the sparse matrix,
the partitioned matrix. In theory, if every piece of software you
touched, followed "standards", it would be a full matrix and we would
laugh at how silly your question was. Well,
we're not laughing particularly.

That's some table. I never knew there were alternative desktop
environments for Windows.

Why do none of the Linux DEs provide an option for "When closing an application window, remember its position and reopen it in the same
position next time?" Surely there must be millions of people like me who
would prefer that to any other option?


--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On 2026-03-07, Handsome Jack <jack@handsome.com> wrote:

On 6 Mar 2026 20:01:52 GMT, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:48:20 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I've got Xfce, Mate and Cinnamon installed on this computer. But I
almost always use Cinnamon (unless I'm testing something). It's easy to
install Cinnamon and then choose which you want to use at login. One
command...

sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

sudo apt install i3

I get 5 choices at login. Cinnamon (Default), Cinnamon (Software
Rendering), Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental), i3, and i3 ( with debug
log).

On one of the discussion group web pages I read apropos this topic,
somebody posted something like "having multiple alternative desktop environments on one machine is a recipe for crashes that are very
difficult to diagnose ... only half-witted newbies do it."

Is there any truth in that or is just the sort of thing that snotty Linux nerds sneer to each other? I don't mind trying different DEs but I can't afford to have serious bugs on my work computer, not any more than
necessary anyway.

I've had all three standard Linux Mint desktops on this machine since Linux Mint 19. I've done two major upgrades since then and it retained working versions of all three desktops without any lock up issues. So, at least on Linux Mint (on on three computers rCo the SSD has been moved to three different computers), it doesn't seem to be an issue. I'll run Mintupgrade again when I (eventually) move to Linux Mint 22 on this machine (that's another thing they tell "not to do").

The SSD is currently in a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny (7"x7"x1.5")desktop with an i7-7700T CPU and 16 GBs of RAM. Previously it was in a Dell Optiplex 3020 Mini, then an Optiplex 9020 Mini, (both with 16 GBs of RAM and i5-4590T CPUs) and, for about four months when I was in Arkansas, in my Latitude
E7450 laptop with an i5-5300U Dual Core CPU (no issues on the laptop
either).

Linux Mint does a good job of keeping their three desktops as similar as possible. So maybe the fact I use Linux Mint is why it works to have more
than one desktop installed.
--
Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On 2026-03-08, Lawrence DrCOOliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 12:51:50 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:

On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 11:52:03 -0500, Paul wrote:

As a searcher, I am familiar with the boundless terrain, even if I
cannot guide you through it.

That sure sounds like (problematic) fragmentation to me.

rCLFragmentationrCY implies a bunch of broken shards with some kind of
lack of unity among them.

That would describe the proprietary market, fragmented between
Microsoft and Apple. It would describe the BSD world, fragmented
between roughly similar but subtly incompatible variants that cannot
even share filesystems, let alone kernels.

It does not describe the Linux world. Remember, the Linux world
invented rCLdistro-hoppingrCY, which is something you can only practise in
a non-fragmented world.

Liunx "fragmentation" (in my view) is a good thing. No one entity can monopolize Linux. Choice is good.
--
Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sun, 8 Mar 2026 09:57:13 -0000 (UTC)
Handsome Jack <jack@handsome.com> wrote:

Why do none of the Linux DEs provide an option for "When closing an application window, remember its position and reopen it in the same
position next time?" Surely there must be millions of people like me who would prefer that to any other option?

One of that million people is me. My solution is to use Devils Pie https://github.com/dsalt/devilspie2/
at list for programs that I use the most.
--
Linux Mint 22.2 kernel version 6.14.0-36-generic Cinnamon 6.4.8 AMD
Ryzen 7 5700G, Radeon RX9060XT, 32GB of DRAM.

--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sun, 3/8/2026 6:24 AM, RonB wrote:

On 2026-03-07, Handsome Jack <jack@handsome.com> wrote:

On 6 Mar 2026 20:01:52 GMT, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:48:20 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I've got Xfce, Mate and Cinnamon installed on this computer. But I
almost always use Cinnamon (unless I'm testing something). It's easy to >>>> install Cinnamon and then choose which you want to use at login. One
command...

sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

sudo apt install i3

I get 5 choices at login. Cinnamon (Default), Cinnamon (Software
Rendering), Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental), i3, and i3 ( with debug
log).

