On 27/06/17 10:12, Ted Harding wrote:
Many thanks, Laurie. That clarifies a number of things! And, yes, live disks of LMC and LMM is an excellent suggestion. And I like (and really sympathise with) the reasons the Mint team went the way they did. In fact, "the way Gnome was going" turned out to be the main reason I have'nt upgraded my Debian for years!
As I understand it, Cinnamon is cloned Gnome 2 but then improved. Mate is Mint's replacement for Gnome. I expect that they're both "better" than Gnome 3 for you, and for me.
I too didn't like the way Gnome was going so stuck with a LTS version of Ubuntu. Eventually it got out of date so I had to update. One machine went to XUbuntu which used Xfce desktop, the other went to Lubuntu which uses LXDE. LXDE uses less resources, but is harder to customise, but is very gnome-like. Xfce uses more resources (but still less than Gnome 3), and is flashy-er. I had to remove a all-singing-all-dancing status bar/running applications bar (which looked like something used on a Mac) and replace it with a boring simple one. Then I was satisfied that it was Gnome-2-alike enough for me. I use Xubuntu on a machine that needs LTS versions and Lubuntu on a low-spec laptop that I don't mind updating every time there is a new release (Lubuntu don't do LTS yet).
Good luck!
Steve