Update

[Jerry3904]

The Development Team has started a short testing cycle of the MX-14 a4 for a last round of checks before going to beta next week.

[masinick]

The Development Team has started a short testing cycle of the MX-14 a4 for a last round of checks before going to beta next week.

Good news! I look forward to testing the Beta release when it becomes available.

[Eadwine Rose]

Me too! Eagerly awaiting what this is going to do.

I did add xfce to my other mepis drive to see what it was like, and I could see that I could start all the applications that I had in kde as well.

I bet that is going to be different with this new beta coming!

[Jerry3904]

I bet that is going to be different with this new beta coming!

You will have exactly zero KDE applications available by default...

[masinick]

Me too! Eagerly awaiting what this is going to do.

I did add xfce to my other mepis drive to see what it was like, and I could see that I could start all the applications that I had in kde as well.

I bet that is going to be different with this new beta coming!

For you, and for others who may be interested in exploring this - with or without MX-14, Debian repositories are rich with a great variety of desktop environments and window managers; that's one of the reasons I got so involved with Debian-based systems back in 2001 (the other was that the packaging updates were, and are, so automatic and clean).

A few notes on how to do this fairly easily:

Install Xfce in an already installed system
Optional: If you want to uninstall GNOME and its dependencies first, do:

aptitude purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep gnome | cut -f 1`
aptitude -f install
aptitude purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall | cut -f 1`
aptitude -f install
To install Xfce, do the following:

apt-get install xfce4
This will install a metapackage, which will install the core Xfce modules and scripts to get it to work.

There are many useful utilities that come with Xfce, to install these:

apt-get install xfce4-goodies
Run Xfce

With a display manager
For GDM, KDM and LightDM choose xfce4-session.

(Quoted from https://wiki.debian.org/Xfce).

Note that you don't necessarily HAVE to use aptitude (or even apt-get) to perform these tasks. You may install xfce4 using whatever packaging scheme you are the most comfortable using, and on a stable Debian-based system like SimplyMEPIS, it doesn't matter all that much which one you use, just stick with the SAME tool as much as possible to avoid conflicts, unless you really know what you are doing (in that case, you probably don't need ANY instruction).

[Eadwine Rose]

The point I am making is that on this new mepis you will not HAVE any of the other DEs I think. Just Xfce. You cannot install Xfce on Mepis to get a true comparison if you want one.


Of course if you just want to try out a new DE, that is a good idea Xfce does start really nice and fast. It will be a learning curve for me though, but all in good fun

[masinick]

I bet that is going to be different with this new beta coming!

You will have exactly zero KDE applications available by default...

For those who would prefer much greater than zero KDE applications, an alternative to using MX-14 is simply to add xfce4 to an existing MEPIS system, and "voila", you can have BOTH KDE and Xfce, and you can readily login to either of them and use applications from either of them.

In some cases, the integration and appearance, without some additional "tweaking" on your part, may not be complete or automatic; I've never had an issue with such things. If you're not picky, that's one way to have "the best of both worlds" (but possibly with more packages than you really need). The choice is yours.

All this said, I am very much looking forward to trying out the MX-14 implementation; it's likely to be much snappier in operation than any stock KDE-based system.

[masinick]

The point I am making is that on this new mepis you will not HAVE any of the other DEs I think. Just Xfce. You cannot install Xfce on Mepis to get a true comparison if you want one.


Of course if you just want to try out a new DE, that is a good idea Xfce does start really nice and fast. It will be a learning curve for me though, but all in good fun

On MX-14, all that will be present will be the Xfce desktop and a set of smaller, more "minimal" style of applications. None of the KDE-based applications will be installed by default. Hopefully it is also clear that it is really easy to install multiple desktop environments with the standard SimplyMEPIS, and it will be with MX-14 as well - all that's needed are the standard Debian repositories to be active; they are, by default, and that's where you can install a wealth of software, including complete desktop environments.

[Jerry3904]

I bet that is going to be different with this new beta coming!

You will have exactly zero KDE applications available by default...

For those who would prefer much greater than zero KDE applications, an alternative to using MX-14 is simply to add xfce4 to an existing MEPIS system, and "voila", you can have BOTH KDE and Xfce, and you can readily login to either of them and use applications from either of them.

In some cases, the integration and appearance, without some additional "tweaking" on your part, may not be complete or automatic; I've never had an issue with such things. If you're not picky, that's one way to have "the best of both worlds" (but possibly with more packages than you really need). The choice is yours.

All this said, I am very much looking forward to trying out the MX-14 implementation; it's likely to be much snappier in operation than any stock KDE-based system.

Once was enough... this thread is about MX-14, not about ways to avoid it.

The meta-installer in MX-14 includes KDE and other DEs.