On one of the discussion group web pages I read apropos this topic,
somebody posted something like "having multiple alternative desktop
environments on one machine is a recipe for crashes that are very
difficult to diagnose ... only half-witted newbies do it."

Is there any truth in that or is just the sort of thing that snotty Linux >> nerds sneer to each other? I don't mind trying different DEs but I can't
afford to have serious bugs on my work computer, not any more than
necessary anyway.

I've had all three standard Linux Mint desktops on this machine since Linux Mint 19. I've done two major upgrades since then and it retained working versions of all three desktops without any lock up issues. So, at least on Linux Mint (on on three computers rCo the SSD has been moved to three different computers), it doesn't seem to be an issue. I'll run Mintupgrade again when I (eventually) move to Linux Mint 22 on this machine (that's another thing they tell "not to do").

The SSD is currently in a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny (7"x7"x1.5")desktop with an i7-7700T CPU and 16 GBs of RAM. Previously it was in a Dell Optiplex 3020 Mini, then an Optiplex 9020 Mini, (both with 16 GBs of RAM and i5-4590T CPUs) and, for about four months when I was in Arkansas, in my Latitude E7450 laptop with an i5-5300U Dual Core CPU (no issues on the laptop either).

Linux Mint does a good job of keeping their three desktops as similar as possible. So maybe the fact I use Linux Mint is why it works to have more than one desktop installed.

The idea is, generally, to curate what you put in the tree, so it
can all be installed at the same time.

The limit on DEs, is also a practical matter, of how many you have
staff to maintain the stuff. (For a downstream DE, you still have
to test stuff, and if you've been patching and changing things
that counts as effort too.)

DE which have different subsystem requirements, may be a lot harder
to fit. (You have to load a different set of things, perhaps
including even the login screen thing. Maybe it requires
a dpkg-reconfigure.)

This is taxing the skills of your tree-herder.

That, and making a Driver Manager work (the package count involved!).

Paul
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

Lawrence DrCOOliveiro wrote:

Mike Easter wrote:

I realize that by not being 'into' such UI tweaking, I'm missing
some strong linux features over that of other OSes. One of these
days I may do more of that.

Sounds like you are pursuing a breadth-first search over the Linux DE landscape, rather than depth-first.

This thread started w/ remarks about a Dedo/Igor review. He is
frequently unhappy w/ what he finds when he wants to tweak some UI to
his liking and doesn't like how the tweaking goes.

I'm more interested in how that dev decided to set up 'his' distro.

There are many different angles a distro dev may choose to approach a 'purpose' for his or their project, which may be a MUCH different
purpose than just how the default appearance is setup, but somewhere
along the way, he/they have to 'decide' on what the initial appearance
is going to be.

Since I'm not generally an appearance tweaker, my views of some
alternative ways of the desktop appearing comes from the 'hopping' if
you would call it that.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

RonB wrote:

Liunx "fragmentation" (in my view) is a good thing. No one entity can monopolize Linux. Choice is good.

I agree. I also 'recognize' (feel) that the result of that freedom is
(some) fragmentation (on top of) a great deal of 'consistency'.

I can love the freedom and still see the disadvantages of the fragmentation.

I wouldn't give up the freedom for the sake of the elimination of the fragmentation.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

Paul wrote:

The limit on DEs, is also a practical matter, of how many you have
staff to maintain the stuff.

The LM decisions on how to handle the DE 'problem' has served the distro
well.

They decided that they were going to have to bail on the KDE end.

They decided that they were going to have to jettison where/how Gnome
was going, by forking that.

And then they decided how they were going to carve their own path by 'harmonizing' how 3 different GTK DEs were going to live in the same house.

AND, they went their own way in defiance of Ub's SnapD insistence.

Bravo to all that.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sun, 8 Mar 2026 10:09:55 -0700
Mike Easter <MikeE@ster.invalid> wrote:

This thread started w/ remarks about a Dedo/Igor review. He is
frequently unhappy w/ what he finds when he wants to tweak some UI to
his liking and doesn't like how the tweaking goes.

I think this is an unfair criticism of Dedo/Igor. Most complaints are
not UI in his critics. I don't recall any "when he wants to tweak some
UI to his liking and doesn't like how the tweaking goes.". Specially in
this rant.
--
Linux Mint 22.2 kernel version 6.14.0-36-generic Cinnamon 6.4.8 AMD
Ryzen 7 5700G, Radeon RX9060XT, 32GB of DRAM.

