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Comment by sampo | Hacker News Reader

Any Desktop Environment (Gnome 3, Cinnamon, Mate, KDE, Xfce, etc.) that you can use in Mint, you can also install (directly from the package manager) on Ubuntu. So the choice of a Desktop Environment should not alone be any strong reason to switch from Ubuntu to Mint.

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The fact you can "install" it is simplistic. Manually adding a desktop environment on top of Unity is not the same as one carefully groomed to work seamlessly, which is what Mint delivers.

carefully groomed to work seamlessly - I don't really know what you're talking about, but many Window Managers work pretty fine.

There are many releases of Ubuntu for almost each DE. For example, I'm running Ubuntu gnome edition, but there's Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, and then more specific things like Studio Edition, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu TV.

I've tried Xubuntu but XFce doesn't seem to work that well with Hebrew keyboard layouts, at least without more tinkering than I was willing to put into it.

Dislike Kubuntu/KDE (I've used Ubuntu/gnome2 for long enough that I can no longer bear the look and feel of KDE).

Maybe I should try Lubuntu... I've lost faith in the Ubuntu project though, I don't think they're capable of making the right decisions.

The alternative Ubuntu flavours also deliver this. Mint isn't anything special here, unless you care that it's not Ubuntu.

Pretty much all of the WMs and DEs I've installed just to check them out over the years (on Fedora, but I would bet on Ubuntu) have just worked out of the box.

I mean they put the package in the repo! The whole WM/DE thing is a derail, that stuff is just claptrap, window dressing, extremely easy to replace and we have a huge selection of choices.

Why else would you download Ubuntu if you didn't want to use Unity? Distributions really only differ in degrees of desktop environments and package management systems anyway.

You can just install (for example) Xubuntu directly, and you'll get Ubuntu with XFCE installed by default. There are also flavours (and corresponding images) for LXDE, KDE and GNOME. Ubuntu isn't a Unity-only shop.

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