--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

yossarian wrote:

Mike Easter wrote:

This thread started w/ remarks about a Dedo/Igor review. He is
frequently unhappy w/ what he finds when he wants to tweak some UI
to his liking and doesn't like how the tweaking goes.

I think this is an unfair criticism of Dedo/Igor. Most complaints
are not UI in his critics. I don't recall any "when he wants to
tweak some UI to his liking and doesn't like how the tweaking
goes.". Specially in this rant.

This rant was a concept of /fragmentation/ about the 'shattered'
condition of the Wayland evolution failures and disruption.

His Dec review of MX was more typical of his tweakiness:

I did spend some time tweaking things, because I know MX Linux will
save the stuff for me. In this regard, Xfce feels archaic. And it's
not about the look. It's the fact you need to go through probably
5-10 different tools and utilities to tweak everything. The system
tray icons don't scale up identically. There's always some mismatch, regardless of the height. The clock is too tiny, the logout button
too big. You have a dock, but it seems as if you can't rearrange the
icons yonder, and you can pin icons to the panel as you normally
would, but they will all be jammed in the right corner, so there's
quite a bit of click-n-move to get things sorted. And then, you will
have duplicates, because the panel icons and the dock icons aren't
the same.

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/mx-25-xfce.html
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

Mike Easter wrote:

His Dec review of MX was more typical of his tweakiness:

I don't have any interest in doing a 'competitive' review of MX vs
Dedo/Igor's which would require following his some footsteps w/
alternate MX choices than his vs his same choices.

BUT... I might guess that his choice to NOT use the MX systemd release,
opting instead for the sysvinit version might work /against/ the
performance of the distro boot, since Deb has gone systemd and MX is
based on Deb stable.

I believe that if I were in the 'business' of looking at linux distro/s,
and MX had 'evolved' toward systemd (and separate sysvinit) from its
earlier condition of using a shim to solve systemd 'confusion', I would
take that division into consideration to see if my criticisms would be
the same in the systemd XFCE release as what I saw in the sysvinit boot condition.
--
Mike Easter
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On Sun, 8 Mar 2026 10:21:18 -0700, Mike Easter wrote:

Paul wrote:

The limit on DEs, is also a practical matter, of how many you have
staff to maintain the stuff.

The LM decisions on how to handle the DE 'problem' has served the distro well.

They decided that they were going to have to bail on the KDE end.

They decided that they were going to have to jettison where/how Gnome
was going, by forking that.

Was there any reason they dropped KDE? To clarify, as they started the Cinnamon fork I can see where they ultimately had to, but rather than
trying to fix GNOME3, why not dump GNOME completely and stick with KDE and Xfce? I suppose then the question would be why not Kubuntu and Xbunutu?

Nothing wrong with Cinnamon but it seems like a lot of work.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On 2026-03-08, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 3/8/2026 6:24 AM, RonB wrote:

On 2026-03-07, Handsome Jack <jack@handsome.com> wrote:

On 6 Mar 2026 20:01:52 GMT, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 10:48:20 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I've got Xfce, Mate and Cinnamon installed on this computer. But I
almost always use Cinnamon (unless I'm testing something). It's easy to >>>>> install Cinnamon and then choose which you want to use at login. One >>>>> command...

sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

sudo apt install i3

I get 5 choices at login. Cinnamon (Default), Cinnamon (Software
Rendering), Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental), i3, and i3 ( with debug >>>> log).

On one of the discussion group web pages I read apropos this topic,
somebody posted something like "having multiple alternative desktop
environments on one machine is a recipe for crashes that are very
difficult to diagnose ... only half-witted newbies do it."

Is there any truth in that or is just the sort of thing that snotty Linux >>> nerds sneer to each other? I don't mind trying different DEs but I can't >>> afford to have serious bugs on my work computer, not any more than
necessary anyway.

I've had all three standard Linux Mint desktops on this machine since Linux >> Mint 19. I've done two major upgrades since then and it retained working
versions of all three desktops without any lock up issues. So, at least on >> Linux Mint (on on three computers rCo the SSD has been moved to three
different computers), it doesn't seem to be an issue. I'll run Mintupgrade >> again when I (eventually) move to Linux Mint 22 on this machine (that's
another thing they tell "not to do").

The SSD is currently in a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny (7"x7"x1.5")desktop >> with an i7-7700T CPU and 16 GBs of RAM. Previously it was in a Dell Optiplex
3020 Mini, then an Optiplex 9020 Mini, (both with 16 GBs of RAM and i5-4590T
CPUs) and, for about four months when I was in Arkansas, in my Latitude
E7450 laptop with an i5-5300U Dual Core CPU (no issues on the laptop
either).

Linux Mint does a good job of keeping their three desktops as similar as
possible. So maybe the fact I use Linux Mint is why it works to have more >> than one desktop installed.

The idea is, generally, to curate what you put in the tree, so it
can all be installed at the same time.

The limit on DEs, is also a practical matter, of how many you have
staff to maintain the stuff. (For a downstream DE, you still have
to test stuff, and if you've been patching and changing things
that counts as effort too.)

DE which have different subsystem requirements, may be a lot harder
to fit. (You have to load a different set of things, perhaps
including even the login screen thing. Maybe it requires
a dpkg-reconfigure.)

This is taxing the skills of your tree-herder.

That, and making a Driver Manager work (the package count involved!).

Paul

I don't know about any of this. I just know that installing Cinnamon and
Xfce (this computer started with the Mate desktop) didn't cause any issues. And I think the Cinnamon desktop was about 200 MBs of storage space and the Xfce install used less. I've got some redundancy, but that doesn't bother me.

It was just two simple commands to add Xfce and Cinnamon...

sudo apt install mint-meta-xfce

sudo apt install mint-meta-cinnamon

Resulted in full installs of all three desktops.
--
Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On 2026-03-08, Mike Easter <MikeE@ster.invalid> wrote:

Paul wrote:

The limit on DEs, is also a practical matter, of how many you have
staff to maintain the stuff.

The LM decisions on how to handle the DE 'problem' has served the distro well.

They decided that they were going to have to bail on the KDE end.

They decided that they were going to have to jettison where/how Gnome
was going, by forking that.

And then they decided how they were going to carve their own path by 'harmonizing' how 3 different GTK DEs were going to live in the same house.

AND, they went their own way in defiance of Ub's SnapD insistence.

Bravo to all that.

Agreed. But, just to see if it worked, I've installed KDE Plasma alongside Cinnamon on my Latitude E7450 laptop and both seem to work fine rCo although I have a LOT of extra applications in my Cinnamon menu now. (I did the full
KDE Plasma desktop install, which may not have been exactly what I wanted.)

There are some good reasons why people like Linux Mint.
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Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
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On 2026-03-09, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Sun, 8 Mar 2026 10:21:18 -0700, Mike Easter wrote:

Paul wrote:

The limit on DEs, is also a practical matter, of how many you have
staff to maintain the stuff.

The LM decisions on how to handle the DE 'problem' has served the distro
well.

They decided that they were going to have to bail on the KDE end.

They decided that they were going to have to jettison where/how Gnome
was going, by forking that.

Was there any reason they dropped KDE? To clarify, as they started the Cinnamon fork I can see where they ultimately had to, but rather than
trying to fix GNOME3, why not dump GNOME completely and stick with KDE and Xfce? I suppose then the question would be why not Kubuntu and Xbunutu?

Nothing wrong with Cinnamon but it seems like a lot of work.

I think because of the different development libraries required for KDE,
where Xfce, Mate and Gnome all use GTK (I think), KDE uses QT(?).

(I'm sure someone will probably correct me on this.)
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Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
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On 2026-03-08, Mike Easter <MikeE@ster.invalid> wrote:

Lawrence DrCOOliveiro wrote:

Mike Easter wrote:

I realize that by not being 'into' such UI tweaking, I'm missing
some strong linux features over that of other OSes. One of these
days I may do more of that.

Sounds like you are pursuing a breadth-first search over the Linux DE
landscape, rather than depth-first.

This thread started w/ remarks about a Dedo/Igor review. He is
frequently unhappy w/ what he finds when he wants to tweak some UI to
his liking and doesn't like how the tweaking goes.

I'm more interested in how that dev decided to set up 'his' distro.

There are many different angles a distro dev may choose to approach a 'purpose' for his or their project, which may be a MUCH different
purpose than just how the default appearance is setup, but somewhere
along the way, he/they have to 'decide' on what the initial appearance
is going to be.

Since I'm not generally an appearance tweaker, my views of some
alternative ways of the desktop appearing comes from the 'hopping' if
you would call it that.

Most of my appearance "tweaking" is done with Firefox. I like to simplify
the Firefox interface rCo to make it "cleaner" and use less screen space.
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Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
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rbowman wrote:

Mike Easter wrote:

They decided that they were going to have to bail on the KDE end.

They decided that they were going to have to jettison where/how
Gnome was going, by forking that.

Was there any reason they dropped KDE? To clarify, as they started
the Cinnamon fork I can see where they ultimately had to, but rather
than trying to fix GNOME3, why not dump GNOME completely and stick
with KDE and Xfce? I suppose then the question would be why not
Kubuntu and Xbunutu?

The problem from the LM perspective was what was happening to Gnome ala
Gnome Shell, considered a departure from a conventional desktop.

So, there was a fork in the direction of Gnome2's nature. The toolkit
was GTK, whereas KDE is a Qt. I think they had their hands full w/o
having to keep up w/ everything KDE, which was another whole ball of wax.

Nothing wrong with Cinnamon but it seems like a lot of work.

Not only the work of Cinnamon, but also bringing the xapps together and
mint tools.

The Mint Dev site tells some of the backstory:

Between 2006 and 2010 the main desktop environment for Linux Mint
was GNOME 2. It was very stable and very popular.

In 2011, Linux Mint 12 was unable to ship with GNOME 2. The upstream
GNOME team had released a brand new desktop (GNOME 3 aka rCLGnome
ShellrCY) which was using new technologies (Clutter, GTK3), which had
a completely different design and implemented a radically different
paradigm than its predecessor but which used the same namespaces and
thus it couldnrCOt be installed alongside GNOME 2. Following the
decision from Debian to upgrade GNOME to version 3, GNOME 2 was no
longer available in Linux Mint.

There's a lot more in the Cinnamon section

https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cinnamon.html

Another dev forked to Mate; while LM went via 'MGSE' which was 'Mint
Gnome Shell Extension' to work its way to Cinnamon.
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Mike Easter
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On Mon, 9 Mar 2026 06:39:47 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I think because of the different development libraries required for KDE, where Xfce, Mate and Gnome all use GTK (I think), KDE uses QT(?).

That makes sense. KDE is Qt. I was getting confused. LXDE (not LMDE) uses
GTK 2 and I thought MATE did also but it's GTK 3 although it's a fork of
GNOME 2, not like Cinnamon that forked GNOME 3.

For more confusion the original developer of LXDE was so pissed by the breaking changes in GTK 3 he broke off to develop LXQt.

Supposedly GTK 4 won't be 'move fast and break things' but other projects
have moved to Qt because of it. I tend to use gVim since it spawns a
separate window but its gtk. It doesn't work on the RPi's Debian based OS since something in the WM is still GTK 2.

It must be a joy to be a distro developer herding cats.

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On Mon, 9 Mar 2026 10:43:19 -0700, Mike Easter wrote:

Another dev forked to Mate; while LM went via 'MGSE' which was 'Mint
Gnome Shell Extension' to work its way to Cinnamon.

That's the one that had me confused. I believe MATE is a GNOME 2 fork but
used GTK 3. LXDE is the GNOME 2 fork that uses GTK 2.

I'll admit I was briefly confused by LMDE, thinking it had something to do with LXDE.

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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint

On 2026-03-09, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Mon, 9 Mar 2026 06:39:47 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I think because of the different development libraries required for KDE,
where Xfce, Mate and Gnome all use GTK (I think), KDE uses QT(?).

That makes sense. KDE is Qt. I was getting confused. LXDE (not LMDE) uses GTK 2 and I thought MATE did also but it's GTK 3 although it's a fork of GNOME 2, not like Cinnamon that forked GNOME 3.

For more confusion the original developer of LXDE was so pissed by the breaking changes in GTK 3 he broke off to develop LXQt.

Supposedly GTK 4 won't be 'move fast and break things' but other projects have moved to Qt because of it. I tend to use gVim since it spawns a separate window but its gtk. It doesn't work on the RPi's Debian based OS since something in the WM is still GTK 2.

It must be a joy to be a distro developer herding cats.

I think that's why Linux Mint put a limit on how many cats they had to
chase. The original Linux Mint release used KDE (I believe).
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Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3
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RonB wrote:

The original Linux Mint release used KDE (I believe).

That is correct. I didn't use LM in those early days, 1 was based on Kub
6.06.

The 2s came out later the same year based on Ub 6.10 and Gnome, and then
the 3s were on Ub, Kub, & Xub 7.04 and their DEs.
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Mike Easter
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